by Fang Lizhi
Our daily routine reverted to what it had been during our student days. We ate in the student dining halls and hit the books right afterward. The difference was that now we didn’t have to go to the main library and sit separately, one upstairs and one down. We could sit in our own home next to each other. The desks we worked at were the same little student-model desks.
My first joint project with Li Shuxian was to translate Quantum Mechanics by Leonard I. Schiff. In 1962, when I was teaching quantum mechanics, Professor Huang Wuhan handed me a draft translation of Schiff’s book and asked me to check it before publication. I found the translation so bad that I decided to do a new one. Li Shuxian’s political status at the time did not allow her the right to publish translations, but she joined the work anyway, because this book was one that both of us really liked. She was pregnant at the time, and some people were counseling us that the mother’s translating would be good for the fetus.
By the time we had finished the book, class struggle had grown so intense that not only Li Shuxian but I, too, was barred from publishing. Our translation of Schiff’s book was banned before it could appear. I recalled the way the farmers of Zanhuang had measured value: by honest labor. That standard was the opposite of the one the Communist Party was now using.
Somehow, largely by luck, that Schiff translation survived the tumultuous Cultural Revolution years and we finally published it in 1980, eighteen years after we had begun work on it. A whole generation had passed in the interim: the fetus that had benefited from its mother’s translating was now a freshman in the department of applied physics at Peking University and at that very time, by chance, was studying quantum mechanics. Professor Huang Wuhan, who had originally suggested the translation, was not so lucky; he had been unable to withstand the political persecution and had committed suicide.
Our first son, Fang Ke—the translation beneficiary—was born on Valentine’s Day in 1963, and that happy event seemed to bring a lucky bonus with it: Professor Qian Linzhao recommended me to Professor Li Yinyuan of the Physics Research Institute (PRI) in the Academy of Sciences. Li directed the research section on the theory of solid state physics and invited me to join his group. It was a great opportunity for two reasons. First, the research environment at PRI, China’s oldest institution for physics research, was much better than that at USTC. Second, any paper on which I collaborated at PRI could avoid political censorship by being submitted for publication through PRI, where it fell between the cracks. Political monitors at USTC would not see it, because it was not a USTC paper. Monitors at PRI would see it, but they had no control over me because my work unit was USTC. Quite a number of my papers slipped through this loophole, and I have felt grateful ever since to Professors Qian and Li, who discovered this “dislocation gap” and allowed it to work for me. (One of Professor Qian’s special fields, as it happened, was “dislocation” in solids.)
My move to PRI meant that my research shifted to solid state physics. I worked on the effects of impurities in solids. Physicists already understood that the slightest impurity in an ideal crystal could cause major changes in its properties. The entire quality of a crystal is determined by its extremely tiny impurities. But this was not a cutting-edge field. After one year and two papers, I shifted to laser physics.
The first operating laser in the world was built in 1960, and China’s first one was built at PRI in 1963. Laser physics was a brand-new field, just opened to exploration, and a whole range of topics awaited study. I chose two: laser coherence, which meant studying laser line width, and nonlinear optical effects, which focused on the two-photon effect. Except for going to classes and to political study sessions at USTC, I threw all my energies into this research, and 1964 became my most productive year since 1957: I completed six papers, of which four were immediately published in Acta Physica Sinica. Only one other person that year had as many articles in the journal as I had. Every time Professor Qian Linzhao saw me he gave me a kind smile. I knew he was proud of me.
But once again, the two of us were wrong. Even though our tiny sliver of satisfaction came entirely from physics and had nothing to do with the great proletarian dictatorship, and even though my papers discussed only the brilliance of laser beams and cast not even the tiniest of shadows across the brilliance of Mao Zedong Thought, still, a few days into the new year of 1965, I was punished again—sent again to do rural labor.
The mayor of Beijing at the time was Peng Zhen, number 9 in the Communist hierarchy. Perhaps he, too, had studied impurities in crystals, because he joined with the minister of public security, Luo Ruiqing, to come up with a new term: “crystal city.” A crystal city was a city whose residents included not one single class enemy; it was a purest-of-the-pure proletarian city. The plan was to make Beijing into one. Every present or former target of the proletarian dictatorship, any hat wearer of any kind, was accordingly ordered out. I had no official hat but of course was an “impurity,” so I was ordered out, too.
About one hundred people in USTC received removal orders. Most of us were only impurities, not hat wearers. Our first temporary station was the Changyang farm to the southwest of Beijing. The work there was roughly the same as at Zanhuang. The differences between the two experiences were, first, that China’s villages had lost the naturalness and sincerity that they had had before the Great Leap famine, and second, that the people sent down had nothing of the naive idealism they had brought with them in the 1950s. In addition to labor we had to engage in political study that forced every person, every day, to violate conscience by lying, exaggerating, performing loyalty pledges, and displaying fake smiles. People’s true feelings were hidden deep beneath wretched masks. Everyone was aware that no matter how hard you worked, or how sincere you tried to be, nothing could expunge the marks of impurity that you bore. You were like Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, for whom no amount of effort could either wipe away the crime of stealing a loaf of bread or spare him from being hunted for the rest of his life. The people sent to Changyang harbored no hope; all they could do was await the orders that would send them even farther from Beijing.
My orders of this kind came in April 1965. I was to report to an electronics factory in the city of Yingkou in Liaoning Province. The banishment from Beijing—from my family, and from physics—would be permanent. One by one, the others in my sent-down group faced their fates and departed. I got ready to leave, too. It was virtually unthinkable to disobey orders. The entire country was “proletarian.” Where would one go?
It was almost a miracle that in the end, I did not have to follow the orders. The matter was forestalled because Yan Jici, the vice president of USTC and the most senior living Chinese physicist, had taken my published papers to Liu Da, the Party Secretary at USTC, and expressed his puzzlement. Why would we be sending away a young man who had just begun to show this kind of promise? Just like that, Liu Da canceled the order.
This counts as a near miracle not only because it was so extremely uncommon but because it depended on the coincidence of two extraordinarily unusual events. First, even though Yan was vice president of the university, he had no authority over its affairs because he was not a Party member. All of the administrative power in a university lay with its Party Committee. For a non-Party vice president to address a Party committee about the transfer order of a teaching assistant was almost unheard of. Personnel questions were out of bounds for non-Party members. Second, a Party Secretary had accepted a request to keep at school a person with a record of “impurities.” This, too, was immensely unusual. There were several later occasions on which this same Party Secretary, Liu Da, looked out for me. In 1987, after my second expulsion from the Communist Party, he came to see me even though he had been retired several years.
“The Communist Party does not like you!” he said.
I said nothing. A few seconds later, he added, as if talking to himself:
“The Communist Party doesn’t like me, either.”
This might explain why he had a
ccepted Yan’s suggestion in 1965. In any case, two near miracles had occurred, and it was a third that they had coincided.
When I left Changyang in 1965, fall classes at USTC had already begun, and I immediately resumed teaching, this time a course in quantum electronics. I was promoted from teaching assistant to lecturer. Despite this turn for the better, I was still aware, of course, that the authorities didn’t like me. If you don’t like me, then so be it, I thought; a person cannot live only to have others like him. If I’m an “impurity,” then fine; I will live with my basic nature. Perhaps, in a sense, a society is like one of those crystals: its attributes are determined by its rare impurities. If this is so, an atom of impurity will be much more powerful than an atom of conformity. Romain Rolland said that “we are not just small, insignificant wheels on this war chariot as it rumbles forward.”
Yes, I thought, no matter how tiny we are, we must be more than little wheels. If I can just hold on to my own rudder, I can still play my small part in shaping the way things are.
9. DAYS UNDER THE DYNASTY
Life returned to something more like normal when I returned to USTC after the stint at the Changyang farm. I spent most days on teaching or research, and although I didn’t achieve any big breakthroughs, my papers did keep getting published, which was satisfying. Pretty soon career paper number thirteen came out, and right when I reached that unlucky number, China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution broke out as well.
In one respect the Cultural Revolution differed from all the previous campaigns the Party had run. All the earlier ones had had named targets—the Eradicate Counterrevolutionaries Movement in 1950 was aimed at “counterrevolutionary elements” who were trying to duck and hide after the revolution; the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957 aimed at “rightist elements”; and so on. But in the Cultural Revolution, it was never easy to say exactly who was and who was not going to be “revolutioned,” as the neologism put it. Even now people have different answers to the question of what was going on during the wild years from 1966 to 1976.
My own analysis is that those were the years when Mao Zedong announced himself as emperor. He did not name his dynasty or reign period, but in every other way, in both form and substance, it is easy to show that he had become emperor. I noted in the previous chapter that university lecturers in the early 1960s were already using “emperor” in a facetious sense to refer to Mr. Top Leader. Mao’s image was in transition from national hero to imperial monarch. He liked to draw public comparisons between himself and Cao Cao and the First Emperor of Qin, two of the cruelest potentates in Chinese history.
Then, during the Cultural Revolution, Mao went on to adopt the forms and accoutrements of an emperor. On every document that the Communist Party sent out and at every meeting that it convened, wherever and whenever the name Mao Zedong appeared, the words wansui! wansui! wanwansui! appeared as well. Wansui, literally “[may he live] ten thousand years,” is glossed in the Dictionary of Modern Chinese, the Communist Party’s officially approved dictionary, as “a term used in feudal times for address of the emperor by courtiers and commoners.” That’s it. There is no second definition, none that says “also used by the citizens of People’s Republics to address their leaders.”
In the late 1970s, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the son of one of my colleagues was preparing for college entrance exams. As he was struggling to memorize the names of all the dynasties through more than two thousand years of Chinese history, he suddenly felt that one was missing.
“What dynasty is it today, Dad?” he asked his father.
The father, helpless either to laugh or cry, said nothing for a moment, then, in an angry burst, stammered, “What dynasty?! The Mao dynasty! The Mao dynasty! The Deng dynasty! The Deng dynasty!”
That son was no dolt. He got into Peking University and later went to a university in Philadelphia for a Ph.D. in physics. The father was my color-blind college lab partner Hou Depeng. At the time, in the late 1970s, Hou was president of Guangxi University.
This dialogue between father and son was not as absurd as it may seem. In theory, China’s imperial system ended once and for all with the 1911 revolution, but the history of the ensuing decades shows that the “once and for all” part was not true. In 1915 Yuan Shikai pronounced himself emperor and held on to the position for eighty-one days. From 1932 to 1945, Pu Yi, who had been Qing emperor from 1908 to 1912, “restored” himself as emperor of Manchuria—even though he was a puppet of the invading Japanese. These are the two most famous gambits toward being a post-1911 emperor, but neither amounted to much compared to the ten years of Mao’s emperor-like rule.
On June 1, 1966, the first day of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, all classes at USTC and other universities were canceled. Libraries and laboratories were closed as well. All faculty and students threw themselves into the new political movement. Some of the students organized themselves as Red Guards and started picking out and denouncing the “black elements” they found around them. A titanic struggle between red and black was now under way.
I was not in the first batch to be picked out and “struggled.” For a while I was still one of the “revolutionary masses.” The first group to be struggled, called the Black Gang, were Liu Shaoqi, president of the People’s Republic of China, a few others of Mao’s associates at the top, and bureaucrats at all levels who were aligned with them. Quite a few intellectuals were struggled, too, but most of them were the “old authorities” whose names had appeared in the newspapers many times. It’s a good thing the Red Guards didn’t read Acta Physica Sinica or my recent productivity might have put me in that first batch.
Since someone like me was neither fit nor willing to be on the other side—the attacking side—my place at the public “struggle sessions” was with the bystanders, the neither red nor black, the people who just stood and shouted wansui! wanwansui! from time to time. Eventually I could even do a bit of research after I got home. I was working on nonlinear Raman scattering in those days, but there was nowhere I could send my papers, because Acta Physica Sinica and all the other journals had closed.
The library at the Academy of Sciences had cut back its hours but still stayed open, so I sometimes went there to read. I remember that it was in an issue of Physics Today that I learned about the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation and its implications for hot cosmology. Modern cosmology was infatuating me quickly. But the library soon closed entirely, and my new love for this field, like my love for Li Shuxian a few years earlier, had to be “frozen” for a while.
If one area was being frozen, another was turning red hot. This was Red Guard activity. It is not widely understood that one reason, indeed the main reason, why so many young people threw themselves so passionately into the worship of Mao Zedong in the fall of 1966 was something that had little to do with Mao Zedong Thought. It was that, beginning in August, under the policy of “great revolutionary link-ups,” they could ride the railways free of charge. So long as you said you were a Red Guard, were on a mission to “stir up revolution,” and shouted wanwansui! a few times, you could hop on any train and go anywhere in China you liked. No ticket or credential was necessary. It was only natural that the number of young Mao fans skyrocketed. Later, beginning in October, no person of any age needed a ticket. All one needed was to say that one was “making revolution.”
A group of my colleagues, including the ones I called A and B in the previous chapter, got caught up in this excitement and went on revolutionary link-ups. Their revolutionary destination was the revolutionary Kham grazing area in eastern Tibet, formerly known as Xikang. Announcing their intention to “stir up revolution,” they set out to see yaks and Tibetan herdsmen. In short, they were part of a great tide of free tourism, the only one that has ever existed in Chinese history. The only thing one might compare it with was the great tide of free eating that happened during the Great Leap Forward in 1958.
By November I myself couldn’t hol
d out against the temptation of free travel. Five colleagues and I packed a few things and set out from the Beijing rail station on a revolutionary link-up. We felt a bit nervous about it, because, among the six of us, three and a half were “impurities.” One had been expelled from the Party (that was me), two had been punished by the Youth League, and one was an overseas Chinese from Indonesia. (Overseas Chinese in those days were semi-impure by definition.) So we always had to be afraid that Red Guards might discover who we were and direct some denunciation and struggle at us. But once we melded into the river of all the other link-up travelers, our fears subsided. There were Red Guards all around us, but they were so eager to get on trains and go make revolution that it apparently didn’t occur to them that some of the people they should be focusing on were right under their noses. Just in case, we had made some preparations. I had carved a large round seal that read COMBAT BRIGADE 71, UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF CHINA. In those “revolutionary” times, any group could call itself a “brigade”; you didn’t have to register with the police. So, if needed, we could always use this chop to show that we were members of a combat brigade.
There was one sense in which it was indeed true that you needed a spirit of combat in order to do revolutionary link-up (or call it revolutionary tourism). Getting on or off a train was always a battle. With every door and every window open to anyone’s use on any basis, the scenes were pretty much what you might imagine them to be. I was a university lecturer, but I would have been sunk if I had tried to maintain decorum appropriate to that status. I wrestled my way through the windows just like everybody else. Luckily, my thirty-year-old body was still in good enough shape to hold its own with the younger Red Guards. Unluckily, our first wrestling bout landed us on the wrong train.