by Fang Lizhi
The Chinese Academy of Sciences, modeled on the Soviet Academy of Sciences, offered no courses and accepted very few graduate students. It was a good idea, therefore, to launch a university like USTC where the assemblage of talented scholars could also be teachers. The first group of professors at USTC were all from the Academy of Sciences, and many were China’s best scholars in their fields. Compared with China’s economy, which was stalled at the time, USTC’s growth was remarkably fast. In 1980, when China opened to the world, Peking University sent the largest number of physics graduate students to the United States for advanced study, but USTC was right behind with the second-largest number.
USTC was born in the wake of the Anti-Rightist Movement, and the Communist Party, still leery of the intellectuals, laid down some extra-strict guidelines: education was to serve the proletariat and was to be combined with productive labor. The key lines in the school anthem were:
Greet the eternal east wind and raise the red flag high!
Be red, be expert, in factory as on farm!
It could have been the anthem of a Communist Party training ground. In September 1958, a high military official who came to speak at our opening exercises put it plainly: USTC should adopt the model of the Resist-Japan Military and Political University, an army school at the Communists’ prerevolutionary base at Yan’an in Shaanxi Province. USTC’s campus had, in fact, once been the campus of the International Party School, whose mission was to train activists from around the world—mostly from countries where the Communists were not yet in power—in how to carry out Communist revolution.
Guo Moruo, president of the Academy of Sciences in 1958, served ex officio as the first president of USTC. Guo was a famous poet during the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s, but no trace of his interest in poetry rubbed from him onto USTC. By that time, too, his own “poetry” was embarrassing. I remember this example:
Old Guo, not so old,
Many poems, not so good.
Everybody, work together
Learn from Chairman Mao!
On one point he was right: you could not make a mistake if you took everything from Chairman Mao. There was a time in 1961, for example, when new instructions on education were passed down from Mao through the bureaucracy, and one of the important points was that students could use crib notes. In appreciation, students began openly copying at exams—and citing Mao. Faculty monitors had to pretend they didn’t see.
Still, I was happy to be at USTC. Whatever the irritations, I was back to physics research and out of the nuclear reactor game. I could work on things that interested me again. Life is short, and one of its pleasures is to pursue one’s real interests. That line about “in factory as on farm” didn’t bother me at all. I could dig wells and catch pigs. Big deal. In the fall of 1959, the teaching assistants at USTC were organized for the “on farm” part of the school’s mission; we were sent to the mountains outside Beijing to plant trees. At noon that day, I ate nine standard-sized steamed buns, which was tops in our group and also stands to this day as my record intake for a meal. I had not forgotten village life. Hard work and eating were still easy for me.
I was, of course, not as naked—in either my upper body or my innocence—as I had been at Zanhuang. Throughout my eight months in the village, I had always clung to the belief that if I labored hard I could return to my former political status of “trusted person.” But my expulsion from the Party had shown me that in matters of politics, sincere effort, in no matter what quantity, might mean nothing.
It was clear that my plan to write a letter to Party Central in 1957 had brought a change in nature, not just degree, in my trust ranking. I was in an “other folder” now. In a feudal social system, a person’s status, once fixed, is extremely hard to change, and the same is true in a class-struggle society. Once you are in an “other folder” (even if they don’t print this on your ID card) it is nearly impossible for you to rise again. No effort of yours will be recognized. Realizing this point freed me from the illusion that “more reform” would restore me to trust. The naïveté and sincerity with which I viewed the Communist Party during my youth was now dead and gone.
I still clung to one part of the illusion, though. I thought the Party would at least observe that bedrock value of Chinese farmers and find a place for someone who did hard and honest work. If I just stuck conscientiously to my work, there would still be growing room for me in the system. So I threw myself into teaching, and I really enjoyed it.
My teaching began in 1959, USTC’s second year. I taught a bit of almost everything—from first-year general physics to advanced-level modern physics, and from basic laboratory to theory of several kinds. In 1960 a professor from the Institute of Modern Physics was teaching a course on quantum mechanics when, for some reason, he had to withdraw halfway through. I was assigned to take over, and the students didn’t seem to mind that a mere teaching assistant had replaced their professor. This boosted my confidence.
It was also around that time that I began my own research work. I chose particle physics, but the working conditions were difficult. We could read Soviet academic journals, but there was a six-month lag for access to Western journals, and preprints were not available at all. There were a few others at the university interested in particle physics, but they were younger scholars with little research experience, and our discussions were not very fruitful. Isolation and closed doors are two great enemies of physics research. Despite the difficulties, though, I was doing what I wanted to do, and my interest remained strong.
In the spring of 1960, I began submitting articles for publication. One of them, called “Calculation of Nucleon Electric Radius by Corrected Propagation Function,” was accepted in the fall by Acta Physica Sinica. The executive editor of that journal, Professor Qian Linzhao, was teaching at USTC at the time. One afternoon, in a stairwell where no one else was present, he stopped me. His face somehow expressed joy and gloom simultaneously. He told me, with elation, that my paper was about to go to press; then, with difficulty, he said, “But we can’t use your real name. Can you change the name?”
It was obvious that he was not expressing his own view. Nor was he relaying a decision by the board of Acta Physica Sinica. Nowhere in the world do physicists write under pseudonyms.
I understood. My activity (publishing papers, in this case) had exceeded the bounds that were allowed to citizens in the “other folder” and had to be blocked. Forbidding me to publish under my own name also served as a warning: “Don’t forget your status!” There was no room for resistance; I could only comply. The name that sprang to my mind was Fang Zhi, because I had used it once before, in junior high school, when my brother and I (he more than I) had written an article and published it in a newspaper. But Professor Qian couldn’t accept that name, because it resembled the original name too closely. I had great respect for Professor Qian as an elder in my field, so I backed off from choosing the pseudonym and asked him to choose one for me. He agreed.
My paper appeared in Acta Physica Sinica, no. 1, 1961, under the name Wang Yunran. When I saw the name, my respect for Professor Qian shot even higher. He had used this name to send a signal to the world that in order to publish a physics paper in China one needed not only to pass muster with peers but to receive a nod from the king. “Wang” means “king,” and “Yunran” is “wills it so.” Qian was, moreover, prophetic. The principle of “the king wills it” soon appeared as a formal regulation: any manuscript submitted to Acta Physica Sinica had to undergo political inspection at the author’s home institution. Without such approval, it could not go to press. After the Wang Yunran piece, the next few articles I sent to Acta Physica Sinica were all sent back because they had failed this political approval. Those rejected papers did achieve something, though. They became a bridge between me and Professor Qian, and the two of us, despite our age difference, became close friends.
If, for a moment, we put ourselves in the shoes of the authorities, it is easy to see why,
among academic fields, physics is so frustrating. First, you have to have it; you can’t just sweep it away, as you can, for example, psychology. (Actually, psychology is useful, too, but never mind.) Second, none of the great proletarian teachers can figure out the class nature of what physicists talk about—electromagnetic radii and such. (For the field of psychology, the determination is easy: psychology is bourgeois.) How can one apply proletarian dictatorship to the field of physics? These were tough problems. Not sufficiently tough, though, to spare physics from the long arm of proletarian dictatorship.
The authors of papers in Acta Physica Sinica in those days were listed as Nuclear Physics Group 401, Theory Group 918, Cosmic Ray Group 515, and so on. In some of the papers it was impossible to see the name of a single Chinese person anywhere in the whole article—except, of course, the name Mao Zedong. Just as Dmitrii Blokhintsev in the 1940s Soviet Union had to refer to Lenin as his guide in quantum mechanics, so, in the 1960s, Chinese physicists had to cite Mao as the supreme helmsman in their work. In an effort to assuage China’s high-level intellectuals, many of whom had been frightened out of their wits by “class struggle,” Chen Yi, who was regarded as the most open-minded among the top Communists, came out one day in the early 1960s to say (this is my summary, not verbatim), “Don’t be afraid, just keep rowing your own boats; with the Communist Party at the helm, you all can relax.” Chen’s words, which were later contracted to the rhythmic slogan “you row the boat, we’ll hold the rudder,” spread widely. Intellectuals wanted to believe them. Some were even moved to tears: the supreme proletarian authority was reserving a safe place for intellectuals! On the great ship of Communism, they could be oar station number 401, number 918, or number 515—inert tools, but safe.
My mention of the “tool” metaphor here is no exaggeration. In the early 1960s, the People’s Daily repeatedly exhorted the Chinese people to imitate the model soldier Lei Feng and become the obedient “tools” of the Party. The most that I, as resident of one of the “other folders,” could aspire to was the role of a tool that didn’t even have a number.
Li Shuxian’s standing in the system was even lower than mine. She wasn’t allowed a pen name. She worked on several translations of physics papers by Soviet experts, but when they were published, her name appeared in no form at all, with or without disguise, either on the cover or in the acknowledgments. Officially, she didn’t exist. Hers was a “non-person folder.”
When I was expelled from the Party the reason for the “freeze” in my relationship with Li Shuxian went away, so we got back in touch. She, like me—only a bit later—had been “sent down” to the countryside, in her case to Mentougou on the outskirts of Beijing. In the fall of 1959, when Mao Zedong announced an amnesty to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, she was among the pardoned. She was transferred back to Peking University and her rightist hat was removed.
In fairness to future readers, I should add a note here. A few decades from now people may not know that “hat” does not refer to headgear. “Her rightist hat was removed” means something different. A hat was a category, not a material object. To say someone wore this or that hat was to identify his or her position in the sociopolitical hierarchy, and to “remove a hat” was to vacate that status. Hatted positions were almost always tainted positions, the result of one or another kind of repression by the proletarian dictatorship. How the repression happened is a large and complicated question that is beyond my scope here. The question merits study, though, and I predict that historians of the future, looking back at this period, will inaugurate a subfield called “hatology.”
Li Shuxian’s hat was off, which was a formal upgrade of status, but in fact there was little change in her condition. She was now a “dehatted rightist.” (My apologies again to readers unfamiliar with these technical terms. You might find them tiresome, but I see no way around them.) She was sent back to the university to work but was not allowed to teach, let alone do research. She was assigned to work at the school’s factory.
For nearly two years between 1959 and 1961, Li Shuxian and I lived basically as we had before the Anti-Rightist Movement. I went to the Peking University campus on Saturdays and we spent the weekend together; the rest of the time we were apart, at the university and at USTC, struggling along in parallel. We wanted to stick with our original plan of getting our careers on track before tying the knot.
But by the summer of 1961 we couldn’t hold out any longer and decided to get married. I had published only one paper—that “king-wills-it” paper—and she had no publications in her name at all. This was well short of what we had first had in mind under the principle of “establishing careers before getting married.” We had failed. But we both felt there was really no choice about the marriage question. In our current positions we felt boxed in, with no space of our own. Only by setting up a household, we thought, could we have our own little bailiwick.
Beginning in 1961 the ambiance for teaching and research in the universities dissipated as politics intruded more and more. There were fewer academic seminars at USTC, and one day per week was devoted to “political study.” The atmosphere got tighter still after Mao unveiled his directive to “do class struggle every year, every month, every day.” People in the universities started informing on one another. At one point a lecturer at USTC was able to lay hands on the transcript of an informer’s report on a few people who had been talking, in a dormitory for lecturers, about a corruption case that they had read about in the newspapers. The report contained passages like this one:
A: How can stuff like this happen right before the eyelids of the emperor?!
B: (pointing at A) Are you running a fever?
F: Who’s got aspirin for him?
C: (chuckles to himself)
In those days informers did not have tape recorders or video cameras, but their transcripts were no less detailed than if they had. The key elements in the snippet above are that A used “emperor” to refer to the highest authority and that the others had responded with mirth. This proved that everyone present was disloyal to the highest authority. Today, as I write, A is in the physics department at Zhejiang University, B is in the math department at Hong Kong Polytechnic, and C is at the Harbin Institute of Technology. F is me. Use of the word “emperor” to refer to the man at the top was pretty standard in those days, so this particular passage was not enough to result in any punishment for us. But we learned something from the episode. We learned how closely we were being watched, even in casual contexts. How, after that, could we just relax and do research?
This was a major reason why Li Shuxian and I decided to marry. We knew the regime was still not wealthy enough to install bugs in every private home. So, if we had our own, we would have a little island of security.
The early 1960s were also an era of man-made famine. After “deep-plowing,” Chinese villages fell before the God of Death. Within three years, twenty million people (some say forty million) died of starvation. Something in me resists recall of those years, and especially of the people whom the famine robbed of their human dignity. For just a bite of food, a person facing death by starvation will trade all morality, all custom, all reason. Such a person becomes no longer human, but an animal—indeed less than many animals, who stop short, no matter how hungry, of eating their own kind. And what was the word for this? Tragic? Brutish? Disgusting? Pitiable? No, this was “socialism saving China.” In the most chilling cases, every person in a village starved to death—there was no village—and yet the slogans painted large on the ghost-village walls still grandly announced that “Communism is heaven, socialism the bridge.” Just like that, among those favored citizens of socialism, a few tens of millions were granted prior-emigration passes to the Communist heaven.
Universities were assigned a “research question”: What cooking methods make people feel more full on the same amount of grain? This challenge led to the discovery of the “double-steaming method”
for cooking rice. Steamed twice, rice becomes soggy and unpalatable. When food is hard to stomach, people feel there is “more” of it. Other researchers discovered the “cold food” theory: the human stomach senses the presence of cold things better than warm things, so if people eat cold things they will feel full sooner. But others disagreed, arguing that hot food makes more sense, because hot food by definition contains more calories. In short, “fullology” was all the rage.
This context, too, inclined us toward marriage. Having our own home could provide some warmth even as the world outside edged toward doomsday. We married on October 6, 1961. The ceremony took place in a meeting room in the physics department at Peking University. It was a simple occasion, but many friends came, in defiance of the fact that we were both “other folder” citizens. Some of our teachers came, too. There were still a lot of good people in the world. Everything went smoothly and happily except for the minor infelicity that we could offer only pears as refreshments. During the famine, pears were the only fruit one could buy, but in China it was taboo to serve them at weddings because li (梨) meaning “pear” is a perfect homophone for li (离) meaning “separate.” And the pear-predicted separation did indeed come about: between 1969 and 1987, for eighteen years, Li Shuxian and I would be forced to live apart, one in the north and one in the south.
Our marital home was a 120-square-foot apartment in Building 16 at Peking University. Does fate do recycling as a way to tease? Building 16 was where Li Shuxian lived in 1952 when we were freshmen at the university. It is also the building closest to the dining hall and to “the triangle,” the most politically sensitive spot on campus. Its east wall is where that 1957 poem “It’s Time” was posted. The Li Shuxian and Fang Lizhi of 1961 were already a far cry from what they had been in 1957, to say nothing of 1952. Such are the perversities of fate. Who could have guessed in 1952 where we would now be? Our shining ideals of the early 1950s were gone forever, but we still weren’t ready to give up. We were only twenty-five!