by Fang Lizhi
With the help of chance, and even as the mindless political denunciations continued, I was able to lay hands on a copy of Classical Theory of Fields by Lev Landau. It was a banned book, of course. Ironically, though, when the 516 struggles reached fever pitch and everyone was preoccupied with protecting their own persons, there was actually more space for reading. Because of the malaria problem, we all slept under mosquito nets, and once you dropped your net, you could read as you liked. And so it happened, during my months in southern Anhui, that Landau’s book became my most beloved (and only) after-hours reading material. Each evening, as night arrived, my fatigued body retired under a net while my liberated spirit leaped toward the wide universe in pursuit of the beautiful and moving question of its ultimate origin.
Poincaré once wrote:
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.
Yes, the universe was beautiful, and worth knowing, too. There was a reason for me to keep on living after all. I had found a new starting point. Bagong Mountain, with its 102-degree temperatures, its mosquitoes and malaria, its 516s and its suicides, its dead bodies and wild dogs—no matter how squalid, ugly, and tyrannical—could not touch the beauty that arose from my wonder and awe at the colossal thing called the universe. That beauty now owned me.
11. ARRIVAL IN HEFEI
In August 1970, when our terms at the Xiesan mine were up, all of us USTC lecturers in physics went to Hefei. So did USTC people from other departments when their sentences, in other places, were over. Our coming together marked the beginning of the Hefei chapter in the history of the university.
Hefei then was a small city, only about half a million, and by the standards of Beijing was only semi-developed. You could cover the entire commercial district on foot within an hour. The streets observed no distinction between slow and fast lanes—trucks, cars, bicycles, flatbed carts, horse and donkey carts, and pedestrians mingled as each saw fit. The city didn’t have any famous historical sites. There was one park, called Ferry to Leisure—to which one trip was enough.
In history, Hefei and its environs had often been battlefields. Many strongmen had risen and fallen here, and the people by nature were a bit pugnacious. China’s waging of wars over the preceding hundred years had depended heavily on armies from Anhui Province, and Hefei’s heroes were mostly military heroes. Li Hongzhang, the founder of the Tianjin Military Academy in the late nineteenth century, and Duan Qirui, the famous Republican-era northern warlord, were both sons of Hefei.
USTC moved into the campus of Hefei Normal College, a school that had been disbanded during the Cultural Revolution and was not going to be restored. It had taught only the humanities—history, literature, music, art, and so on. Because it did no science, the campus had no laboratories or machine shops, and its supplies of electricity, water, and gas were not enough to support scientific research. Except for a few dormitories and classroom buildings, USTC would have to start from the ground up.
We battered scientists weren’t afraid of starting from scratch so long as we felt we were really building something. From all our experience of being “sent down” and “reeducated” beginning in 1958, we had picked up abilities in quite a few lines of work. I daresay Chinese intellectuals of our generation, however they might compare with their colleagues around the world in their special fields, in terms of general worker skills would easily rank number one. All of us could present long lists of the kinds of manual labor we understood.
In this memoir I have already mentioned some of the items on my own list: farming (both the northern and southern varieties, which are different), well digging, pig raising, railroad construction, coal mining, and flatbed cart pulling. Here are some others that I haven’t mentioned yet:
In the fall of 1965, I worked in the converter room at the Shijingshan Steel Mill in Beijing. My job—an obsolete task by now, because machines have replaced it—was to shovel raw material into the furnace. I have a small scar on my arm that is a souvenir of a tiny drop of molten steel that once came flying out.
In the winter of 1967, I worked in a vinylon factory at Niulanshan, in the eastern outskirts of Beijing. The entire plant was imported, and it was state-of-the-art, but my own work was routine and I didn’t pick up any new technology there.
In 1969 Mao Zedong called for “digging deep tunnels” to prepare for nuclear war, and I joined several times in the digging. I can’t promise that our tunnels did anything to protect against nuclear attack, though. We never had any experimental evidence.
When I got to Hefei in 1970, the list kept growing: brick making was next. During my first year in Hefei, physics was only my avocation; my main work was making bricks. USTC had its own brick factory, finished in March 1971. The chemistry building that stands on the campus today was built from bricks that we professors made there.
WORK HARD TO BUILD CHINA INTO
A STRONG MODERN SOCIALIST COUNTRY!
PUT BRICKS AND TILES TO WORK FOR
CHINA’S SOCIALIST CONSTRUCTION!
Slogans and banners such as these were everywhere in China in the 1970s. I feel a duty here to describe our brick factory, both its personnel and its process, in some detail, so that people in later times can get a feel for what “making bricks and tiles for socialism” was all about.
The factory had a staff of thirteen. One was an experienced brick maker and the others were “black element” academics drafted from a number of departments. I introduce them briefly below. The tags that follow their names were their titles as of 1971; when I say what they are doing “now” I mean 1990, as I write this.
• Chen Xiru, lecturer in mathematics. Chen was studying in Poland in 1956 when, because of rightist opinions he expressed there, he was sent home and became a “rightist who slipped through the net.” Now he is a famous professor of mathematics, one of China’s leading authorities on probability theory.
• Qian Datong, lecturer in mathematics. Qian had already published papers on statistics but, because of some wayward political speech, became an “active counterrevolutionary.” He is now an associate professor at USTC.
• Deng Weilian, lecturer in mathematics. Deng had an illustrious background. There is a statue in Guangzhou in honor of his uncle Deng Zhongyuan, who, before he was assassinated in 1922, had been a military general and one of the earliest followers of Sun Yat-sen, the Nationalist revolutionary leader. Deng’s father had been in charge of the Nationalists’ government-owned airline and, in 1949, ordered that all airline staff fly from Hong Kong to the mainland, with their aircraft, and report to the Communists. This transfer of personnel and equipment became the kernel of the People’s Republic’s own airline. Deng Weilian himself went to study history at Yenching University in Beijing, and in 1950, with the outbreak of the war in Korea, he volunteered to go fight the Americans. After the war he came back to China and switched his field to mathematics. Then he said something that offended the authorities and became an “active counterrevolutionary.” In the late 1970s he left China for Hong Kong. I have been told that after 1984, when the Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong laid out plans for the city’s reversion to China, Deng moved again, this time to the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific.
• Xu Jialuan, associate professor of physics. Xu supported the Communists in the 1940s and in 1949 passed up a chance to go abroad in order to answer the Party’s call to stay and build a new China. As I noted in chapter 9, though, he later mentioned his dream of studying in the United States, and that mistake brought him a label of “counterrevolutionary element.” The authorities said he was planning treason. He was struggled and beaten. In 1981, while on a visit to America, he flew from there to Taiwan, where the Taiwan authorities welcomed him as a “righteous anticommunist.” He is now a professor of physics at a university
in Taipei.
• Li Xianyu, professor of mechanics. In the 1920s Li studied engineering in Shanghai, where he was a classmate of Lu Dingyi, who later, from 1954 to 1966, was chief of the Communist Party’s Department of Propaganda. Li joined the Party back in those early days in Shanghai as well. Later, while a student in Japan, he resigned from the Party, and because of that act he received the label of “traitor” during the Cultural Revolution. He died in the early 1980s.
• Huang Maoguang, professor of mechanics. In the 1940s Huang went to Cornell University in the United States for a Ph.D., after which he returned to China and became famous in the field of thin plate mechanics. But he kept up correspondence with his American friends, and for this he received a “spy” label. After President Nixon visited China in 1972, some of Huang’s acquaintances in the American scholarly community came visiting, too, and the authorities, embarrassed in front of foreigners, had to remove the “spy” hat. Huang is retired now and lives in Beijing.
• Zhu Zhaoxiang, professor of mechanics. Zhu at the time was one of China’s leading experts on the mechanics of explosions. He joined the Communist Party before 1949 while at Zhejiang University and did underground work against the Nationalist government, but in 1957 he was expelled from the Party for rightist opinions. His category in 1971 was “rightist who slipped through the net.” He is now president of Ningbo University.
• Lu Yang, lecturer in chemistry. In the 1930s a group called the Federation for National Salvation called upon the Nationalists and Communists to resist Japan instead of fighting each other, and in 1936 seven of this group were arrested by the Nationalists. There was a great outcry on their behalf; even Albert Einstein sent a telegram of support. They came to be known as the Seven Stalwarts. The only female in the group, Shi Liang, was Lu Yang’s aunt. The Communist Party was extremely enthusiastic about the Seven Stalwarts in 1936, but in 1957 Lu Yang’s connection with Shi Liang did him no good at all. Indeed, two of the Seven Stalwarts were themselves labeled rightists. This is what people mean by the phrase “That was then and this is now.” Lu Yang committed suicide in 1981.
• Liu Lang, a leading physician and president of USTC’s medical school. Liu joined the Communist Party in his youth and worked in military medicine. Before working with the Communist armies, though, he had also worked in Nationalist organizations, and that was enough to get him the label “historical counterrevolutionary.” In the 1980s he went back to Beijing, where he is now retired, and writing.
• Guo Laofu. In the 1940s, Guo went to study at a military medical school in Japan and later worked in the Japanese-occupied northeast of China. From there he joined the Communist Party of China and served in an army commanded by Lin Biao. He followed the army from the northeast all the way to Guangzhou in the south, but, because the circumstances of his original departure for Japan were “unclear,” he, too, got a “historical counterrevolutionary” hat. Later he retired to Beijing and took up fishing.
• Jin Yongtao, technician in the physics department. Jin was the only one of the “black elements” who did not have a higher education. He got his rightist hat in 1957 when he was a technician in the Physics Research Institute of the Academy of Sciences. Now he is an engineer at the Beijing Science Technology Management College.
• Me.
So there it was: the average level of education and knowledge at this little brick factory could rival what might be found at any building materials plant anywhere in the modern world. Indeed, measured in terms of concentration, we might have ranked first. The difference between our pool of talent and others was that in our case the authorities wanted only our manual labor, not our knowledge. They were asking us to use a two-thousand-year-old method of firing bricks to fire up China’s modernization.
“Qin bricks and Han tiles” is a cliché in Chinese. People use it to point to the early start that China got in technology. Chinese knew how to make bricks in the third century B.C., and a century later could do tiles. Technologically speaking, there’s no real reason for me to expand on the USTC method of making bricks, because it’s all laid out in a book by Song Yingxing called Heavenly Creations, published in 1637. Still, in order to clarify the ways in which traditional Chinese culture was put to use to build Communism as invented by Marx, I will have to recapitulate some of the processes that Song described more than three hundred years ago.
The first step in traditional brick making is to cast the raw bricks. This requires blending the clay and getting it into wood frame molds. The job takes two people. One grips the mold firmly on the floor while the other raises a ball of clay that weighs about fifteen pounds over his head, then thrusts the ball forcefully downward into the mold. The quality of the eventual brick depends upon the force of that thrust: the harder the thrust, the denser the clay and the better the brick. If the force is insufficient, the clay contains too many little bubbles, like a sponge, and the finished brick will not be able to bear weight, which means it has to be discarded. No person can throw down more than a hundred lumps of clay before feeling utterly exhausted. In our little work group, only the younger people—the lecturers—had the energy to throw clay. The professors and the associate professors held the wooden molds. Later we got a machine that made the raw bricks and we didn’t need to throw clay anymore. That was a big advance, but there was only one machine for the whole brick factory.
Step two is to air-dry the raw bricks. A finished brick weighs about five and a half pounds, and in its wet, unfired form weighs more than double that. We carried the wet bricks, entirely by hand, to places that had a good flow of air—but it had to be in the shade—and set them down to dry. They had to be turned several times during the process so that the drying would be even.
Step three is to build a kiln, and this requires technical expertise. A kiln is a domed structure, about thirty feet across and twenty feet high, made of unfired bricks. It resembles a tent. The dome structure was a breakthrough in building mechanics that someone in ancient China invented. The 120-foot Zhaozhou Bridge in southern Hebei, built more than thirteen hundred years ago, uses the same principle of stone-on-stone arched construction. The senior brick maker who directed us in our kiln construction was passing along essentially the same know-how that had gone into building that bridge. He had no blueprints, took no measurements, and made no calculations. He did everything by eye. He glanced here, glanced there, telling us all what to do—and the result was a beautiful round dome, exquisite in design. The professors of mechanics were very impressed. The old worker may have spent five years of his youth mastering this technology, learning how to set each minor angle in order to get the beautiful arc just right. There was no way he could know, of course, that in a mechanics class at USTC a hundred students could come to understand in one hour a mathematical notation that rigorously expresses the curve of that same arc, and from that could deduce the optimal size for each minor angle.
The final step in brick making is to fire the bricks inside the kiln. This is essentially a technical task that requires little labor. All we had to do was add coal when the senior worker told us to—and then stop when he told us to, after eight or nine days. But right there were two great secrets of traditional brick making: when to add coal and when the bricks were ready to take out. The old worker didn’t say what criteria he used to judge these questions. He preferred to keep personal vigil at the kiln day and night, allowing himself only a bit of sleep after each addition of coal. We twelve intellectuals divided into three groups to form round-the-clock shifts. The professors got the day shifts, so I was always on night shift.
It turned out, though, that the old brick maker was not a perfect keeper of secrets. Each time we added coal, we sat around the kiln afterward and listened to him talk about his techniques. He seemed to view us as disciples in his craft. We learned that the crucial skill was to judge temperatures inside the kiln. He referred to the “fire conditions,” by which he meant the colors of both the flames and the bricks. Most people cannot di
scriminate color differences among flames of 1,100, 1,300, and 1,500 degrees, but experienced brick makers can. The more accurate their eye for these subtleties, the higher their rank in the trade.
Later I read in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, which was written about two thousand years ago, that astronomers in ancient times categorized stars by their colors: white, blue, yellow, red, and dark. People have expressed skepticism about that passage—the colors of a few planets might be discernible to the naked eye, but thousands of stars? Yet it is worth noting that modern astrophysics also classifies stars by color, and the colors correspond to different temperatures. Moreover, the color classifications of quite a few stars, as obtained by spectral measurement, match those listed in the Records of the Grand Historian. This finding, too, has drawn skepticism.
After my experience at the brick kiln, I came to believe there is a chance that the Grand Historian’s records might actually have some basis. Two thousand years ago China had brick-kiln artisans, it seems, who could discriminate extremely fine gradations in the color of fire; so might it not also be possible that astronomers of that era had trained their eyes to perceive extremely fine gradations of starlight?
But if Chinese astronomers ever did have this skill, it died out long ago. And it is not going to come back, because modern astronomers have no use for it. Spectroscopic analysis has exceeded, a thousand times over, what the best possible human eye could ever do. Today I feel a deep respect for that old kiln artisan who could see temperatures for himself, but I have no desire whatsoever to acquire his skill. A pyrometer could give me temperatures inside a kiln with much greater precision. During my work at the brick factory, I never went to the USTC physics lab to get a pyrometer, though. After all, we were being reformed. I just shoveled coal, as instructed.
In the dead of night, on my shift at the kiln, I stared into the fire and mused that human history itself might be something like a fire that constantly forges new things into being as it reduces old things to ashes. The extinction of traditional skills sometimes causes people who admire such skills to grieve, as if treasures have been lost forever, and as if today’s world depends on whether they can be retrieved. I didn’t think so, though. I felt, and still feel, that old skills do have archaeological value, but other than that, extinction is probably what ought to happen to them. The progress of humankind depends on retiring old technologies—and that means, in today’s world, trading in eye skills for pyrometers. This is why I did not want to learn eye skills, even while admiring the man who had them. If my refusal to learn eye skills nudges humanity a tiny bit forward, so much the better, I thought. Is this “cultural revolution”? Yes, I mused—and that is what the term really ought to mean.