by Fang Lizhi
On the last day of 1981, I flew from Okinawa to Nagasaki, where I spent New Year’s Eve. In the days when ocean travel was done in sailing ships, the Chinese merchants who traveled back and forth between China and Nagasaki, the Japanese port closest to China, were obliged by the wind patterns to spend the turn of the year there. They crossed to Japan during the six months when the winds blew eastward and returned during the six months when the winds blew the other way. Several Chinese native-place guild halls still stood in Nagasaki. The Worship Blessings Temple was the hall for Fuzhou people, and the Rising Blessings Temple was for people from the Yangzi delta. Sage Blessings Temple, Flowers and Moon, and Roofs for Tang People were other places where Chinese had gathered. I could picture the bustle of those bygone days. But now the buildings stood deserted. No one honored their past and few tourists noticed. They were ghosts of forgotten times.
I stayed in Japan until April, then passed through Taiwan and Hong Kong on my way home. I spent three weeks at the University of Hong Kong. After that I threw myself full time into preparations for the Third Marcel Grossmann Meeting.
The Grossmann Meetings, which are devoted to topics in general relativity and relativistic astrophysics, occur every three years. By international standards their size is nothing special. About three hundred people attend, which makes them about midsize. But this was the first time an international meeting on physics of anywhere near that size was going to take place in China.
Shanghai had been designated to be the site. Forty years earlier, Shanghai was the largest city in East Asia, grander than Nagasaki or even Tokyo. But now, after forty years of separation from the world, we couldn’t find a hotel anywhere in Shanghai that had any experience with international academic conferences. We finally settled on the Jinjiang Hotel. It was Shanghai’s best—the place where foreign leaders stayed. But the Jinjiang people were clueless about the needs of an academic conference. There was, for example, no overhead projector anywhere in the hotel.
The meeting was scheduled for the end of August, and I began to work full time on it in mid-June. Officially I was only the “academic” organizer, but in fact I had to handle meals, lodging, and much else. China was still locked into a central planning system. The authorities stipulated that hosts of all foreign visitors—be they heads of state or scientists—must, for each visitor, submit a detailed itinerary including where every meal was to be taken and even how much food would be needed. The plans were then printed as “red-letterhead documents” (i.e., official documents with government seals affixed) and sent to all relevant departments. This meant that we, the organizers, had to estimate exactly where—and how much—two hundred or more visiting scientists would eat during the week of their stay. You can imagine the complexity. Professor Sato Fumitaka at Kyoto University had experience in China and knew how to be helpful. He wrote to me explaining that his wife and daughter would accompany him to Shanghai but noted specifically that “you may schedule the three of us for two portions of food—that will be enough.”
The most serious crisis was over the Israeli participants. The policy of the Chinese government at the time was to refuse visas to all Israelis. We wrote well in advance to the Foreign Ministry recommending that, in accordance with accepted practice for international scientific conferences, visas for the Israeli participants be allowed. By June the authorities had not yet replied. Some American physicists, who had been chafing over the matter, announced that they would skip the conference if the issue of the Israeli visas was not resolved. The chair of the international organizing committee for the conference became agitated at this point and made a special trip to Beijing to make it clear that he would consider moving the entire meeting to another country if the problem persisted. We Chinese hosts went to the Foreign Ministry to restate our own appeal. We finally reached a compromise that allowed two Israeli scientists, Tsvi Piran and Gerald Tauber, to enter China. Just to be sure that nothing went wrong, I went to meet them personally at the Shanghai airport. It was the first time an Israeli had entered China since 1949.
It seemed that every little detail of the conference had to be fought as a “reform battle.” In the end, though, it all worked out and the meeting went smoothly. “Smoothly” does not mean easily. It means a myriad of irksome snags were overcome, one by one, with labor.
Broadly speaking, China’s reforms at the time faced two kinds of obstacles. There were the outmoded regulations and bad habits left over from the Mao era, and these were gradually being overcome. But there were also the new obstacles and pressures, and these cast a worrisome cloud over the prospects for reform.
In each year after reform began in 1978, strident new noises that were very much at odds with reform issued from the government. In 1979, the noise was Deng Xiaoping’s announcement of the “Four Basic Principles”—demands that everyone “persist with” four things: “the socialist system, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the Communist Party, and Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong-Thought.” These principles flatly contradicted the slogan “Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth” that Deng had recently invented and had been spreading everywhere. What’s worse, they were no different in their essential meaning from the “class struggle” principles of the Mao era, and they were put immediately to use in suppressing Wei Jingsheng and others at Democracy Wall. In 1980 the new noise was the order to suppress organizations and elections among university students. In 1981 the noise was the denunciation of the film Unrequited Love, which had dared to suggest the question “You love the government, but does the government love you?”
Still, and despite the continuing background static, reform moved forward. It was being pushed by the populace below much more than being led by the Communist Party from above. In several places farmers had taken the lead to make changes in their villages before Communist officials caught up and declared the changes to be official. You might say that a popular gale for reform was muffling the government’s discordant noises. People hoped the authorities would just be less noisy, go with the flow, and hand out more ex post facto approvals.
What happened, though, was that quite a few powerful people inside the Party decided to talk about “reform” on the one hand while manipulating state-owned resources to build their private wealth on the other. As this pattern became more obvious, respect for the Party steadily declined. University students, especially the ones with good grades, became less and less interested in joining the Party. It no longer seemed a “glorious path.” Near the end of 1982, the Party Secretary of the Department of Applied Chemistry at USTC asked me to speak to his students on “Why Join the Communist Party?” This topic was a first for me. But I accepted, and I did encourage students to join. My pitch was this: Precisely because the prestige of the Party has been falling, the only effective way to change it is to get more educated people inside. If all the talented people refuse to join, then we’ll be led by a Communist Party that not only lacks popular respect but is bereft of modern knowledge as well—and how will the society get anywhere if that happens?
I made this argument often. I told people that to get anything done in China—even a harmless thing like a scholarly conference—every single detail has to go through the Communist Party. You can’t avoid this fact even if you want to. So rather than scheming about how to get around it, it’s better to join the Party and change it from within. Everyone in my astrophysics research group joined the Party around that time.
In the fall of 1983, I went to Europe again, and this time Li Shuxian could come with me. We arrived in Rome on September 8 and worked in the physics department at the University of Rome for three months. We lived in Castel Gandolfo, an ancient, elegant town that rests in hills just to the south of Rome and is the site of the pope’s summer palace. The Vatican Observatory and a huge flower garden are there as well. Pope John Paul II, avoiding the final days of the summer heat in the city, was in residence when we arrived. He returned to St. Peter’s Basilica on September 18.
The trip to or from Rome takes about forty minutes by rail, and Li Shuxian and I made the trip daily. The train station at Castel Gandolfo is at the base of the hills, next to the lake. To get there we took a shortcut down a long set of stone steps that descended through a thicket of greenery. In the early mornings, the steps were usually deserted as we made our way down—except for a few stray dogs. Pretty soon the dogs became our friends. As soon as we appeared at the steps they would dart and prance to meet us and escort us all the way to the station. This was entirely voluntary on their part.
For a time our Castel Gandolfo residence, which was spacious, served as an activities center and sort of boardinghouse for Chinese students and scholars who were visiting Italy. There were quite a few by then—in Sicily, Sardinia, and elsewhere—including about ten who had been my friends or students back in China. At one point an official delegation led by the president of the Science Association of Xinjiang stayed with us. This was all very different from the way things had been just four years earlier on my first trip to Italy.
Whenever Chinese outside China got together, the favorite topics of conversation were reform in China, the future of China, and comparisons between China and foreign countries. On one occasion, I remember, our topic was Italian sloth. We were reviewing a variety of examples of the phenomenon and noting how it contrasted with Chinese diligence. We were describing it almost as a difference between heaven and earth. A few Italians were listening in, and they didn’t seem to mind our criticisms. They laughed at the funny examples as hard as we did, as if they felt comfortable with their worldwide reputation for indolence. Then one of them offered, in turn, a criticism of China that I will never forget: “Chinese people are very diligent at keeping China undeveloped.” The words stung. But when I reflected on it for a moment, I had to admit he had a point. Even the “lazy” Italians had achieved a developed society, so whatever force was holding China back must indeed be the result of very hard work by somebody.
In October, we got word from China that another of those movements by “people who are very diligent at keeping China undeveloped” was at hand. It was the Anti-Spiritual-Pollution Campaign, whose goal was to purge China of all polluting influences from the capitalist world. The campaign did not reach as far as Castel Gandolfo, of course, but “spiritual pollution” was a favorite topic at mealtimes nonetheless. One of our Chinese houseguests came up with a trenchant opinion. He said the biggest piece of pollution that the capitalist world ever sent to China was Marxism. The capitalist world produced Marxism but declined to take it for itself. Instead it shipped it off to Russia and China, where its pollution has caused backwardness ever since.
In November 1983, we went to Germany. First we visited Munich, where we were hosted by Professor Gerhard Börner at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. I gave a seminar on the morning of November 15 on “Dark Matter,” which was one of the topics I had been working on. In the afternoon, the German president, Karl Carstens, made a sudden appearance at the institute. He was walking the length of Germany north to south on what he called a “long march,” and by coincidence he arrived at the Planck Institute the same day as my talk. He delivered an informal speech, to a gathering of about twenty people, in the foyer of the main building. Apparently aware that some Chinese were in the group, he asked if Chinese leaders were still on a long march.
That evening we flew from Munich to West Berlin. It was late by the time we reached the downtown area. The Kurfürstendamm, which normally bustled, was already deserted, and most of the hotels had no vacancy. We wandered around for a while before we found a small hotel that could take us in.
About ten o’clock the next morning, we passed through the Berlin Wall at the Invalids’ Cemetery and entered socialist East Germany. We went with a tourist group, but personally I had no interest in the tourist sites. I wanted to see what Marxism looked like in the home country of Marx. Much as I expected, East Germany resembled China—both in what it had and what it lacked.
As soon as we crossed the border, some of the guides began peddling East German postage stamps to us, and even though our passports clearly showed that we were from a fraternal socialist country, they hoped we would pay in hard Western currency, not East German marks. Next we visited a monument to the Soviet army, which struck me as oddly familiar. China had been a victor in World War II, and Germany was among the vanquished; but their war monuments were almost the same. When our bus crossed from West Berlin to East Berlin, no one checked anything; when we crossed back to West Berlin, though, the East German border guards spent fully five minutes searching the vehicle inside and out for illicit human cargo. On the west side of the wall a few wreaths had been hung; they were for innocent people who had been shot to death while trying to scale the wall.
That was enough for me. The police and the wreaths said it all. We flew back to Munich at 5:30 that evening. Our trip had taken twenty-four hours and had cost us one thousand marks. I felt I had never spent money better, though, because I had been shown an irrefutable conclusion: the socialism invented by Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong was a failure. It could not save China. Forget it.
16. VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF CHINA
In the early 1980s a rumor arose that I would be named a vice president of USTC. While I was still away in Kyoto, in 1981, a USTC colleague wrote to me with the “secret” news that the university’s Party Committee had sent to Party Central a list of recommended appointments and that my name was there as vice president.
In 1982, Hu Yaobang was promoted to be General Secretary of the Communist Party, and one of his priorities was that leadership groups become younger, better educated, and more professional than before. Institutions across the country started looking hard for people who met these criteria, and this helps to explain why USTC intensified its focus on me. I was one of the youngest full professors in the country as well as one of the youngest members of the Academy of Sciences. Added to that was that my seniority in the Party—twenty-six years, from 1955 to 1981—was at the high end for people of my age. (Having been expelled for twenty-one of the twenty-six years did not, at this point, count.)
I frankly felt ambivalent about the prospect. Part of my hesitation was purely selfish: I liked to work on science that interested me and preferred such work to putting in hours for the common good. My friends were not of much help with the problem, because they fell into two camps. One group thought I could create a better campus environment for everyone and that this would be a better overall contribution to USTC than my own work. The other group said my brain was suited for physics and using it on administration was a waste. A colleague in the latter group got so worried that he wrote an article titled “Fang Lizhi Is Unsuited to Be a Vice President” and published it in the magazine Study of Science.
That friend might have worried less if he had known that Party Central had its own doubts about me. USTC’s nomination of me in 1981 remained stuck at the top for three years, until the summer of 1984, before anything happened with it. The authorities never explained what their misgivings were, but these are not hard to guess. My unorthodox public talks in 1980 had not sat well.
When the appointment finally did come, it arrived abruptly, with no sign of either what had delayed it or what, now, had precipitated it. In the Chinese Communist system, hirings and firings are among the most guarded of secrets, and it is often very difficult to fathom what is going on. Certain background facts, though, must have been relevant. These, for example: that students at Nanjing University had recently taken to the streets to demand that the president and the Party secretary on their campus be replaced, because, the students said, they were incompetent both
as administrators and as scholars; and, at USTC, some students were already planning events to demand that Fang Lizhi be appointed vice president. They said they, too, were ready to take to the streets if this did not happen.
The authorities moved quickly to appoint Qu Qinyue, a genuine scholar and not a Party member, to be the new president of Nanjing University. Qu had once been a colleague of mine; we had coauthored a paper on abnormal neutron stars. By chance, he, Li Shuxian, and I were all in the same location when he learned of his appointment. We were lecturing at Nanchong Normal College, a campus not far from Deng Xiaoping’s hometown in Sichuan. When the lecturing was over we took a three-day boat trip down the Yangzi River from Chongqing through the famous Three Gorges to Wuhan. Our second-class cabins were next to each other, and Qu shared with me the obvious observation that the authorities had selected him in hopes that he could settle down the Nanjing University students. Then, as soon as we got off the boat, I got word of my own little glorious assignment to the imperial ranks.
In the early 1950s, Chinese university presidents, especially those at the elite “key” universities, had high social status. Their standing in the bureaucracy was on a par with ministers in the central government. But after the attack on intellectuals in the Anti-Rightist Movement, that standing fell sharply. In 1984 the president of a key university corresponded to a bureau chief in the central government. Deng Xiaoping said repeatedly that intellectuals should be “emphasized,” but in fact the highest salaries for professors under Deng were 20 percent lower than they had been in the early Mao years, and university presidents never recovered to the minister level, either.