by Fang Lizhi
Our objective in studying whistlers was closer to the Yellow Emperor’s. We speculated that when man-made objects like satellites or intercontinental ballistic missiles penetrate the earth’s magnetic field at high altitude, they might leave behind ripples that could show up in whistler patterns. If we could analyze those ripples, we might be able to detect satellites and missiles and trace their courses. And if that worked, the breakthrough would obviously have great military value—just as the Yellow Emperor’s “south-pointing chariots” had. But it didn’t work.
These two excursions into observation—one of the heavens and one of the earth—were but eddies next to the mainstream of my interests, however. My main interest was deeper in space, mainly in quasars. In November 1977, Professor Dai Wensai invited me to Nanjing University to lecture on general relativity. Professor Dai attended all of my lectures, and so did other luminaries in the astronomy field at Nanjing’s Purple Mountain Observatory, such as Professor Gong Shumo, so I took my responsibility very seriously. By that time, the political fishermen were gone. Modern cosmology, rising under the mantle of “modernization,” had moved from underground into the open for the first time in socialist China.
How a society understands the cosmos is one way to measure how advanced it is. There are many unanswered questions in cosmology, but the forefront of the field, at any given time, does stand as the most advanced understanding we human beings have of the universe we live in. Because cosmology was repressed for so long in socialist China, Chinese people have not been able to keep up with advances. Grade schools and high schools, and even universities, for decades got no further in reporting the matter than Immanuel Kant and Pierre-Simon Laplace—only because that is exactly as far as Engels got. As of the late 1970s, after the severe erosion of Chinese education during the Cultural Revolution, many teachers and students in physics departments in China knew nothing at all about Big Bang cosmology. Popular understanding of the universe fell even to the level of fengshui, which taught that “the sky is round and the earth is square.” People had no idea what kind of universe they were living in. This is why some of my colleagues and I decided to write some books for the popular reader in China.
Thoughts about the shape of the world were, in fact, what brought Chinese people their earliest glimmerings that modernization is something that they might need. In the late sixteenth century, when the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci came to China to do missionary work, the Bible that he brought with him didn’t arouse much interest among the Chinese, but the world map that he presented to the Ming emperor—the “Comprehensive Map of the Geography of All Countries”—caused quite a commotion. Until then, the maps of the Ming showed the world as flat, with China in the middle. There were some labels for barbarian tribes and alien regions around the edges, but no place was nearly the size of China. No words indicating Atlantic Ocean or North and South America were even on the map.
Ricci’s map was shocking in China not only because China was not in the center (Ricci said the world didn’t even have a center) but because the celestial empire was only a small piece of the whole. The world had other parts, and they were huge! A small group of Chinese intellectuals resolved right then to pursue this new learning, and their efforts, as I see it, were the first sprouts of Chinese modernization.
In May 1987, during a visit to Rome, I went to the Vatican Library to take a look at that “Comprehensive Map of the Geography of All Countries.” (What they had on display was a replica, of course.) The map is very rudimentary. A lot of the distances are way out of proportion. Australia barely shows. Still, in its day it had been far enough ahead of Ming maps to make Chinese people want to go and hide. I felt a sudden respect for those late-Ming intellectuals who reacted not in petulant rage but by reaching out to embrace new learning. China’s first book on astronomical telescopes, On Telescopy, was published in their day, only fifteen years after Galileo built the world’s first example of the device. You can see how quickly they were willing to learn.
If we draw a parallel between mapping the world and mapping the universe, cosmology in China in the late 1970s was not even up to the level of Ricci’s rudimentary map. Ricci’s understanding of the world was far, far ahead of Kant’s and Laplace’s understanding of the universe. Now consider this: Kant and Laplace weren’t even Chinese, so why were Chinese people feeling ashamed to admit that the Kant-Laplace map of the universe was out of date? But they did feel that shame. Truth can be stranger than fiction.
In July 1977, Beijing hosted the first conference on natural dialectics to be held after the Cultural Revolution. University teachers of courses on Marxism and related topics came from all around the country to attend these annual events. The title of the conference that year, “Dialectics of Nature,” was the same as it had been in the immediately preceding years when the “great denunciations” were in high gear. But the content of the conference this time was very different. What the organizers were trying to do now resembled Matteo Ricci presenting his map: they wanted to introduce the teachers of Marxism to what had actually been going on in various fields of learning during the years when China was bottled up. The conference was held at the Party School in Beijing, which was, by odd coincidence, on the very site where Matteo Ricci was buried after he died in Beijing.
The organizers asked me to be the main speaker for the field of modern cosmology. More than a thousand people filled the auditorium of the Party School to hear me. This was the first time I had ever needed to explain cosmology to people who lacked basic knowledge of physics, so I put a lot of care into planning the lecture. But I was still afraid that people would not have patience to keep listening, especially because the weather was hot. After an hour and a half of lecturing, there was a fifteen-minute break.
The break made it clear that people had not been bored. The official who was chairing the session passed me a big handful of notes that audience members had sent up to the dais. “Never mind these,” he said softly as he handed them to me. “Just keep going; say what needs to be said.” I unfolded the notes and took a look. They said things like:
May I ask the speaker if his intention is to deny Engels?
Do you or don’t you believe in Marx’s theory of an unlimited universe? Please answer!
Mr. Chairman, why do you invite speakers full of counterrevolutionary ideas like this? I hope the organizers will reconsider.
I was elated. Here was pay dirt! Modern cosmology was striking a blow at the hard core of contemporary ignorance. So when the fifteen minutes were up, I did as the chair suggested and just kept going. I had not originally planned to say much about the tiresome topic of ideology; time was limited, and there were several facets of the cosmology field that still needed explanation. But because of this new inspiration from the audience, I saved a few minutes to address ideology explicitly, and I raised the volume of my voice a bit to do it.
“Engels’s concept of the universe, in my view, is out of date.”
This was the first time I had challenged classical Marxism in public. When the lecture was over, an excited crowd besieged me for quite some time. My challenge had struck a chord.
I gave similar lectures in other places—Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Nanning, Guiyang, Kunming, Anqing, Urumqi, and elsewhere—and got virtually the same responses: the same indignant notes and the same after-lecture crowds. I noticed that, as a rule, the more backward the place, the stronger the opposition. In 1984, at Nanchong Normal College in Sichuan, a student in the physics department stood up after listening for a few minutes and announced, placidly confident in his correctness, “This stuff is all counterrevolutionary.”
It made me sigh. This was the fruit of thirty years of socialist education? What can one say? Perhaps only that the sealing off of China under the Mao dynasty was little different from its sealing off for two centuries under the Ming. In one case the blind faith had been that “we are the great heavenly dynasty of the Ming” and in the other it had been that “we are the gre
at center of world revolution.” Indeed, the Mao dynasty was the more benighted of the two; the Ming had that little group of open-minded intellectuals on its historical record, the Mao not even that. Prolonged cultural starvation had desiccated people’s minds so severely that they were simply incapable of absorbing new things. Hallucinatory megalomania had inserted an impervious membrane between people and things that arrived from the outside; the society could feed only on its own offal, recycling it internally.
I concluded that the main problem facing modernization in the late 1970s was not that people were ignorant but that they did not even know that they were ignorant. Without public acknowledgment that Marxism was out of date, to imagine the modernization of science in China was folly.
I reflected that my fate in this society had little to do with the logic of surface appearances. In 1958, when I was in Zanhuang laboring hard and studying Marx in order to reform myself, my political status plummeted. I was expelled from the Party and became a pariah. Two decades later, as I went around the country lecturing on the theme that Marxism is out of date, my status actually got better and better and I was invited back into the Party. This showed that “belief in Marxism,” as the authorities understood it, was nothing but a pretty banner. You could parade it to the left, then parade it to the right—all on whim. I had been slow to grasp this fact.
In 1977 the parade was heading to the right. Word was spreading that Party Central was preparing to exonerate victims of the various political campaigns of the Mao era. My political trajectory continued upward, in tandem with the increase in the rumors. It was as if I had “bounced” off the bottom. In March 1978, I was invited to attend a huge National Science Convention in Beijing. This was the sign that my pariah status had been lifted and I was once again a member of “the people”—meaning politically acceptable people. The convention was held in the Great Hall of the People, into which only “people” were ever invited. That great structure, facing Tiananmen with its Greek columns, had been built in 1959, the year after I was expelled from the Party, and it had taken nearly twenty years for me to enter it for the first time. It really was true, as some said, that there were essentially two castes in China, the people and the non-people.
In the spring of 1978, the authorities organized a big campaign to push the idea that “practice is the criterion for determining truth.” There were big meetings, little meetings, newspaper and magazine articles, and more. It was quite a scene. They invited me to join and I agreed. For a physicist, this modest sentence was like confirming that, yes, ABC is ABC. The true significance of the authorities’ invitation to me was not that my expertise could confirm their idea. That much was obvious. The significance lay in the political facts: that I had been invited at all, that I could have a platform from which to speak, that my words could be printed in the newspaper, and that my name could appear in number 5 size print. Each of these was a mark of rising political status. By the summer, my bounce from the bottom went high enough that my name could appear in number 3 size print (a size used in small headlines)—but this was permitted only in provincial newspapers, not central ones.
The university promotion system, which had been sidelined for two decades, was restored in 1978. In September I was promoted to full professor. The promotions were based on evaluations by colleagues, but the authorities wanted it clear that the policy change was their doing. Deng Xiaoping said several times in those days that “I want to be the Minister of Logistics for the intellectuals.”
In the fall of 1978, Hu Yaobang (whose death would spark the Tiananmen protests a decade later) took over the Organization Department at Party Central and began the process of formally exonerating 1957 “rightist elements.” He oversaw the drafting of Central Document No. 55 of 1978, which provided that Communist Party members who had been stripped of membership because of “rightist speech” should have it restored. The guidelines included me. The contents of Document No. 55 leaked in advance and spread widely among intellectuals. But as I saw it coming, it presented a dilemma. My Party status would likely be restored, but I had given up, long ago, on the idea that the Communist Party of China represented the progressive forces in society. I now saw it as a symbol of backwardness. My faith in Marxism was gone as well. So should I accept an automatic restoration of Party status or not?
In early October I went to Guilin, the small city in southwest China famed for “the loveliest landscapes under heaven,” to attend a conference on “The History of Microphysical Thought.” Most of the papers were on philosophy of physics, an area in which I was not especially interested, but I went anyway, in part because the organizer, my old friend Hou Depeng, urged that this was a good chance to come see the famous scenery. Guilin was not at its best during my visit, though. Its stunning beauty depends on the graceful Li River that snakes through its mountains, but the river during our visit was almost dry, and the barren riverbed robbed the mountains of their charm. We could still visit the famed Dissolving Cavern and Reed-flute Crag, but these held no attraction for me. My time at the Xiesan mine had given me more than I needed of tunneling into caves. No hole, on either flat land or a mountainside, appealed to me in the least; it only brought back bad memories. I left the conference before it ended.
During the three days I was there, the hottest topic of conversation—hotter than any of the conference papers—was Document 55. There were quite a few rightists and “rightists who slipped through the net” at the conference. Everyone was exchanging stories and speculating on what Document 55 might do. The three rightists at the meeting whom I knew best were Hou Depeng, Xu Liangying, and Fan Dainian. They, like me, had joined the Communist movement early, and I wondered whether they felt the same dilemma I did.
Hou Depeng was labeled a rightist while working at the Central Propaganda Department in 1957 and was then “sent down” to work in Guangxi. His experience during the Cultural Revolution paralleled mine. In 1970, political fighting in Guangxi had reached such a pitch that bodies of people beaten to death were simply tossed into the river. Even live people were sometimes tossed in, tied in gunny sacks. More than a thousand corpses floated downstream all the way to Hong Kong. When British authorities in Hong Kong complained to Beijing about this, Beijing ordered officials in Guangxi to pull corpses out of the river. Hou was a member of the brigade assigned to that work. After the Cultural Revolution, he taught quantum mechanics at Guangxi University. Now, he said, he was ready to accept reentry into the Party with no conditions, if that was what Document 55 was going to offer him.
Xu Liangying, in the 1940s, had been a teaching assistant in physics at Zhejiang University, where he headed the Communist Party’s underground campus organization and organized several student movements. After 1949 he did research at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences. He was fired from that job in 1957 because of his rightist “hat” and returned to Zhejiang, where—like me, briefly—he became a farmer. But while working the soil he also collected and translated everything that he could find by Albert Einstein—papers, lectures, letters, records of conversations—and in the end had amassed 410 items that, in translation, totaled 1.3 million Chinese characters. Between 1974 and 1979 he published the collection, in three volumes, as The Works of Albert Einstein. It was the world’s tenth collection of Einstein’s work.
I met Xu in 1974, when he came to ask my help in translating an astronomical term that appeared in an Einstein text. After that we became good friends. In 1978 he was reassigned to his post at the Academy of Sciences, where he planned and organized the Academy’s new Institute for the History of Natural Sciences. Although he had begun as a very orthodox Marxist, from the time I knew Xu he was always a fiercer critic of the Communist Party than I was. His stance toward Document 55 was that he would accept restoration of Party membership, but “My purpose in going back to the Party will be to change the Party.”
Fan Dainian had been a colleague of Xu Liangying at the Institute of Philosophy and had been declared a right
ist at the same time as Xu. Fan, too, was sent next to farming. After that he worked briefly in the library at USTC, then went back to the Academy of Sciences, where, in 1978, he helped to organize the Institute of Management Sciences. He, too, was ready to reenter the Party with Document 55. His reasoning was that if you want to get anything done these days, you have to begin inside the Party.
After I left Guilin I pretty much decided to join these friends in accepting reentry into the Party in order to work inside it to change it. Four months later I received the formal document that restored my membership. Here is the full text:
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Decision on the Correction of the Expulsion from the Party of Comrade Fang Lizhi
Fang Lizhi, male, 42 years of age. Original family status: staff. Personal status: student.
Entered the Party in June 1956 while studying at Peking University, in 1956 came to our institute to work, served as a research intern, was a member of the branch committee inside the Party, on 18 October 1958 because of Rightist speech during the times of rectification and opposing the Right was designated by the Party committee of the Academy of Sciences organization for expulsion from the Party, now teaches at the University of Science and Technology of China.
In accordance with the spirit of the central dissemination of Document 55 (1978) of Party Central, the question of Comrade Fang Lizhi’s expulsion from the Party for Rightist speech has been reviewed. During the rectification of 1957, Comrade Fang Lizhi was able to participate in the movement actively, and in an outline for “A Letter to Party Central” offered his own opinions on the direction and policies of the Party and the government and related questions; this accords with the organizational principles of provisions of the Party Charter. Most of the opinions in the outline are correct, even though some of the opinions, classifiable as cognitive problems, not Rightist speech, are inappropriate in places. Therefore his expulsion from the Party was not right, and it is decided to do a correction, to rescind the original punishment, to restore his political reputation, and to restore his Party status.