by Fang Lizhi
That train was bound for Nanjing, a place I had already been and didn’t really feel like going to again. I wanted to go someplace farther away. But by the time we realized what train we were on, getting off was hopeless. The crush of people behind us had made it unthinkable. So: ahoy, Nanjing!
After the train left the station, most of the riders, exhausted from the boarding struggle, one by one fell asleep. But entry into somnolence did nothing to reduce the pressure that everyone exerted on everyone else. Push-back was still requisite.
Suddenly, in the middle of the night, we all were woken by a frenzied voice.
“No air! No air!”
The cries were coming from under a seat. The people who had gotten spaces under seats originally had felt privileged. Those were little protected spaces, where the pilings of the crowd could not reach. No one anticipated, though, that the crowd would get so thick that even air was sealed out of those cubbyholes. The people in them were gasping—and now shouting—for air. People on top, realizing what was at stake, started shouting, “Carry forward revolutionary humanism! Give the people some air!”
Then, in rhythm with our shouting, we heaved our bodies in unison to allow a wedge to open so that air could flow down beneath the seat.
Our trip took us to Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. I had been to all of these places before, so nothing felt very new. For me the only new leg in the trip was a steamboat ride from Suzhou to Hangzhou. Like the trains, the boat was free of charge, and this was my first trip ever on China’s famous Grand Canal, which had been built in the seventh century A.D. Emperors had used it for pleasure excursions. Two hundred years ago, when the Qianlong emperor made a famous trip to the Yangzi region, he traveled the very same route from Suzhou to Hangzhou that we were now traveling. It was said that when Qianlong’s magnificent fleet passed by, ordinary people crowded the banks of the canal shouting “wansui! wanwansui!” On our trip, the noise of the steamship engines was too loud for us to hear if there were any wansuis coming from the banks. But we could smell foul odors that rose, from time to time, from the surface of the gray-black water of the canal.
Hangzhou was my family’s old stomping grounds, so when we arrived there I served as guide for Combat Brigade 71. A misty rain was falling when we visited West Lake, so all of the gorgeous scenes of the lake and the mountains in the background were foggy at best. The combat brigade was acutely disappointed. I kept reminding them of the popular Hangzhou saying:
With bright lake and glittering surface, clear days are the best
With murky hills and drifting mists, rain has its charm as well
I added that when you can’t see clearly, you have the advantage that more space is left to be filled by beauty that your imagination can supply. But it didn’t work. Challenged in the imagination department, the brigade remained in a funk.
Spirits had recovered by the time we left Hangzhou. When we got to the rail station, though, the crowds were even worse than they had been elsewhere. (As a rule, the prettier a place was, the more revolutionaries came to visit.) How could anyone get on a train? For better or worse, the railway staff invented an ingenious technique. Instead of announcing which platform a train would arrive on, they kept that information secret and announced that anyone who wanted to board should follow a designated staff member. The staff member set out walking, then walked faster and faster, then broke into a run, and ran faster and faster, looping around, until the followers thinned out into a more or less single-file line. This assured that when they finally reached the train they could board without pushing. (Slow runners couldn’t get on.) When Combat Brigade 71 joined this melee, its revolutionary solidarity was destroyed. We couldn’t find one another and eventually ended up on different trains. Three of us got on a boxcar built for livestock or prisoners. There were no seats, only very small windows, and an open toilet in the center. I later learned by watching films that this was the same kind of car Hitler had used for transporting Jews in Europe. I sat at a distance from the toilet, and a night on the train passed quickly.
We got our room and board from universities or other organizations. Room was free on link-ups, and board very inexpensive. In fact it didn’t matter if a person had no money at all; you could just write a note, or intone, “Chairman Mao beckons us to the future,” or the like, and the food went onto Mao’s tab (i.e., the local people’s tab). The custom was rather like the itinerant monks in the old days, traveling from temple to temple without paying, knowing that if they chanted “a-mi-tuo Buddha,” the Finance Ministry in Heaven would provide.
Our revolutionary link-up ended in December. Every member of our scattered combat brigade found his way back to Beijing by the end of 1966. People might wonder how a movement like the Cultural Revolution, so utterly steeped in politics, could have contained such bubbles of free tourism. But it did. I would wager that at least 90 percent of the people doing link-ups either were in it purely for tourism or, if they did have “revolution” in mind, had not the slightest notion of what their revolution was for or whom it was against. The point of the ferment was, in fact, not revolution—it was for someone to proclaim himself emperor.
I should acknowledge that this insight about Mao’s self-proclamation as emperor came to me only later. In 1966 I was still a half-believer. The all-out worship of Mao that I felt in 1949 while waiting for him in the rain at Xiannongtan was, to be sure, long gone by 1966. Many things, not least the Great Leap famine, had shown me that Mao’s policies were wrong. But I still felt that he might have meant well despite terribly messing things up. Maybe his Great Leap policies had come only from a wish that China become rich and powerful a bit more quickly. Similarly, my faith in the Communist Party, which was so complete when I was young, had been much deflated. Yet I still felt that the Communist Party was basically different from the Kuomintang or other political parties. The only real hope for China’s progress, I thought, was that the Party itself might make progress. As for Marxism, it was still basically my political faith when the Cultural Revolution began. Nothing had replaced it in the sphere that it occupied. In 1965 Xu Jialuan, a colleague a dozen or so years older than I, told me that he really wanted to study abroad and that his first choice was the United States. I told him that if I could go abroad my first choice would be the Soviet Union. My ideal at the time was still Soviet-style socialism. The fact that the Soviet Union’s exploration of space was ahead of America’s at that time reinforced my faith in socialism.
In my youth a powerful idealism had brought me to Communism, and at one level, the embers of that idealism were still warm. I had taken many shocks and setbacks in the intervening years, but the ideals, anyway, were not dead. That is why, when the Cultural Revolution began, and Mao proposed that the Communist Party revolutionize itself from within, my interest once again was captured. I wanted to believe that Mao and the Party finally had seen the error of their ways and now would move forward more reasonably. At a minimum, I thought, they would follow the Soviets and make China into a place where science and technology were strong.
But this hope, like my earlier ones, was quick to collapse. As we went through 1967 and 1968, the universities still held no classes and recruited no students. The laboratories and libraries remained closed. There was no new call for science or technology—nothing at all but politics. You couldn’t even get away from politics by studying at home, because the Cultural Revolution had turned into armed combat. University campuses resembled the European Middle Ages, with mobs patrolling around in helmets and wielding clubs, always on the verge of battle. Our home on the Peking University campus was right in a place where two factions were constantly battling, making quiet study impossible. For Li Shuxian and me, living in a combat zone was all the worse because we had to worry about a five-year-old boy. Finally we decided we couldn’t take it anymore and abandoned our little home of six years in favor of living with my parents at the Libo Barracks.
During those years, 1967 and 1968, a number of credi
ble stories leaked out about the people at the top of the regime, and just as Khrushchev’s secret speech on Stalin had caused me to reevaluate Stalin, these leaked stories caused my mental images of the top Communists in China to shrink drastically. Despite the great respect I had once had for them, when I saw their moral and political qualities in the light of these accounts, there was no way I could identify with them any longer.
The fundamental difference between them and me was that their working concerns were all about factions and power networks, whereas I was worried about scientific method and principles. Marx had held that his theories were “scientific” in the sense that even if the topic were factionalism, the approach to it should be scientific. There should be no parting of the ways between “Party nature” and science. This had been one of Communism’s main attractions for me. Short of accepting a split personality, a person who embraces science cannot easily leave it behind.
Many facts made it clear to me that the so-called “two-line struggle” at the top of the Chinese Communist Party was nothing but a great catfight for power, in principle no different at all from the palace warfare under the dynasties that involved the emperor, high officials, and powerful families. To me, the victors (Mao Zedong and his group) deserved no veneration, and the losers (Liu Shaoqi and his group) deserved no sympathy, because neither side was speaking for the idealism and the scientific spirit that I cared about.
Oddly, though, I began to feel that the catfight was liberating me. It allowed me to set aside the naive illusions of my youth as well as all the pain and trouble to which my sincere pursuit of them had led. There was relief in this. I had turned thirty—the age, as Confucius put it, of “establishing oneself” in the world. I could see that the future would be tough, but I felt ready for it.
In the summer of 1968 it became my turn to be a target in the Cultural Revolution. Universities began “cleansing class ranks,” a phrase that meant struggling against the “impurities,” the new label for which was “ox ghosts and snake spirits.” The term formally included landlords, rich farmers, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, spies, and power holders who were taking the capitalist road. Ox ghosts and snake spirits were incarcerated on campuses and could not go home.
I was detained in June, just before the birth of my second son, Fang Zhe. My official category was “rightist who slipped through the net.” This meant a person who should have been declared a rightist in 1957 but somehow wasn’t. On the day I was detained, our home was raided. The intruders didn’t take away any property (despite our official status as the “small propertied class,” we didn’t have any property to speak of), but we did suffer a significant loss. Hoping to forestall further trouble, we hurriedly burned more than a hundred letters that Li Shuxian and I had exchanged during our separation in 1958 and 1959.
I was held in a dormitory that had been converted into a makeshift prison, where Red Guards monitored the ox ghosts and snake spirits. I had three roommates, all, like me, lecturers in physics. Three were rightists (or net-slipped rightists) and the fourth was a counterrevolutionary: in his high school days, he had joined the Three People’s Principles Youth League, the KMT’s counterpart of the Communist Federation of Democratic Youth that I had joined. The four of us could still talk physics, so daily life wasn’t entirely terrible.
The Red Guards checked on us twice a day. They demanded that we write a daily confession and use the rest of our time to study the famous “little red book” (miniature in height and width but 256 pages thick) entitled Quotations from Chairman Mao. This work wasn’t hard. Our confessions, which were about a thousand characters each, took about a half hour to write. We copied Mao’s Quotations for about a third of them, copied political exhortations from the previous day’s newspaper for another third, and filled the final third with our own “reflections,” which meant expressions like “I have profoundly come to realize that…” Later we figured out that no one was actually reading the confessions. The guards were merely noting down whether we handed them in or not. After that, I made a practice of copying my confessions more than once. If I used characters of somewhat different sizes, I could hand in the same thing, a few days later, and no one noticed. This mass-production method not only saved time, it also meant that I always had a pile of confessions all set to go.
Perhaps because we never fell behind on confessions, the guards gave us favored treatment. They let us go outside for labor every afternoon. This gave us sunshine and exercise, which felt like small blessings wrapped inside the larger disaster we were undergoing. Our labor was making mud paste. The paste for sticking up political posters had always been made of flour, but the posters got so numerous that people ran out of paste and had no more flour rations, so somebody came up with the bright idea of making paste from mud. The invention does much to explain why so many posters could keep going up for all of ten years. That is not a joke; I think it is true.
Struggle intensified during the winter of 1968–69. The authorities sent two groups, the Workers Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team (“Work Prop Team” for short) and the Liberation Army Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team (“Lib Prop Team” for short) to run our campus. By then we detainees totaled more than four hundred. We had to line up before every meal and walk into the dining hall single file. Later, in the early 1980s, I was a visitor at Cambridge University and sometimes attended formal dinners at High Table in King’s College. There, too, people lined up to enter the dining room single file. The most exalted and most lowly human processions bore a resemblance, I realized.
The expanded struggle netted Professor Qian Linzhao, whose category was “suspected spy.” This was because he had been acting director of the Academia Sinica in 1949 when that esteemed national-level research body moved to Taiwan. He went to Taiwan himself for a while and then returned to mainland China. Aha! There was the rub: Why did he come back? His motive was unclear, so he was a “suspected spy.”
During one spell, Professor Qian and I were roommates, with four others. When the guards were not around, he would tell us about his student years in the 1930s in London. Storytelling like this of course had to be sealed from the ears of the guards. If discovered, it could count as “pining for the old world” and be punishable by at least a scolding and at worst a formal denunciation. We were lucky that Professor Qian, although more than sixty years old at the time, was still quick-witted. One day he was telling us how he had gone to Cambridge to visit some friends and go biking. Cambridge is hilly, and once, while he was coasting downhill, his brakes failed. His bike flew forward, out of control, he panicked, and … Rawk! A guard suddenly pushed our door open. He may have heard our cheerful banter from out in the hall. In any case, as soon as the door swung open, Professor Qian stopped—on a dime. We all reverted immediately to somber-looking faces and planted our noses in Quotations from Chairman Mao. After the guard left, Professor Qian did not resume his story. To this day I do not know how he got off that bicycle.
But let me not give the impression that those days were all comedy and farce. A lecturer in chemistry named Cai, two years younger than I, had a background that paralleled my own: a Peking University graduate, a teacher at USTC, and now a “rightist who slipped through the net.” The ox ghosts and snake spirits of the chemistry department were our next-door neighbors, and we saw them every day at meals. One day we couldn’t find Cai. He had waited until others went to eat and then thrown himself to his death from a fourth-story window.
A colleague in physics, a lecturer named Ji Weizhi, had not been detained but seemed destined for that fate in the next phase of the campaign. One day he disappeared, too. His body was found in a laboratory, already stiff, bound in coils of electrical wires whose ends had been plugged into a socket. His field had been electrodynamics.
A teaching assistant at USTC who had graduated in physics from Peking University three years after me was not an “impurity” of any kind. But one day someone found her body on the roof of a building
, dead from poison. She had never been struggled, but from her friends we learned that the daily ordeal of seeing abuse heaped on others had finally been too much for her, and she had decided to take leave of this world.
On average, the struggle sessions at USTC were not as frightening as they were elsewhere. There were ten suicides that winter at USTC, and this was below average.
We noticed that suicide rates were higher among people who were about to be struggled or who felt they were next in line for detention. People who had already been struggled or detained had lower rates. This apparently shows that impending disaster—the stage at which ruin looms and creeps ever nearer—is the most frightening. Once it hits, there is less room for terror. The traditional Chinese technique of public decapitations utilized this same psychology. Normally, the people watching decapitations were more terrified than the people being decapitated. Mao Zedong borrowed this ancient principle when he invented the tactic of “holding hat in hand,” that is, holding the threat of a political label over your head and letting you know that it might descend at any moment. “Hat in hand” terror led to many suicides. Those of us who were already hatted were, in general, more relaxed. We could even enjoy stories about runaway bicycles in Cambridge.
In any case, the first high tide of suicides ended in early 1969, and in March of that year the government sent everyone at USTC to go build a railroad. Railway construction was one activity that did not stop during the Cultural Revolution, and we were sent to work on a line that connected Beijing with Yuanping, in Shanxi Province. This line had an extremely important function. It linked to the Beijing subway system to form a single route that reached the heart of the city where the top leaders lived. The point was to give the leaders a quick underground escape route in case of emergency. On the eve of the June 4 massacre in 1989, troops suddenly appeared at Tiananmen Square who had not arrived through the streets. They had come by that same Yuanping–Beijing rail line that we had worked on.