The Most Wanted Man in China

by Fang Lizhi

  “Mealtime!” Whenever this word rang out, everyone stopped, sat down on the palm, and waited for a cloth bag containing flatbreads to be passed down the line. Each man took one. That was lunch. Then a jug of water was passed along. Everyone took a swig or two. That was drink. We didn’t wash our hands before eating. There was, first of all, no place to wash, but somehow we also did not feel a need to wash. Everything was black in any case; we could hardly even see those hands that might need washing. The environment somehow caused a psychological suspension of ordinary rules.

  Only when we came out of the mine at the end of the day did we know how blackened our bodies had become. If you’d offered me a flatbread then, I wouldn’t have dared touch it with my hands. The water in the miners’ bathing pool itself was black and had bits of coal suspended in it. But no matter. After rinsing in it we were much cleaner than before.

  After I’d been down the shaft a few times, I got used to it. I joined a “tunneling team,” whose job it was to open tunnels, cut into coal beds, and prepare palms for coal collection. This work was harder than shoveling. There was no ventilation, and coal dust hung in the air. Heat from deep in the earth, sealed there for hundreds of millions of years, radiated from below, leaving us so hot that everyone worked naked. Psychologically, digging tunnels through coal beds is significantly different from digging a tunnel through a hill. In a hill, you can sustain yourself on the faith of getting through to the other side, to light. But tunneling in a coal mine, you dig from one blackness to the next. In the diminutive light of your helmet lamp, all you can make out are a few naked bodies in front of you, wriggling forward in the blackness toward somewhere deeper, somewhere even blacker.

  Is hell black? Could it be blacker than this?

  Many people, Karl Marx included, like to quote the famous words from the “Inferno” section of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “It is written at the gates of hell, ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’” My own feeling, as I ascended, with naked body, from a thousand feet deep in the mine, was that the great poet had hung his sign over the wrong door. He should have hung it at the doors of those countries that were pursuing the invention that Dr. Marx called “proletarian dictatorship.” It turned out that lesson one of my reeducation—the actual lesson, not the intended one—was this: I began to doubt Marxism itself.

  In Marxist theory, no worker is more proletarian, more solid a base for Marxism, than a miner. I was now surrounded by miners, but I got no sense at all of what Marx had claimed: that these classic proletarians were on their way to exercising a dictatorship. The Communist Party of China held that workers, peasants, and soldiers were the bulwarks of the “people’s democratic dictatorship” that the Party was leading. As of the spring of 1970, I had lived among all three bulwarks and never got the slightest impression that any of them were interested in the Party dictatorship. They did not ask, and obviously could not have cared less, what my label “rightist who slipped through the net” was all about.

  Quite the contrary, I had made friends among them. That young farmer in Zanhuang with whom I had shared everything—house, food, work—stayed in touch with me until the early 1960s. Then his messages stopped coming, and I had to wonder if he had died in the Great Famine. After two months of working in the mine I also got to know some of the miners. Dictatorship over class enemies like me? Nothing could have been further from their thinking. They just wanted to make friends. So I had to think: Why did theory and reality diverge so? This question had occurred to me at Zanhuang, and now it came back at the mine.

  Then something happened that made everything clear. One day, great red banners appeared at the mouth of the mine, courtesy of local propaganda officials:

  Work in a craze for thirty days

  Push tonnage to a higher phase!

  and

  For Labor Day, here’s a must:

  Ten thousand tons or bust!

  and so on. I noticed that the slogans were not, in fact, very political. Their goal was just to fire up the miners to work harder and produce more coal. I knew from working inside the mine that if the miners wanted to, it would be easy for them to produce more coal. Of the eight hours a miner spent on one shift, only about three, on average, were spent at work. The rest of the time was used in other ways, including, near the end of the shift, just sitting in the dark and waiting for the shift to end. If this empty time were converted back to work, production would go up 10 percent or more for each reconverted hour.

  The miners, the “proletarian masters of the country,” paid no attention at all to the banners that appeared at the mine entrance. Down below, they still worked their three hours and then sat down to wait for quitting time. Every person—the whole team—did this. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a formidable thing on the earth’s surface, but a thousand feet underground it lost some of its punch. As I sat there in the darkness with the miners, musing on all of this, one of them said quietly, “Sixty cents of pay buys sixty cents of work.”

  Eureka. That comment helped unlock my puzzle. There in the blackness, I could suddenly see that the miners were not “masters of the dictatorship” but the opposite. They, like me, were on its receiving end. The only difference was that the control mechanisms were different. For me it was the label “rightist who slipped through the net”; for them it was their fixed sixty-cent wage. My subordination showed in my inability to remove my label, theirs in their inability to get a fair wage. In both cases, the dictatorship forced us to accept what it dealt us. That verbiage about “masters of the country” was fluff. To the miners, it mattered not a whit who won the power struggles in Beijing; they couldn’t have cared less about either faction.

  My new understanding soon got corroboration. In May, the authorities ordered us to go to Wabao Lake, just south of Shouyang, for a session on “recalling the bitter past to savor the sweet present.” This was to be part of our reeducation, but in fact we already knew the script well: Farmers would stand up to say how awful life used to be and how pleasant it is today. They would say that in the old society they were serfs (how bitter, how bitter!), but after the Communists came they were masters of their own fate (how blessed, how blessed!). But even though I expected to learn nothing, I wanted to go. It was a chance to get out for a little trip and breathe a bit of different air.

  What I did not imagine was that the Wabao farmers might turn out to be poorly trained in ideology. They started off fairly well: “the Communist Party liberated us,” and so on. But when it came time to “recall bitterness,” they all said that the bitterest times were during the Great Famine of 1959–62. They went on to recount all sorts of scenes of people starving to death. This presented me and the others who were being reeducated with a dilemma. To nod our heads would be political anathema; to shake them was a moral impossibility. Could we laugh? That would be worst from both points of view. All we could do was seal up our writhing inner feelings and allow nothing to show on the surface. The official in charge of the session evinced obvious discomfort. But he, too, was trapped. The farmers’ words were grossly “incorrect,” but he was in no position to cut them off because only moments earlier, he had been at the podium announcing that he himself was eagerly awaiting the chance to “learn diligently from his brothers in the peasant class.”

  In his summary comments, he tried to salvage a correct interpretation of what had been said. “The Great Leap Forward years were different from the years before Liberation,” he intoned. “After Liberation, peasants were their own masters.” I found this astounding. He was distinguishing between two ways of starving to death: when you starve as a “serf” it is bitter; when you starve as a “master” it falls into the category of sweet. A remarkable invention indeed: the doctrine of “sweet starvation.” But at least one thing was now clear about the more than three million people (in a total population of about forty million) who had starved to death in Anhui: they had had sweet deaths.

  The experience deepened my insight into the political position
of the farmers, another of those “three bulwarks” of the people’s democratic dictatorship. They, like the miners and the intellectuals, were on the receiving end of the dictatorship.

  In short, it became clear to me that Marx’s ideal of a “proletarian dictatorship” was an empty abstraction that was not going to happen. How could proletarians really be the dictators? Whoever did the dictating would be, you could be sure, no proletarian. The followers of Marx had taken this empty abstraction and pushed it to the point of hypocrisy and cruelty.

  In the summer of 1970 a new campaign arrived, and with it the struggle and the cruelty intensified. The name of the new campaign was “Arrest 516 Elements.” And who were these “elements”? I doubt that any reference book has, or ever will have, a clear definition. All we knew was that it was a new “hat” in the arsenal of the proletarian dictatorship. Perhaps the regime’s hats had become so similar and so numerous that, like the streets in New York City, numbers had become the most reasonable way to name them: it was now time to go after group number 516. (I shivered on my first visit to New York when I learned that a suburb had a telephone area code numbered 516.)

  Whatever the definition, the actual 516 victims were students, for the most part, especially ones who had been Red Guards in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. The high tide of the campaign to arrest them came in June, July, and August, the last three months of my stay at the Xiesan mine. My status as a hat wearer meant I had no right to participate in politics (too bad! I could not go out hunting 516 elements!)—but it also disqualified me as quarry, since a hat was already on my head and there was no obvious room for another one. This was just fine with me. After four years of nonstop denunciation and struggle, people were so sick of political movements that many felt going down into a mine was preferable. But unless you were an already-hatted person like me, you had no choice. You had to join the campaign. If you didn’t attack others, that fact turned you yourself into a target for attack. So you had to choose which role to play—attacker or attacked—and this is why people like me, banished to terrain outside this cruel dilemma, felt oddly privileged. I was still subject to the dictatorship, to be sure, but my freedom from the 516 campaign actually brought me a wisp of elation.

  I continued to get labor assignments. Some were in the mine, some on the surface. Eventually I was assigned to pull flatbed carts. These little vehicles were the most common means of moving cargo in Anhui. Made of wood, they were like horse carts, but smaller. Their beds were about three feet wide and eight feet long, and their pulling poles stuck out about four and a half feet. They had two rubber tires. They were usually pulled by humans but could be fitted for donkeys as well. Rivers of small flatbeds flowed everywhere in Anhui (and predominate even now, as I write in 1990). For a little more than a month, I was part of the flow.

  Pulling a cart was a pleasant sort of labor. It was summer, so I could strip to the waist, like the other cart pullers, and enjoy the open sunshine without fear that police would say anything. Anhui is hilly. Its roads go up and down, and pulling uphill could be tough going; but then there was the coasting down, cart and puller as one. The work had an oscillation—now hard, now relaxed—that made for good exercise. When I got tired I could take a break in the shade of a tree and cool off. When thirsty, I could buy a slice of watermelon. It was cheap, and sellers were everywhere. In theory it was against the rules for a hatted person like me to buy food on the streets without advance permission from supervisors. Yet I could feel completely confident that no supervisor would come along asking to see my permission slip to buy watermelon, because they were all too busy chasing 516s. So there I was—no supervision, no politics, a body bathed in sweat, a road bathed in sunlight, watermelon stands lining the way—pulling, coasting, flowing within the river of the flatbeds. It felt great. Only temporary, perhaps? Yes, but which escapes from the burdens of life are anything but temporary? In any case, my body, out in the air and sun, was the big winner during that interval of cart pulling.

  When I came back from my sun-filled days on the road, body bronzer than usual, I thought I noticed some envy in the expressions of my colleagues who had no hats and therefore no rights to go out pulling carts in semi-freedom. They had to spend their days pursuing 516s, and their faces were pale, even sickly. Then it turned out that some of them really were sick. In July, when the mosquitoes came out, malaria followed. For several days my cart and I were pulling nothing but malaria victims. There was no public transportation between the Xiesan mine and the local hospital, so patients had to go by flatbed. The load was grim, but, from a cart puller’s point of view, optimal in size. A cart loaded down with heavy things was of course hard to pull; an empty cart was also irritating, because it would bounce around on the uneven roads. A human body of about 150 pounds was just right—neither too heavy nor too light.

  I remembered my mother taking me, more than once, to ride on human-pulled rickshaws in Beijing and Shanghai. If that was inhumane, and a sin, then those days in Anhui when I spent day and night ferrying sick people to the hospital by rickshaw may have been my atonement. Even though I made many hospital runs, and was bitten by plenty of mosquitoes, and never had a preventive injection, I did not get malaria. Was this reward for the atonement?

  The breakout of infectious disease did nothing to slow the campaign against 516 elements. Even though I took no part in the campaign, its progress was as obvious to me as to anyone else. As it picked up speed, students disappeared one by one. The 516 suspects were separated out and detained, similarly to the way in which I had been detained and held during the “cleansing of class ranks” at USTC. Some of the 516 elements were held in miners’ housing at Xiesan, but “serious” cases were shipped to Hefei and incarcerated there. One Red Guard who had been charged with supervising us hatted people stopped showing up in July. It turned out that he had his own hat now, a 516 hat.

  Then began a new round of suicides. One student who had been a very active Red Guard at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution was among the “serious” cases sent to Hefei. A few days later we got word that he had jumped to his death from the fourth floor of a building. This was like the story of the chemistry lecturer I recounted in the last chapter. Even the “fourth floor” part was the same.

  Another student, one who had never been especially active, began in July to go on aimless walks by himself. His speech grew incoherent and his behavior unpredictable. One day he disappeared. People working on the freight rail line found him lying on the tracks, both legs severed at the thigh by a train that had recently passed. They rushed him to the hospital, but he had already lost too much blood and died within hours. By chance I was delivering another patient to the hospital that night, and I noticed some physics students standing guard at the morgue. They were on a twenty-four-hour watch. This was because wild dogs thrived in Anhui, and their sense of smell was sharp. Whenever a fresh corpse was brought into the morgue, they would gather in bunches in the bushes outside. When no one was looking, often in the middle of the night, they would use their heads to butt the door of the morgue open and go lick up the blood of the fresh corpse. The reason for the twenty-four-hour watch was to shoo away these dogs. The Chinese custom of “guarding the gates for the departed” had a new and literal meaning.

  The departed spirit of this particular young man was in a lucky minority. The regime viewed suicide as a counterrevolutionary offense, and even after death a suicide victim could be targeted for denunciation—but he was not. In principle, the reach of the proletarian dictatorship had no limit. Counterrevolutionaries could be pursued even to heaven.

  Heaven. Yes. The heavens remained. The final lesson in my course of reeducation at Bagong Mountain was in the value of studying the heavens. The human spirit, like the human body, seems to have an automatic tendency to seek balance. When falling to the left, a human body automatically leans to the right, and when falling right, it leans to the left. When immersed in darkness, a human mind automatically thinks of light.
When surrounded by evil, it seeks harmony and beauty.

  It was on that principle that my life at Bagong Mountain sparked in me a passion for astrophysics. What power, I asked myself, could rival the one that governs the heavenly bodies in their timeless movements and at the same time dispel the depression of a lonely physicist as he sits at the bottom of a mine waiting for quitting time? What could match the divine purity of a firmament packed densely and deeply with stars—and also wash away the stench of wild dogs haunting a morgue?

  This was not the first time in my life that I had found the heavens attractive. The year I graduated from high school, when my youthful aspirations were at a peak, I had written down “astronomy” as one of my three preferences for a university major. Then at Zanhuang, in 1958, I learned to be a keen observer of the heavens, but less from passion than from necessity, because I was out on the roads a lot at night, where the constellations and the moon were the most reliable signposts. Later, at USTC, there was a time when I was in charge of the physics demonstration room. Keeping a 15-centimeter reflecting telescope in proper adjustment required that I spend many nights with it, focused on the skies. And finally, there was that alluring article I had seen in 1966 about cosmic microwave background radiation.

  All of these were but glancing encounters, however. They did not penetrate into my inner self and grab hold. The heavens seemed beautiful to me, but they were, after all, very far away. Not until I reached the bottom of the mineshaft at Xiesan did I suddenly feel the urge to reach as far as I could in the opposite direction, far out of the squalor, in search of an uncontaminated sanctuary for my tormented spirit.