The Most Wanted Man in China

by Fang Lizhi

  The new revolution turned out to be just another rubric for class struggle, and I was once again sent to do factory work. But although the reality was the same, the theory this time was different. Officially, the purpose was not to “reeducate” people or to “reform” them. It was to illustrate another of Marx’s principles: that everything is created by labor. Engels had said that all of the natural sciences arise from needs that emerge in the course of productive labor. For science, one factory is more important than twenty universities. Conversely, anything that is not necessary to the processes of productive labor is for that reason not science, or at least not proletarian science. It followed that the first step in an education revolution in the natural sciences should be that scientists participate in productive labor.

  Accordingly, a few of my fellow physicists and I were sent to a camera factory in Beijing. The purpose was to get us to understand exactly what kind of physics was needed by this factory whose importance exceeded that of a university by twenty times.

  The Marxist theory got at least one point right: the camera factory, which produced Great Wall cameras, really did need some physics. It was a new operation and the cameras were not very good. One of the many problems had to do with the lens filter coatings. The factory had a special room where technicians applied a coating that was supposed to turn the filter surfaces yellow; but they couldn’t control the thickness of the coating and the filters came out with hues of red, green, and other colors mixed in. So here indeed was a genuine need—control of coating thickness—that arose out of a production process.

  It was a problem that modern physics could easily handle. The theory of optical thin film interference had been around for a hundred years or more, and I drew upon it to fashion a little device that we attached to the machinery. This kept the coatings even and the filters a uniform yellow. So my visit had not been entirely a waste. I had used the yellow filters of Great Wall cameras to prove that physics is in tune with Marxism: science indeed was “necessary to productive labor.”

  But the yellow filter incident was not the most important part of my stay in Beijing. The important milestone was a paper that I wrote on modern cosmology. It was the first such paper to be published in socialist China, and it turned out to show that physics and Marxism do not quite agree. It was also the beginning of new trouble for me.

  Actually, cosmology has been a “pirate ship” for a long time. In 1989 a British cosmologist lamented that “cosmologists have an unhappy history of getting into trouble with the powers that be.” He listed examples: Aristarchus, Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Sakharov, others. His theme was that authoritarian regimes have never gotten along with people whose profession it is to research the universe. Or to put it the other way: power elites who have disliked cosmologists have almost always been authoritarian.

  My motive in choosing the field of cosmology was by no means to seek headaches for myself or to jump onto a “pirate ship” in order to irritate Communist authorities. It was (as I explained in chapter 10) my experience at the Xiesan mine, hauling malaria victims and seeing dead bodies, that caused me to look toward the heavens and to decide to head in that direction. Far from seeking political trouble, it was precisely an impulse to escape it, to soar toward the placid beyond, that ignited my interest. So when I moved from the brick factory to the physics department and began to have a bit of time for research, I set aside the solid state physics and laser physics that had occupied me in the past and turned to astrophysics.

  It was not easy going. The university libraries had reopened, but their books and journals lagged well behind the times. They had almost nothing published after 1968, so it was impossible to know what colleagues around the world had recently been doing. We did get a few little brochures, and so could speculate, but that’s all.

  Another problem was that astrophysics, from its birth in the 1860s to the present day, had never been needed in any process of productive labor. No factory had ever used it to manufacture anything. So obviously it fell outside what Engels had declared science to be, and there was no way it was going to get any support from the Proletarian Education Revolution. Professor Qian Linzhao advised me that it would be better if I continued my work in either solid states or lasers, since those two fields were ones the authorities still regarded as useful—whereas heaven only knew what they would think of astrophysics. This caused me to hesitate for a time, but then three things happened during the spring and summer of 1972 that made me finally take the dive.

  First, my assignment to the Great Wall camera factory gave me the chance to go to research institutes and specialized science archives in Beijing, where I could see professional literature that I couldn’t get in Hefei. Second, news that Joseph Weber had detected gravitational waves coming from the center of the Milky Way generated great excitement among physicists, and some of my former colleagues at the Physics Research Institute of the Academy of Sciences had become inspired to test Weber’s theory by repeating his experiment. Most of them did not know gravitational theory very well, though, so they asked me to come give them a systematic account of general relativity. I agreed, and that errand required that I dig deeper into astrophysics. Third, Acta Physica Sinica, now simply called Physics, resumed publication. All of China’s scientific journals had completely closed in 1966, and Physics, resuming in the fall of 1972, was the first to come back. So now we again had a place to publish.

  When I got back from the camera factory I sat down to write my first physics paper since the Cultural Revolution began. The piece was not long, but its name was: “On a Cosmological Explanation for Matter and Black Body Radiation Using Scalar-Tensor Theory.” I wanted to squeeze into the title the names of as many concepts in cosmology as I could—“cosmological explanation,” “black body radiation,” and so on—so that everyone would know this was a paper on modern cosmology. If I had used a less explicit title, something like “A Rigorous Solution in Scalar-Tensor Gravitational Theory,” the story that unfolded next might have been different.

  The article appeared quickly in Physics. Then, in the winter of 1972–73, I began hearing that the relevant authorities were incensed and were making inquiries. Someone was daring to talk about “cosmological explanations”? What temerity!

  And sure enough, in the spring, a spate of articles in the Shanghai newspaper Wenhuibao and the journal Dialectics of Nature launched an all-out denunciation of the field of modern cosmology. One of the attacks, titled “Does the Universe Have an Explanation?” took straight aim at my article—even though my article had not contained even one political term, let alone any political content.

  In case you, my reader, might be curious about exactly what words a proletarian dictatorship uses when it denounces a field of pure science, I record below some of what the attack said:

  Modern cosmology is “bourgeois cosmology.” It is “counterfeit cosmology” and “shows only the degree of depravity that is reached when the natural sciences fall into the hands of the rotten and depraved bourgeois class.”

  The model of an expanding universe “seeks to establish that the capitalist system not only cannot be overcome but will continue indefinitely to expand.”

  The cosmos “has no mathematical or physical explanations, but it has a philosophical explanation”; “the proletariat has its own cosmic explanation”; “the proletariat will write its own new ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies’ and new ‘Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmopolitical Plan.’”

  (“On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies” is a work by Copernicus, and “The Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmopolitical Plan” is an essay by Immanuel Kant.)

  In short, all of cosmology, from Copernicus on, was under attack. But invective of this kind was not an invention of China’s Cultural Revolution; it was a tradition in Communist ideology. Years before, on June 24, 1947, Andrei Zhdanov, the ideology commissar for the Soviet Communist Party at the time, made a major speech in which he announced an all-out war on “
bourgeois science.” He called on Communists, armed with Marxism, to “occupy” astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, computational science, and other natural sciences. One by one, relativity theory, quantum theory, resonance theory, genetic theory, and others all came under fierce attack.

  Cosmology took the hardest hit. In the Soviet Union it was completely eliminated; the very word “cosmology” was deleted from textbooks. The rationale was that because Marxism had already solved all problems concerning the cosmos, the entire field of modern cosmology was anti-Marxist. In the People’s Republic of China, which was founded in 1949 with a “tilt toward the Soviet Union” while the Zhdanov campaign was at high tide, cosmology was doomed from the start. There were no cosmology textbooks, no papers on cosmology, and no mention of cosmology in any development plans for the sciences. It was as if the field did not exist. The 1973 denunciations of cosmology in Wenhuibao were, in short, orthodox Communism.

  Wenhuibao had a unique position during the Cultural Revolution. Although not an organ of the Party center, it was under the direct control of Yao Wenyuan, the leading authority on Chinese Communist ideology at the time, so it carried special weight. The Cultural Revolution itself had been launched by a withering attack that Wenhuibao had published. The writer-historian named in that attack took the matter rather too hard and resorted to suicide.

  Now Wenhuibao and Dialectics of Nature were turning their annihilation machinery against relativity theory, quantum theory, and cosmology. Everyone knew there were powerful political forces behind the move, and people waited to see what might happen. Would somebody take things too hard again? But alas, the murder effect did not travel well this time; the pressure was not enough to persuade even one person to give up on life. Maybe this was because astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists, ever since Aristarchus of Samos (310–230 B.C.), have never been very big on suicide. Or maybe it was because seven years of Cultural Revolution had taught people that nothing is really that shocking anymore.

  Still, the episode raises a question worth asking: Exactly why is it that the august ideology of Communism, while claiming to liberate the entirety of humanity, cannot swallow something like cosmology? In 1973, the number of people in all of China who understood relativistic cosmology could not have been more than a hundred. A paper in a physics journal could not possibly have had more than a hundred readers. So how could it threaten a proletarian dictatorship with a standing army of three million? How could the colossal Communist Party become as enraged as it was by a little paper on pure science? People in later times might look back and judge that the power holders of the day were daft. Something like Don Quixote?

  Joking aside, insanity was a real problem during the Cultural Revolution. Quite a few people, wounded by events, were driven to madness. But the insanity of denouncing cosmology was not the result of any trauma; it grew out of Communist ideology.

  Mao-era state socialism rested on a “Holy Trinity” of despotisms: in politics, a one-party dictatorship; in economics, a dictatorship of state planning; and in ideology, a dictatorship that resembled that of the medieval church in Europe. Each of the three powers needed the other two. Marxist texts had the status of sacred religious texts. No challenge, however slight, of whatever kind, from whatever person, could be tolerated. Zhdanov’s point (in Wenhuibao, noted above) that we don’t need modern cosmology because “the proletariat has its own cosmic explanation” was precisely that point—no challenges allowed.

  Hoping to understand what could be meant by a “proletarian cosmic explanation,” I did some research. What I found was that, although the Marxist classics use the terms “universe” and “cosmos” fairly often, there are only two sentences in them that could be said to offer an “explanation”:

  1. Space in the universe is infinite.

  2. Movement through space in the universe can go forward or backward, up or down, or left or right indefinitely; there are no end points.

  The two statements appear in two works by Engels: Dialectics of Nature and Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science. Neither of the propositions is accepted in the field of modern cosmology, because there is no evidence for either. But their presence in Engels means that a proletarian dictatorship must ban modern cosmology.

  Actually, neither of the statements originated with Engels. They are only recapitulations of the most simple hypothesis in the cosmology of Newton’s time—that the universe is an unlimited three-dimensional euclidean space. But these two propositions had the good luck of being understood by Engels, who copied them into his books. With that their value soared. They turned into the cream of the cream of human learning—a “proletarian cosmic explanation”! (One can only wonder what Newton would have thought.) In any case, Engels had driven a wedge between Newtonian cosmology and modern cosmology. They were now opponents: “bourgeois cosmology” and “proletarian cosmology.”

  There is an interesting precedent for this. The theory that the earth is at the center of the universe is not in the Bible and was not invented within the Christian church; it originated in a model of planetary movement that arose in ancient Greece. But when the medieval church adopted the concept, it got catapulted to the level of sacred, unchallengeable doctrine. That the earth was at the center was now the divine truth, and it was heresy to say that the sun is.

  So the ideological dictatorships of modern socialism and the medieval church had several things in common. They both saw themselves as authorities on cosmology; both adopted an outmoded cosmology as their unchallengeable model; and both used the tools of tyranny to block scientific progress. This helped me to understand that the problem with Communist rule over science was not just those tools of tyranny themselves but an ideology that in its very nature is opposed to the conditions that science requires: free inquiry, a spirit of skepticism, and reliance on evidence.

  A few years later, in 1981, I accepted an invitation to a conference on cosmology at the Vatican. The conferees were presented with the text of a speech by Pope John Paul II on the church’s current position on the relation between science and religion. It said that “the cooperation between science and religion, so long as neither side undermines the autonomy of the other, is beneficial to both. This means that religion can ask for the freedom of faith, and science can insist on freedom of inquiry.” But in 1990, as I write this, the dictatorial system in China still rejects in principle the notion that science can be free to operate independently of Communist faith.

  Marxist writings often make the claim that Marxism expresses the essence of all previous learning and transcends all cultures. Because it stands as the most general of truths, any new creation or development in science or culture must accept its suzerainty. Earlier in my life I had blindly embraced this principle.

  Once blind faith was gone, it became easy to see that this essence-of-the-essence doctrine was nothing but a garment in the wardrobe of the emperor’s new clothes. Moreover, it has been one of the favorite garments of the great Communist teachers generation after generation. Only when they wear it can they criticize and guide all branches of learning without needing to understand them. Here are a few examples:

  • Karl Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts has long been honored as a classic in Marxist natural science. During the Proletarian Education Revolution movement in China in the early 1970s, universities went so far as to adopt it as a mathematics textbook. In it, Marx uses dialectics to expound upon concepts in calculus, and specialists in Communist ideology have followed up with piles of articles on, for example, Marx’s dialectical analysis of zero divided by zero. Unless one reads this literature conscientiously, one can get the impression that Marx actually does have a hold on some kind of esoteric argument. What a careful reading actually establishes is only this: that Marx completely failed to understand the limits theory that was already well established and available during his time.

  • In 1908 Lenin wrote a propaganda pamphlet called “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” in which he be
came very concerned with physics. He wrote with soaring passion about a “crisis in physics” and attacked a number of physicists, especially Ernst Mach and Jules Henri Poincaré. The overall message was that only Lenin can save physics. The claim of Mach and others that no absolute reference system exists was made, according to Lenin, only as a basis for asking their capitalist bosses for higher salaries. One might think that a personal attack of this sort would trigger a sharp response. But Mach replied only that “Mr. Lenin has yet to understand physics.”

  • In 1963 Mao Zedong decided to wear the “dominate physics” clothes as well. He had just invented the new slogan “Never, Ever, Forget the Class Struggle” when—perhaps inspired by Lenin’s precedent—he was suddenly attracted to physics. He felt a need to instruct physicists in how to do particle research. He praised the Japanese physicist Sakata Shoichi, commenting that Sakata’s research accorded with Marxist philosophy. Chinese Marxists swarmed to show how Sakata’s results fit with Mao’s philosophy as expressed in the essays “On Practice” and “On Contradiction” and in the Mao slogan “one divides into two.” It’s too bad for Sakata that he was Japanese; had he been Chinese, he could have soared to stratospheric heights. The actual impact of Mao’s comment was not, alas, that all Chinese specialists in ideology should go in search of physicists in order to learn about Sakata’s physics. It was the opposite: all Chinese physicists had to take initiatives to go absorb the guidance of Mao Zedong Thought.

  It may be that this sort of hallucinatory megalomania in Communist culture had its origins in the all-embracing philosophical system devised by Hegel. In the years when I was trying to get into the Communist Party, I read some Hegel in order to better understand Marx. Most of Hegel’s enormous system lies outside the scope of my special knowledge, and I have no opinion on those parts of it. But this much I can say for sure: every one of Hegel’s theses on physics, without exception, is pure poppycock and utterly devoid of value for serious physicists. From his discussion of concepts in physics such as force and heat, it is plain that all he is doing is spreading a philosophical system that he regards as omnipotent over areas in which he has no understanding whatsoever.