The Most Wanted Man in China

by Fang Lizhi

  Hegel’s intellectual pushiness grew from needs that were intrinsic to his philosophy. In countries that practice proletarian dictatorship, however, the function of the megalomania in Marxism has been to exert ideological dictatorship over others.

  In December 1974, I wrote to Li Shuxian that “we are governed today by muddleheadedness and ignorance … on this topic my thinking has now gone very, very far.” It was around this time that the icon of Marxist ideology collapsed in my mind once and for all.

  In 1973, the year in which the political attack on cosmology was launched, a few of my colleagues and I organized an informal group on astrophysics. At first there were only five of us, but we were the seed that eventually grew into USTC’s Center for Astrophysics. None of us anticipated that such a thing would happen. In those days, when the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was waning but still dominant, the government had yet to resume support for academic research of any kind. Our little group lived only by interest and without any thought of where things might lead. We were lucky that the open-minded Liu Da had by then returned to be Party Secretary of USTC. Liu never disobeyed explicit orders from above but, down on the ground, was very good at “opening one eye and closing the other,” as the Chinese saying has it. Our little group had his tacit approval.

  The conditions for research were, of course, poor. We began with no budget, and our first grant, which came for ad hoc reasons, was only 200 yuan. But we didn’t have many special activities and didn’t need equipment, so budget was not a big concern. We had no office, so we held our seminars in a staff dormitory room that contained a ten-square-foot blackboard. It was hard to find professional reading material; astrophysics had not been in the original plans for USTC, so the library holdings in the field were paltry. Sometimes one of us traveled all the way to Beijing in search of what we needed. We were cut off from the international community of astrophysicists; there was no way we could send our papers for publication abroad, and it was extremely rare for any foreign colleagues to come our way.

  Research activities begun in such conditions normally wither and die, but our little group thrived. Not only did no one quit, but a trickle of younger people kept arriving, wanting to join. Some of the “credit” for this continuing influx must go, ironically, to the political campaign against cosmology. That campaign lasted right to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, and (although this was not its purpose) it provided a politically correct reason for Chinese astronomers to get back into action. After all, in a big campaign on the topic of astronomy, who should participate if not astronomers? Beginning in 1974 there were major annual conferences on astronomy. Denunciations of the wrong kind of astronomy topped the agendas, but in order to do that, someone had to read the texts of the papers that were going to be denounced. So real astronomy spread.

  During the last three years of the Cultural Revolution, the power of the ideological dictatorship to intimidate people declined steadily. When it was launched in 1973, the attack on cosmology had considerable sting, but later it became more and more pro forma. Scholarly meetings on astronomy turned gradually into genuine conferences conducted under the banner of denunciation—and became opportunities for a bit of travel as well. This was how the field of astronomy got back on its feet in China. It grew from being attacked.

  Universities and observatories around the country took turns hosting the conferences, and in 1976 it was our turn to hold one in Hefei. It was, as things turned out, the last to be held during the Cultural Revolution. Before it ended, though, the Cultural Revolution exerted once last kick. Repression intensified during its final year and grew especially strong after the “April Fifth” incident when protesters were forcibly evicted from Tiananmen Square by baton-wielding police. Well-positioned people began discreetly letting us know that the Hefei conference on astronomy would get very close attention from “the concerned parties”—meaning the government guardians of ideology—and that we should be careful. So we prepared meticulously and scoured our plans to remove every vulnerability we could imagine.

  As a site for the meeting, we chose a building complex that had been constructed a few years earlier as a training base for officers of the Viet Cong. It was not open to the public. Its environs were pretty and it had good equipment, including a place to swim. Since it had been built for Communist revolutionaries, no one could accuse us of choosing a place with bourgeois comforts. The only drawback was that, since the Vietnamese don’t mind heat, it had no air-conditioning.

  The bigger worry was what to do for the customary conference excursion. We would obviously be denounced if we chose Huangshan. There was always Bagong Mountain, but who would want to go there? We finally settled on Huoshan County in the Dabie Mountains of western Anhui. This was known as “the county of the generals” because it was the native place of more Communist generals—several dozen of them—than anywhere else. It was also an early base of the Communist revolution. Neither of these points was the attraction for us, though; we were drawn by the rare natural beauty of the Plum Mountain Reservoir in that area.

  All the preparations went forward as planned, and our meeting convened in July 1976. As expected, the “concerned parties” in both Beijing and Shanghai sent some neophytes in astronomy to attend. Some of the real astronomers nicknamed these interlopers “fishermen,” because their purpose at the meeting was obviously to troll for politically incorrect speech. If you weren’t careful you could be a “hooked fish.”

  The first fish to be hooked was Professor Dai Wensai of Nanjing University, who made the mistake of saying publicly that he thought there really had been a Big Bang. Since Professor Dai was a very senior figure in the field, the fishermen opted not to set their hooks right away, but to wait for others to nibble as well so that they could reel in a big haul. In that limbo, nothing happened as the conferees peacefully set off for Huoshan, spent two pleasant days at the Plum Mountain Reservoir, then returned to the Viet Cong training base. The fishing resumed, and everyone watched to see who might be hooked. The weather got hotter and hotter, the atmosphere in the un-air-conditioned conference tenser and tenser …

  Then—oops, too bad!—right when tension was at its peak, the shocking news of the great Tangshan earthquake arrived. The conference ended, fish and fishermen dispersed as one, and that was that.

  So our little research group on astrophysics muddled through, and eventually thrived, only by the grace of a counterproductive political campaign plus assists from a few weird, unpredictable events. In any case, beginning in 1974, our group produced more scholarly papers per person per year than any other part of USTC. The topics were cosmology, gravitational collapse, compact objects, and active celestial bodies, all of which fall into the general category of relativistic astrophysics. Soon thereafter the school authorities officially recognized an astrophysics research section in the Department of Physics, and from that time forward we were legitimate.

  I find, looking back at what I have written in this chapter, that it contains rather too much stultifying detail about denunciations of cosmology. With this emphasis I might, without meaning to, actually be desecrating cosmology and astrophysics. The harebrained denunciations are, after all, only a minor sidelight in their history. One fact that I cannot change, though, is that those were indeed sorry times. It is the history itself, not my words about it, that does the desecrating. The fields, in their wisdom, just sparkle along as if nothing happened.

  In fact I don’t think cosmology and astrophysics will mind that I have written down this chapter in their history. Astronomy has never aimed at worldly fame or descended into hurly-burly over power. It doesn’t need the sympathy that pity offers. Indeed, the flow of strength goes in the opposite direction. The more a human being opens to the universe and accepts cultivation from it, the more inspiration that person will receive and the more firm the person’s confidence will be—especially that kind of confidence that cannot be had in other ways, the confidence of belief. Immanuel Kant chose the
se words for his tombstone:

  Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the reflection dwells on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

  Indeed. The universe is quite as ideal, noble, and unbounded as this. When you stand face-to-face with the universe, in its ultimate depth and ultimate beauty, your spirit cannot but soar. As you grow clearer and clearer about how space and time are continually expanding, and how the universe is evolving:

  What terror or timidity is not swept away by a current of joy?

  What problem or puzzle does not melt in the beauty of wisdom?

  What worry or anxiety does not dissolve in a celestial song?

  13. MODERNIZATION AT THE END OF THE 1970s

  In July 1976, the great Tangshan earthquake killed about four hundred thousand people. It seemed, somehow, also the death knell of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

  When USTC opened for classes in the fall of 1976, the Astrophysics Section of the Department of Physics received its first-ever budget allocation. We used it to buy a calculator. It wasn’t much more powerful than the little pocket calculators that followed very soon thereafter, but in size and weight this one resembled an electric typewriter. The factory that made it did not do deliveries, so one afternoon a colleague and I set out by bicycle to go pick it up. The day was September 9. We were barely out of the university gates when we—and all the rest of the city—were overwhelmed by mourning music. It blared from every public loudspeaker, large and small, in unprecedented volume. In that era, the volume of funerary music was strictly calibrated to the political status of the deceased, so for us the inference was obvious: Mao was dead.

  We picked up the bulky machine, loaded it onto a bicycle, and headed back to campus. The mourning music boomed unabated. I found it strange, though, that nothing else seemed different. The little flatbed carts streamed through the streets just as before; no cars honked horns in sympathy with the mourning (as they often did on other occasions); pedestrians walked past giant banners that read LONG LIVE CHAIRMAN MAO! as if no banner were there. This is how the passing of this man from the era before calculators—no, let’s be clear, this emperor—was observed by his subjects.

  A month later Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and her political allies known as the “Gang of Four” were arrested. With no ceremony beyond that, the curtain fell on ten years of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the stage was set for China to attempt modernization again.

  The end of the Cultural Revolution brought an effusion of levity all across society. News of the collapse of the Gang of Four sparked a spontaneous celebration at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Cymbals clanged, drums banged, and people’s spirits soared. The clouds of so many years of “denunciations” were floating away. What joy!

  It was easy to reach a new consensus that China should pursue modernization. Everybody wanted the country to move beyond Mao Zedong’s approach of fight-heaven fight-earth fight-humanity. When it came to questions of what modernization was, though—how to pursue it and where best to start—there was not a lot of consensus. Everyone had his or her own notions. Estimates differed, too, on the questions of exactly what China’s current position was and what the prospects were. Most people were cautiously optimistic. But the ones who had been most badly battered in the Mao-era campaigns remained skeptical and fearful. They just waited, watched, and kept their mouths shut.

  Some people who had relatives overseas, or in Hong Kong or Macao, rushed to emigrate as quickly as they could. The government was now permitting emigration, but approvals were not easy to come by. My old friend Deng Weilian from brick factory days and my colleague A, whom I had known for twenty years, were both indefatigable in their determination to get out to Hong Kong. Both had cheerfully left Hong Kong in 1949 to be part of the new China. Now, the two major episodes of elation in their personal histories formed a stark contrast: in 1949 they were elated to go in, and in 1977 they were elated to get out.

  Deng Weilian came to see me before he left and we talked about how things looked for China. He was pessimistic. He said the reason he wanted out was that China’s future looked bleak, and the reason for his gloom was that Deng Xiaoping had returned to power. This was not how most people (including me) saw things. The common view was that because Deng had been purged by Mao and had felt the brunt of the proletarian dictatorship personally, he would be different from Mao.

  But Deng Weilian said that we were all hoodwinked, and he had an extraordinary analysis to support his view. Drawing a parallel to a famous military trick in the ancient novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, he reasoned this way: Mao had not really persecuted Deng; Mao and Deng had conspired to present the appearance of persecution, the purpose of which was to deceive the Chinese people into welcoming Deng on precisely the assumption many of us were now making—that Deng, detesting Mao, would be different; the hidden goal was to continue the Mao dynasty; in essential matters there was no difference between Mao and Deng; Mao’s official “successor,” the mediocre Hua Guofeng, was but a stalking horse. Weilian buttressed his interpretation with the observation that every other time Mao had carried out the purge of a rival, he had not rested until the rival was dead. Never before had there been a case like Deng Xiaoping’s—you get purged and you still get to play bridge. After listening to Weilian’s analysis I remained unpersuaded. I had to admire the rigor of his logic, though.

  The people most eager to leave were those who had ties outside China. The ones who were born and grew up in China—like me—found leaving harder to think about. Our default position was to stay put and hope things would improve. The end of the Mao dynasty might be a turning point.

  My own first response to the new modernization ethos was to throw myself into teaching and research in physics. However the cards play out, I told myself, physics is essential to modernization. Before 1977, I published an average of four papers per year. After 1977, it was eight. Astrophysics was consuming my life.

  In October 1976, our astronomy research group went to visit the Xinglong Observation Station located one hundred miles northeast of Beijing in the Xinglong Mountains. During the Qing period the area had been a hunting reservation for the aristocracy, and even now almost no one lived there. Pollution from electric light was near zero and atmospheric conditions were good, so it was an ideal place for “optical observation,” as we astronomers call it. The station’s equipment, though, left much to be desired. The main pieces were a 60/90-centimeter Schmidt telescope and a 60-centimeter reflecting telescope. In 1958 construction had begun on a telescope with a two-meter diameter, but the later tides of “revolution” doomed that project.

  Chinese astronomy has a few thousand years of history. Because ancient kings and emperors claimed that their authority came from heaven, astronomy from the very beginning was a government-sponsored branch of learning. It is interesting, though, that the most eminent premodern Chinese astronomer, Guo Shoujing (1231–1316), did not emerge in one of the great Chinese dynasties—the Tang, the Song, or the Ming—but during the Yuan, when China had been invaded by Mongols and its own civilization was at low ebb. I find this interesting because it shows that the fortunes of Chinese astronomy did not parallel the rising and falling of the rest of Chinese civilization. Astronomy may have been the first science in the world to transcend nationality and make progress across cultures.

  The Beijing Observatory, which was built in 1279 by order of Yuan founder Kublai Khan, was the capital observatory of what was then the largest empire in the world. It was also, for its time, the world’s most modern observatory, and Guo Shoujing was its first director.

  Time does not stand still, however, and seven hundred years later, the Beijing Observatory telescopes were nowhere near the best in the world. At the Xinglong observation site we could do only the most ordinary observations. We were lucky, though, to observe the BX Andromedae, an eclipsing binary star, at the time of its minimal brightnes
s. Based on that observation, I was able to infer that the rotation period of this binary is gradually increasing, and I wrote a paper about it called “The Period Increase of BX Andromedae.” This is the only paper I have ever written based on data from my own observation.

  When we got back from Xinglong, some of my friends in space physics invited me to join in a two-month observation of whistlers. This was not astrophysics, but it is a very interesting phenomenon. Whistlers are electromagnetic waves of audible frequency that are generated by thunder in the southern hemisphere and then, following the earth’s magnetic field at high altitude, arrive in the northern hemisphere. Southern hemisphere thunder, by the time it reaches the northern hemisphere, becomes a wonderful whistling sound. When you hear a volley of whistles at a listening station, you know that somewhere in the southern hemisphere, at that very moment, thunder is rolling. The length and pitch of the whistle can tell you about the magnetic field configuration high above the earth.

  The whistler observation point that I visited was in a geomagnetic station in a northwestern suburb of Beijing. Interest in geomagnetism, like astronomy, has ancient roots in China. The legendary Yellow Emperor is said to have led his fighters in 2690 B.C. through a thick fog that had been breathed out by Chi You, the mythical beast who commanded the barbarian enemy, by riding in “south-pointing chariots” that apparently used geomagnetism to tell direction—and could do so even through a fog. Those were the most advanced war chariots of the time, and they assured total victory for the Yellow Emperor. But the descendants of the Yellow Emperor did not, alas, follow up with military applications of this breakthrough. The “south-pointing needle” (a compass) became, instead, a tool in the geomancy called fengshui and was used primarily in the layout of gravesites. Chinese coffins, almost without exception, were laid out with the head to the north and the feet to the south, like little magnetic needles lying in line with the earth’s magnetic field. Physical magnetism had merged with moral magnetism; the earth’s magnetic field became a blanket of loving care.