The Most Wanted Man in China

by Fang Lizhi

  It was an invitation I found hard to refuse, so one day in early April I went to Pisa with him and his crew to record those words on tape. It made for an incongruous scene. I would forgive Italian television viewers, for whom the Leaning Tower is a national treasure, if they found something a bit absurd about a Chinese guy standing in front of their tower pronouncing strange sounds about the movement of boats. It may have been the very bizarreness that left deep impressions on people. Later, when I visited the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, some of the secretaries recognized me right away. “Here comes the TV-star professor,” they said.

  My few seconds of electronic stardom showed Italian viewers that sprouts of thinking that resemble relativity theory had appeared in China even earlier than in Italy, but I never felt any nationalistic pride about that fact. Galileo’s thinking, as a whole, was the true progenitor of modern physics; it unleashed an unstoppable scientific tide. That early burst of brilliance in China was like a meteor: one flash and it was gone.

  Why did modern science not emerge in Chinese civilization? Historians have offered various answers to this question, but for me, as a physicist, it does not seem very hard to understand. There is no way that isolated, authoritarian societies can advance very far in science. Science needs free exchange. Einstein said that “everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.”

  The International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) at Trieste illustrates this point. It began as a United Nations project, and its founding director, Professor Abdus Salam, told me that his main reason for starting it was to help physicists from Third World countries move out of their isolation and into an environment of free research. The People’s Republic of China had been a member of the United Nations since 1972, but its government had not allowed Chinese physicists to work at the ICTP, or even to visit it. In 1979, things loosened. I was the first Chinese physicist to visit the ICTP, and I was able to help more to come by serving on the ICTP’s International Scholarship Committee. I did what I could to get as many Chinese physicists as possible to the ICTP, to enjoy the right to “work in freedom.” It was just what they needed. In the years before the Tiananmen events of 1989, the number of Chinese who went to the Center reached as high as two hundred per year, and many of them did so on my personal recommendation. I feel far, far prouder of this accomplishment than of my television appearance on behalf of The Book of Documents.

  I spent a somewhat longer time in England—fully a half year, from October 1979 to April 1980, except for a visit to Ireland for Christmas. Most of my time was spent at Cambridge, where I was a visiting senior researcher at the Institute of Astronomy. Professor Martin Rees was director. My life in Cambridge was far more quiet, routine, and unvarying than it had been in Italy. Every morning about nine o’clock I rode my bicycle to the Institute of Astronomy and worked till noon, when I ate lunch at the dining hall of the Cavendish Laboratory. Then I went back to work, later took afternoon tea, then resumed work again until about seven, when I went back to my apartment. I lived on Cranmer Road, in a quiet, elegant area not far from the famous strip of green called The Backs on the west side of the River Cam. Since King’s College was my official host, I sometimes went to dinner at the dining hall there, but other times I just went back to my apartment and made noodles. If nightly noodles was monotonous—well, all right, I thought. Monotony seemed normal in England.

  There was social life, but not much. At King’s College the social life was in the dining room, but the formal dinners were too solemn—especially for the members, like me, who sat at “high table” wearing gowns. People who sat there had to observe decorum, and that meant keeping chatter and laughter within bounds.

  There was a small community of Chinese at Cambridge who had been there for many years, but most of them were from Hong Kong or Singapore, and I didn’t have much contact with them at first. In February, four months into my stay, their “Chinese Society” invited me to give a talk on astronomy in ancient China, and after that I got to know them a bit better. Only a few mainland Chinese were in Cambridge at the time; the one I knew best was Zhu Cisheng, from the astronomy department at Nanjing University, and I occasionally went to his place to chat.

  I did not go to church on Sundays. I did go once, at the beginning of Advent, to join in the singing of hymns at the King’s College chapel, and I attended an Easter service at St. Matthew’s Church. I was struck on these occasions by the similarity in form to some of the inner-Party activities of the Communist Party of China.

  My daily life was nothing special. Outside my windows I saw what one often sees in England: lawns, groves of trees, meadows, horses, cows, squirrels. So I have no amusing anecdotes to pass along; everything just unfolded on track. But this only proves the wisdom of the saying “No news is good news,” because those six months at Cambridge were extremely productive in my research. My conclusion was that the placidity and regularity of Cambridge life are forces that both oblige and induce a scholar to make progress.

  At one point a student of mine, Wu Zhongchao, arrived to do a degree in theoretical physics and applied mathematics. He used to come looking for me on Sundays, and we went for strolls. We would walk northward along the river until it was almost dark, then turn back. I occasionally went bike-hiking with friends as well, either to a botanical garden near to the Mullard Observatory (the place where pulsars were discovered) or to a cemetery for American soldiers who were killed in action during World War II. The latter had been a U.S. Air Force base during the war, and now it had a wonderful lawn. The roads around Cambridge were (just as Professor Qian Linzhao had told us in 1969) indeed hilly, and one had to be careful. I was reminded of the professor’s unfinished story about the runaway bicycle.

  Cambridge has a long-standing reputation in the Chinese academic world. The Chinese poet Xu Zhimo wrote a famous essay about it in the 1920s, and Chinese scholars had been visiting the campus even before that. One of my teachers had been here—and indeed, one of his teachers had been. It seemed that each time China opened its doors, another new group of scholars headed to Cambridge, retracing steps that their predecessors had trod. Would the next generation have to do it once again? Just before I left Cambridge I wrote an essay, which was published in May 1980 in the Hong Kong Dagongbao, expressing the hope that the next generation would be spared that fate.

  Some of my experiences left me less than optimistic, though. On December 14, 1979, for example, the Italian Cultural Institute in London, still commemorating Einstein, held a public symposium on relativistic astrophysics. Martin Rees chaired, and Remo Ruffini and I were speakers. The goal was to introduce this difficult but exciting new field to the general public. I arrived at the meeting hall early, having traveled from Cambridge, and found more than a hundred people already there. The organizers had sent invitations to the Chinese and Italian ambassadors in London, and the Italian ambassador, Roberto Ducci, was there. But there was no sign of anyone from the Chinese embassy. Then, just before the event began, the Chinese ambassador, Ke Hua, made his appearance. He greeted the event’s organizers, shook hands with the Italian ambassador, and then rushed off, explaining, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand the subject, so I’m not going to stay to listen.” Two Chinese diplomats—science and technology attachés—did stay.

  After the seminar there was a brief reception at which a group of elderly British ladies surrounded me and peppered me with questions about this or that point in the presentations. They had found some parts puzzling, which is understandable. The jargon alone—black holes, accretion, time freeze—might be enough to spin one’s head. For these ladies, “not completely understanding” was the reason for coming up afterward to learn more. To them, a new frontier was exciting. For our Chinese ambassador, though, the reasoning had gone in the other direction: “not completely understanding” was the reason for not listening.

  My stay at Cambridge ended on April 19, 1980. I went to Lond
on and the next day boarded an airliner that flew over Greenland and Canada and arrived at San Francisco at 3:00 p.m. My schedule in the United States was tight from the moment I arrived. I had originally hoped that it would be relaxed, because there were many places, from the West Coast to the East, that I had wanted to enjoy. But the Chinese Academy of Sciences notified me, rather abruptly, that I was to be in Pakistan by mid-June for the International Nathia Gali Summer College, where lectures by me had already been scheduled. This turned my U.S. stay into a fifty-day barnstorm. My itinerary was San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Houston, Boston, Washington, Charlottesville, Chicago, New York. There was very little leisure. I did a lecture every five days, on average, and that doesn’t count the seminars and colloquia, or the travel time, so hardly any time was left for sightseeing. Still, I took every chance I could to glimpse this expansive New World. Between Los Angeles and Austin, I should, properly speaking, have stopped at the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. But the temptation of the Grand Canyon was too great, so I settled on the following whirlwind tour:

  April 25: at night, boarded a long-distance Greyhound bus in Los Angeles.

  April 26: arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, at 5:00 a.m., Flagstaff at 9:00 a.m., and the Grand Canyon at 11:00 a.m.; looked around, but had no time to descend into the canyon; at 5:00 p.m. reboarded Greyhound for Flagstaff, arriving at 7:00 p.m.; left Flagstaff at 10:30 p.m.

  April 27: arrived at Albuquerque, the largest city in New Mexico, at 5:00 a.m.; after breakfast and a three-hour tour of the cityscape, boarded another Greyhound at 11:30 a.m. and arrived at 7:45 p.m. in Lubbock, Texas; stopped for a hour and half and then reboarded Greyhound.

  April 28: arrived at Dallas at 4:50 a.m.; after breakfast and another quick tour, got back on the bus and arrived at Austin at 12:50 p.m.

  April 29: gave a lecture at the University of Texas on “Phase Transition in the Early Universe.”

  It was one of the most densely packed four-day periods of my life.

  May 24, 1980, is a day I must call “wasted” from one point of view, interesting from another. A friend in New York, whom I will call T, took me to Long Island. We went first to Old Westbury Gardens, a park of landscapes in the European style. Then we went to Old Bethpage Village, a full-scale restoration of life and buildings—tavern, inn, craft shops, and others—from mid-nineteenth-century America. Artisans dressed in the garb of earlier times demonstrated blacksmithing, boot making, broom making, dyeing, and other skills. The tourists were fascinated. A bootmaking demonstration drew a crowd of people who craned their necks to see how the shoe was fitted onto the last, how the leather was cut, and how it was then nailed to the sole. They were enthralled to see these ancient (for America) skills.

  As I watched, an irrepressible resentment of T invaded my mind. Why had he brought me to see this? T was Chinese, but, separated from China for too long, was apparently unaware that these very methods of shoemaking were still in use on the streets of Beijing. Why would I need to fly thousands of miles over the Pacific Ocean to view demonstrations like this? If the tavern at Old Bethpage is a valuable antique, then those shops all across Zanhuang County that hang out their “tavern” signs ought also to be protected as national treasures. In any case I was amused, at least, to note how the value of a thing could vary so much with its context.

  I then reflected that the same is true of words. Words could have different, even opposite, meanings in different ideological contexts. For example, during my travels in the United States, from West Coast to East, I was always meeting American intellectuals who couldn’t understand why Chinese intellectuals deplored the Cultural Revolution. These Americans were not Maoists, or even believers in Communism, but they felt that Cultural Revolution slogans like “Intellectuals Should Serve the Working People” expressed high human ideals. Dubious of what I was telling them, they kept asking me, “What was the Cultural Revolution, after all?” and “What were you doing at the time?” I felt that there was no alternative but to go to the root of the matter and try to explain how the same words could have very different meanings. This might be the only way these curious Americans could see what those slogans, built of words, actually meant in China. It was a considerable challenge, though, because the distortions were so many and so systematic. I started here:

  The People’s Government = authoritarian rule

  liberated people = debased subjects

  Cultural Revolution = destruction of culture

  scientific worldview = dictatorship over science

  intellectuals serving the working people = distribution of labor assignments to intellectuals

  These truisms were things that good-hearted, naive Americans like those tourists at Old Bethpage Village found inordinately hard to understand. It occurred to me that the only way to get them really to understand would be to go to Long Island and build an Old Bethpage Village of the Cultural Revolution that featured living reenactments of typical scenes (short of the suicide scenes, of course) and let them crane their necks for a while.

  Before I had seen nearly enough of America, I had to rush to Pakistan, the next stop on my journey. I arrived in Rawalpindi on June 14 and headed immediately to Nathia Gali, a cool, elegant summer resort in the northwestern part of the country. The summer program on physics began on June 15. I was not late, and I gave my lectures as scheduled.

  On June 22, during the first weekend break, I went with two colleagues, one Italian and one American, to look for the ruins of a Buddhist temple that lay between the towns of Butkara and Malam Jabba, not too far away. It was said that the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who traveled to India in the seventh century A.D. in search of the true Buddhist scriptures, had once been in charge of this temple. The trip required us to descend from the cool hills, and the weather was torrid that day. Even before noon the temperature reached 113 degrees Fahrenheit. At one point we had to walk, under a fireball of a sun, and without umbrellas, along a dirt road lined by very few trees. There was no breeze, and the heat was so intense that it was almost hard to breathe.

  The area was the Indus River Valley, where the mighty mountains of the Karakoram range rise to the west and the Hindu Kush stands to the east. On his way to India, Xuanzang had crossed the Karakoram and followed the Indus down to the Indian subcontinent. On his way back to China, he stopped temporarily at this local temple to wait for summer to arrive, because only then could the snowy ridges of the Karakoram be challenged. By that time the name Xuanzang was so famous that the local monks decided to honor him with the status of temporary temple chief.

  Let me explain what helped me to press on, despite the heat, in search of those ruins. I imagined that the place might be the country of so-and-so as described in Journey to the West, the charming Ming novel about Xuanzang’s journeys; an image floated before my mind of the four intrepid pilgrims in the novel, the monk and his three assistants, Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, and Sha Wujing, traipsing through 113-degree heat, and I felt that our little troupe of twentieth-century physicists were somehow their confreres in torture.

  The image that floated to the mind of my Italian friend was quite different. In the day when all roads led to Rome, this same area was where the Roman empire abutted the Chinese empire of Han. If that were not enough attraction, the Oxus valley, slightly to the north, was where Marco Polo had crossed the Pamir plateau on his way to China in the thirteenth century.

  Our American friend was probably the one who suffered the most that day. He, too, had to take the 113-degree heat, but he could not enjoy the compensation of these rich historical associations. For him, the seventh century probably seemed somewhere back there not far from the Big Bang.

  We found the ruins about 11:30 a.m. The temple structure was entirely gone. All we could see were the foundation and a few stone carvings. This was in a Muslim area, but the people guarded this Buddhist site with the strictest of care and had nothing but praise for Xuanzang. My Italian friend noticed that the broken stone carvings had an unm
istakable Greek flavor. In particular there were carvings of the body of Buddha that bore a striking resemblance to ancient Greek and Roman statues of the naked human body. Sculpture of this kind apparently did not come back to China with Xuanzang—or, if it did, it must not have been accepted in Chinese society. But historians have confirmed that China did accept many other things that Xuanzang brought back.

  For example, the temple ruins were surrounded by rice paddy, and I noticed some Pakistani farmers heaping rice stalks into piles. From my farming days in China I knew this activity well, and I noticed that the forks the farmers were using were exactly the same three-pronged kind that Chinese farmers use—and that they apparently were prototypes of the nine-toothed rake that Zhu Bajie used as a weapon in Journey to the West. The way the farmers piled the stalks was also exactly the same. I couldn’t help wondering whether Xuanzang’s transmission of culture included some agriculture.

  When our visit was over we took a car northward along the valley of the Swat River and, as dusk fell, reached the foothills of the glorious snowy peaks of the Kalam range, where we spent the night. We got up early the next morning to hike. By the time we reached a point about three hundred feet below the snow line, I felt utterly exhausted. I lay on my back, gazed at the sky, and fell into a reverie. The vault of heaven was tranquil; wisps of white cloud floated silently by; the towering peaks of the Hindu Kush, capped with snow, rose against the deep azure sky.

  My thoughts returned to Xuanzang and his three disciples. Unfortunately the novel Journey to the West doesn’t tell us what happened after he had gathered his sacred texts. How did he manage to lug hundreds of them over those snowcapped mountains and get them back to China? Anyway, when he did get back, he refused the high posts that the emperor of the Tang Dynasty offered to him and devoted himself instead to translating his precious trove. This was the right decision. What China needed was not tribute offerings of rare Sanskrit texts to its emperor. What China needed was a way, as the Buddhists say, for all sentient beings to transcend to a spiritual plane.