by Fang Lizhi
Humanity has always sought to transcend. Right now China was facing another such effort, calling it “reform.”
15. IN THE TIDES OF REFORM
At the beginning of the 1980s, reform was the most fashionable word in China. The first thing I did after I got back from Pakistan in July 1980 was to attend a conference on how USTC was going to do reform. But even though everybody was talking about reform, and even though it seemed to touch everywhere, no one could say exactly what it meant. Deng Xiaoping himself, the “initiator” of reform, could speak only of “crossing the river by feeling the stones.” Crossing what river? To reach where? He didn’t say.
For me, a major concern was to get rid of the “forbidden zones” of the Mao era, and in the early days of reform a lot of progress was being made on that score. In August 1980, for example, cosmology suddenly was no longer a forbidden zone: there was to be a First National Conference on Cosmology. Our research group at USTC was assigned to run the conference, and it was radically different from the one we had run just four years earlier. We didn’t have to hold it at a training base for the Viet Cong. We held it in the Lu Mountains in Jiangxi, a place famed for its beauty. A great banner draped in the lobby of the elegant Lulin Hotel read CONFERENCE ON COSMOLOGY.
When school opened in September, USTC instituted a system of elections for positions at the lowest levels of authority. It was largely a symbolic move, but still it was progress. I was elected to head the university’s Interdepartmental Program in Physics. The program was responsible for all physics courses—in general physics, theoretical physics, and physics laboratory—for all majors on campus. More than a hundred staff were involved.
USTC began sending a large number of physics students overseas. Professor Tsung-Dao Lee of Columbia University had set up something called the China-U.S. Physics Examination and Application (CUSPEA), which was a program that let Chinese undergraduates apply for Ph.D. programs in physics at American and Canadian universities by taking an examination in China. I was on the CUSPEA selection committee, and in October we held a meeting at which we chose 102 students from across China for the first group.
In November I went to Beijing and spoke at a conference on the philosophy of science. I criticized Lenin again, for his abuse of Ernst Mach and others, and this time there were no ripples. No one handed in notes saying “Stop the counterrevolutionary talk!”
Everything went smoothly until December, when I ran afoul of a “forbidden zone” that was still in place. A national conference called “Study of Science, Study of Human Talent, and Study of the Future” (abbreviated “The Three Studies”) was scheduled for Hefei. About four hundred people had registered, but I had not. I was teaching electromagnetism six hours a week and didn’t have much time for outside activities. The chair of the conference came to me, though, entreating me to give a talk in the section of the conference called “Study of the Future.” “It’s all right if you haven’t actually studied the future,” he said. “Everybody is at least entitled to a view of the future.” He had a point, I had to admit.
So on the morning of December 7, 1980, I went to the Three Studies conference to give a talk. I offered a view as plain as day. I said science had progressed into an era that was radically different from what had gone before; China’s future could not possibly stay cooped up in the Marxist era. I ended with this:
The three fundamental elements in Marxism—philosophy, political economy, and scientific socialism—are all out of date. Humankind has passed through a number of stages of civilization, and Marxism can be viewed as one of them. The passing of an historical stage may not be a bad thing, because humanity passes into a new future only by shedding old ways of thinking.
In the midst of reform, I thought, who would still believe that nineteenth-century Marxism was the cutting edge? Today’s world was living proof that some of the theses in Marxism were simply wrong.
I did not anticipate that my little talk would stimulate something of a replay of what happened in 1955 at the Youth League Conference at Peking University. But it did. I again threw a conference into buzzing confusion. Some people were in favor and some were opposed, but almost no one lacked a vigorous opinion and there was no way the program could proceed as scheduled. By the time the Communist Party Secretary for Anhui, Zhang Jinfu, gave a speech in the afternoon, things had settled down a bit. Zhang did not criticize what I said directly, but commented only that the conference should set aside questions of whether any things are “out of date.” So my ship had run aground again, even if the reef this time was soft.
Then there was a second soft collision. Early in 1981, some students in the USTC mathematics department formed an organization that they called Student Voices. They had no political agenda, at least not at first. They invited me to give a talk and I agreed. But then, after the posters went up, the Party Secretary at USTC paid me a special visit. He urged me not to go. He couldn’t come up with any good reasons, though, so I went.
At the talk I presented a principle that I knew students of mathematics in particular would appreciate. To say that reform can proceed only within fixed bounds amounts to saying that reform cannot take place. This is because there is a theorem in mathematics that says that when the boundary conditions of a domain are specified, solutions within the domain exist and are unique. Not long thereafter, as if to confirm the theorem of unique solutions within bounded domains, Student Voices was forced to close—not because of my talk, as it turned out, but because the central authorities had sent a strongly worded internal memorandum to universities nationwide instructing that they find ways to shut down all autonomous student organizations. In December 1979, Deng Xiaoping had ordered the closing of Beijing’s “Democracy Wall,” where essays and poems calling for freedom and human rights had been appearing since the fall of 1978. After Deng’s order, no independent student groups of any kind were tolerated.
Right from the beginning of reform, a fissure had separated science students from the regime. The students were expecting that there be no limits on scientific inquiry, while the regime was prepared to allow “reform” only inside a birdcage. In the heady initial days of reform, everybody was too excited to notice the fissure. But as it widened, one couldn’t miss it.
In March 1981, I was elected as an academician in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. There were about four hundred academicians; it was the highest honor a scientist in China could receive. The selection process, when it began in 1956, was modeled on the way other countries choose their honorees. It was supposed to be free from politics, and the scientists had certainly seen it that way. But elections to the academy were halted in 1957 by the politics of the Anti-Rightist Movement, and then, as the status of intellectuals fell, some members who had already been elected were expelled. During the Cultural Revolution the entire institution was suspended. It was revived in 1980, but it was still not independent of politics. The president of the academy was a Party official, not a scholar.
So, although I had received the votes to be a member, the authorities could still block me on political grounds, and some of my friends were worried that this would happen. The authorities had not been pleased with my talks at the Three Studies conference and at Student Voices.
The worries did not pan out, but that was not because the authorities had forgotten about my two talks. On April 29, the Communist Party Second Secretary for Anhui Province, Gu Zhuoxin, invited me for a “chat.” The president of the Party School of Anhui Province was there, too. Their topic was the Three Studies conference. I was ready for them to criticize my “anti-Marxist” speech, but after they invited me to recapitulate my views, and after I did so, I sat waiting for them to hold forth and they hardly said anything. The meeting just ended. The point of the session was to show the regime’s “concern” for me.
A second expression of concern came on May 12 at a meeting of academicians in Beijing. Fang Yi, a member of the Communist Party Politburo, a vice premier of the State Council, and the highes
t government official in charge of science, wanted to talk with me. Our exchange lasted more than an hour, and at no point did Fang Yi say that any of my views were incorrect. He said only that “some things, although not wrong, must not be said too casually.” Then, just as abruptly as the last “chat,” this one ended.
It was pretty clear that the regime’s objective was to mollify and co-opt me. These high officials, while cautioning me to watch my words in public, were at the same time conceding in private that my views were not wrong. When they advised me to “be careful how you put things, rightness or wrongness aside,” the message was that if I mastered this skill of how to put things, I could have a future in the system. Success as an official in China requires one to make words “fit”—whether or not they make sense.
The problem was that I had no desire to be an official. I had already said as much in a letter I wrote to Li Shuxian from Cambridge in March 1980:
My hope from here on out is not to be an official but to work to strengthen science in China. In the system that we have, an official, even a science official, has to ride in the flow of some very foul water, and has to sacrifice one’s independence. If I stand outside, on the other hand, I can be useful as a gadfly. One reason I’ve been able to do some good in recent years, and have gained the support of others, is that I have dared to let loose with my criticisms. If Chinese society is going to move ahead, somebody has to do this. And I personally feel much more free in this role.
It was true. Somebody did have to do it. Neither science nor China could progress without independent voices. I wanted to explore this freedom more.
Much of my energy in those days—outside of normal teaching and research—was spent in strengthening the ways in which my colleagues and I stayed in touch with people in our fields around the world. This activity was essential to “reform,” in my view, and is reflected in my travel log:
June 12 to July 3, 1981, to Islamabad.
September 23 to October 7, 1981, to Trieste.
November 3, 1981, to Japan for half a year.
The visit to Islamabad was to attend a “Third World Symposium on Physics,” to which the Chinese Academy of Sciences sent a ten-person delegation that included me. The trip to Trieste was to plan for the Third Marcel Grossmann Meeting, which was to be held in China the following year. (Grossmann was a pioneer in relativity theory and a onetime tutor to Einstein.) The meeting in China in 1982 was to be my responsibility.
My stay in Japan was as a visiting professor at the Research Institute for Fundamental Physics at Kyoto University. This institute had been founded by Yukawa Hideki, the first Japanese physicist to win a Nobel Prize. Yukawa loved classical Chinese literature. His calligraphy graced the walls of the institute’s seminar room, and one of the pieces was the famous dialogue in Zhuangzi about the happiness of fish.1 My host, Professor Sato Fumitaka, told me that this was one of Yukawa’s favorite pieces of Chinese philosophy.
During my stay at Kyoto I lived in the university’s guesthouse called Kitashirakawa, which was close to campus and very convenient. I didn’t know Japanese, but Chinese characters were everywhere. I felt I could guess about 50 or 60 percent of what was meant, so I didn’t have that completely alien feeling that I had in Europe.
In Japan I had another feeling that I never had in Europe. Everywhere in Japan I saw things that seemed like recapitulations of Chinese culture, and this made me feel, as a Chinese, rather like a cultural or spiritual ancestor. The city of Kyoto was modeled on China’s ancient capital of Chang’an during the eighth century A.D., and its layout today still bears a strong resemblance to that of Xi’an, as Chang’an is now called. The names of some of the city gates in modern Kyoto are the same as those of ancient Chang’an. When Japanese friends took me to visit their shrines, our roles were sometimes reversed, with me doing the explaining to them, because the auspicious phrases were in classical Chinese. When we went to watch classical Japanese drama together, my Japanese friends had to rely on Japanese subtitles whereas I could read directly from the original Chinese phrases that were projected. These were usually poems in the traditional pattern of five syllables per line—not very well done, actually, but they did rhyme. One read:
I grab the tail of a green snake
A few inches below its big blue head.
There must be something weird in me;
Stiff things I love, supple things I dread.
In a letter to a friend five days after I arrived in Japan, I wrote that “back when the Japanese were importing all kinds of things from China, they must have assumed that ‘anything originating from the Great Tang must be good.’” Even today, for example, Japanese shops have Chinese names like “Great Immortal,” “Kingly General,” and “Pleasures of the Mystical Way.” These names are auspicious. But others are not. I also saw “Mountain Thieves,” “Southern Barbarians,” and even “Dwarf Pirates.” The latter was especially odd, because in recent times Chinese have used it to denigrate Japanese. To see shop names like these written seriously, in neat characters and hung at roadsides, made me unsure whether to laugh or cry—or perhaps to feel guilty that Japanese people might have held the Great Tang in such high regard that they copied literally everything they could from it, including verbal abuse of themselves.
That spirit of copying might seem laughable, but it probably deserves some respect. The Chinese, in borrowing from the West, have favored the motto “Capture the cream and toss out the dregs,” and compared to that, the Japanese might seem insufficiently discriminating. But the Chinese approach, I’m afraid, has gone too far the other way. We have been excessively choosy.
The longer I stayed in Japan the more I became aware of the civilization’s ability to borrow. My boyhood experiences during wartime had left me with a deep wariness about Japan. Although I treated my individual Japanese friends exactly as I did other friends, when I thought of Japan as a whole, a vague grudge was still lodged in my mind. Now I felt a need to try to complicate that impression in certain ways. Japan’s prosperity was no accident; it was a major success of the Japanese people. Their ability to absorb foreign culture was far better than China’s. If “reform” was going to succeed in China, there would need to be a similar spirit of “opening all doors.”
On December 26, 1981, I sailed to Okinawa for a vacation. I rode a 7,500-ton steamship that left from Osaka. It was the holiday season, and the only tickets available were for space in a large open cabin for fifty people. The cabin floor was covered in Japanese tatami and was very clean, but the crowding was severe. Some people even slept in the corridors. It reminded me of year-end crowds in China, but not as noisy.
We sailed forty-one hours past Cape Toi and Cape Sata on Kyushu Island, then went past Yaku Island, Amami Island, and some others, with the Pacific Ocean to the east and the East China Sea to the west. This was not far from the route that the Chinese Buddhist monk Jianzhen took when he crossed to Japan during the eighth century. China has no popular novel like Journey to the West to tell about Jianzhen’s travels, so he is not as well known as Xuanzang, but I did notice this comparison: in the Japanese city of Nara, the Tōshōdai-ji temple, where Jianzhen explained Buddhist texts, is very well preserved and very famous; by contrast, the Xingjiaosi Temple in Xi’an, where Xuanzang translated Buddhist texts, is dilapidated beyond recognition. Very few people in China even know that this famous temple still exists.
Our ship docked at Naha, Okinawa, early in the morning of December 28. The next day I took a tour that covered the whole island. When we got on the bus, our tour guide, speaking English, asked each of us to say what country we were from. When it came to me I said, “China.”
“Yes, Taiwan,” she said, in a friendly effort to show that she knew what I meant by “China.”
“No, Beijing,” I said.
She looked startled. As in Sicily, I must have been the first specimen of my kind to arrive in quite some time. On one point, though, Okinawa was very different from Sicily: many ancestors of the Ryuk
yu islanders, including Okinawans, had come from China. Our tour guide pointed to a number of ways in which Chinese culture had affected Ryukyu civilization, and said that the early Japanese pirates in the area had actually regarded the Chinese as their overlords. We visited Shuri, the capital of the Ryukyu Kingdom from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and saw the Chinese-style arch at the city gate. Its inscription—THE GATE OF OBSERVING ETIQUETTE—was written in the style of the famous Tang calligrapher Yan Zhenqing (A.D. 709–785). Another example was that in Japan, roof tiles are flat, but in Okinawa they had interlocking notches like the ones used in China. On our tour, we visited a pineapple farm and its attached sugar factory, where the hosts explained to us that their methods of producing sugar from pineapple originated with thirty-six families of early Chinese immigrants. When the owner of the hotel where I stayed learned that I was from China he became extremely friendly; he said his own ancestors had come from the Chinese mainland—but he couldn’t say exactly how many generations ago that was. He and his family said they liked the sound of my spoken Chinese, even though they couldn’t understand it. They seemed to like it only because it was the language of their forebears.
Chinese people like to call themselves other people’s ancestors. As soon as children learn to write, they like to scribble on walls that “so-and-so is my grandson”—as if being a grandfather were somehow a great thing. Now, on the Ryukyus, when I found myself everybody’s “ancestor,” it suddenly was plain to me that being an ancestor was nothing to be especially proud of. It is true, of course, that ancestors lead the way chronologically; but in almost all other ways, it is usually descendants who are more advanced. Okinawa was a barren island in the days of the ancestors—but now the descendants had prospered and were much further along. Chinese also believe that the achievements of descendants show how wonderful the ancestors were. But that can’t be, either. To say that every good thing today is the result of merit in earlier times is to overlook that the entire universe rose from nothing to be something. The innovations of humankind, generation by generation, seem to follow the same principle—each generation creates something that did not exist before.