The Most Wanted Man in China

by Fang Lizhi

  What did get restored to the minister level was the process for appointing university presidents. Universities were possible sources of trouble, so the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China had to approve all hirings and firings of their leaders. That did not mean, though, that university presidents had actual power on their campuses. The practice was that minor decisions were made by campus Party committees and major decisions by the State Education Commission in Beijing. University presidents were “responsible” for campuses over which they had no real authority.

  An anecdote can show what I mean. When I visited Jiaotong University in Shanghai, campus administrators told me about a project whose budget, as determined by a formula that the State Education Commission had approved, included the number 44.4 percent. This was a problem. Should they round the number down to 44 percent or up to 45 percent? In the end they had to ask for guidance on the question from the State Education Commission itself. The power of a university president was insufficient to decide even a matter of four thousandths.

  By these standards, I enjoyed unusually good conditions during my tenure as vice president of USTC between September 1984 and January 1987. USTC had no Party secretary during those years and did not even have much of a functioning Party committee. Perhaps the General Secretary in Beijing was just too busy to get around to such a small task. USTC was one of the ten “key universities” in China, but it was in Hefei, a small city that was off the beaten track, so perhaps it is not strange that we were overlooked for a while.

  USTC got a new president at the same time it got me as vice president. He was Guan Weiyan, another physicist—a specialist in low-temperature physics—who had been a student of the Soviet physicist Pyotr Kapitsa. I had known Guan from the early 1960s when I was at the Academy of Sciences working on solid state physics. Our common background made it very easy for us to cooperate. Guan served simultaneously as deputy Party secretary, but we always talked to each other the way physicists talk.

  The happy coincidence meant that, for two years, two physicists who were president and vice president of USTC saw eye-to-eye, had no Party committee looking over our shoulders, and had some freedom to make innovations on campus. Later in our tenure, after USTC students organized protest demonstrations—and students on other campuses (156 altogether) followed their lead—Party Central finally got around to the matter of naming a Party secretary at USTC. A bit late?

  On the other hand, it was probably not a question of lateness. With or without a Party secretary, frictions on the campus were growing. Quite a few professors, including me, had already stated publicly that we disagreed with the State Education Commission on a key question: Had Chinese education in the seventeen years before the Cultural Revolution—from 1949 to 1966—been on the right track? The State Education Commission said yes; many professors said no. In our view, the destruction of Chinese education was one of the disasters on Mao Zedong’s historical record. Not only had ten years of Cultural Revolution caused an entire generation to miss one or another part of its schooling; in important ways, even the 1949–66 years had been aimed at keeping people ignorant. The evidence for this, in our view, was clear. Illiteracy in the 1980s was still around 30 percent. More important, young people who did know how to read had been trained in a slave mentality that was very much the opposite of modern education. Chinese universities in the early 1960s openly called for molding students into “docile tools of the Party.” One model for emulation was the soldier Lei Feng, whose goal, in his own words, was to “become a stainless-steel screw for the Party.”

  Now, in the 1980s, the State Education Commission wanted to resume the policy of training docile tools. It had no intention of restoring genuine education. For university students, it even offered a new, freshly minted model for how to be a tool. He was Qu Xiao, a 1957 rightist who went to jail for twenty years, during which time his wife and children left him. For that part of his life, he certainly deserves sympathy. But in 1985 he began going around to universities giving lectures in which he said that the Communist Party’s punishment of him was “like a mother spanking her son.” It is a mistake, he said, to assign blame in such matters; spanking is a form of love, meant for a child’s good. He urged that others view the matter as he did; we all should be willing to be the continually spanked children of the Party.

  Are university students children of Communist parties? To people who live in modern societies, the question might seem bizarre. But in Chinese universities in the mid-1980s, it was not only a real question but an active one that was argued on both sides. One of the things I worked hardest on as a university vice president was to try to establish that university students are not children of the government.

  I spoke to students about it many times. I used a standard template for my speeches, and I copy it below as a memento of the era:

  You are constantly told to study hard in college—the Party has given you this wonderful opportunity, so how can you not study hard?

  As citizens, of course, you would be right to work hard in school. But to say that the Party gave you the opportunity, or that the country gave it to you, or that you are “children” of the Party or government, is entirely incorrect. First ask these questions: Where did the Party come from? And in what sense does it “give” you something? We were all born with the rights to think and to be educated. We are the owners of that right; it is not something the Party gives us. To say the Party bestows these things is a reflection of a feudal mind-set.

  Let’s look at the economics of it: Workers in China are paid less than the value that they produce. The difference, in fact if not in name, is a tax, and that tax more than covers the costs of our educations. The Party does not donate our educations. It is more accurate to say that the government is obligated to give us what we have paid for. All of you here are students, I know, so you have not yet personally paid much in these de facto taxes; but your parents have paid plenty.

  This can be calculated, and we can take USTC as an example. The ratio of teaching staff to students at USTC is about 1:2, and it takes an average of five years for a USTC student to graduate. This means that, on average, one teacher produces two students every five years. Now let’s ask: What is the average lifetime economic value to the state of the education of one student? The state denies that there is a labor market, but that does not mean that this value cannot be calculated, and I have done so, and we can put it conservatively at 20,000 yuan. That means that one USTC teacher produces, on average, 40,000 yuan of wealth for the state every five years. In return, the state pays a teacher on average one hundred yuan per month—or, in a five-year period, 6,000 yuan. So where do the other 34,000 yuan go? Some, of course, is needed for capital expenditure, equipment, maintenance, and the like. Those costs, too, can be calculated, and they amount, on average, to somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 of those 34,000 yuan. But this means, still, that each year the state takes from each USTC teacher, on average, about 3,000 yuan in a de facto tax. That is a tax rate of about 70 percent.

  So you can see that your education is not something that the Communist Party bestows from above, but rather a process by which money flows upward from us toward the Party. At the time of the revolution, we Communists always liked to ask the question, speaking of the old regime, “Who is feeding whom?” Today we have to be very clear on that same question, and we must change the way we conceive things.

  I also kept telling students that the role of universities is not to train loyal children but to produce independent adults.

  In October 1984, at the occasion of my first speech as vice president of USTC after Guan and I were installed, a student asked me what kind of university I wanted to see USTC become. I answered that “a university should become a thinking center.” What I meant was that China needed creativity more than it needed anything else. My answer was the beginning of a protracted confrontation with the State Education Commission.

  Later, when Guan and I were fired—“removed” in hi
s case, a more severe “revoked” in mine—the authorities charged us with pursuit of a “bourgeois line” in education that was leading USTC toward “liberalization.” To me, by that time, the word liberalization sounded more like high praise than malfeasance. And in fact the charge was true: both of us had consciously tried to bring a freer atmosphere to USTC. Our only regret was that we hadn’t had enough time to get very far. We could get done only some of what we wanted, and when we stepped down USTC was still far short of what our goals for it had been.

  Those first steps that we did take included:

  • Communist Party administration and academic administration were kept separate. Party committees at all levels had to stay out of professional decisions about teaching and research.

  • Budget allocations, teaching assignments, and promotions were decided by committees of professors only.

  • Representatives of teachers and students had the right to evaluate and to monitor university administration and to voice their criticisms at the department and university levels and beyond that at the levels of Party and nation.

  • The system of “political advisers” for students was abolished.

  • Political censorship of academic conferences was abolished.

  USTC was not very big. It had fewer than four thousand undergraduates and just over one thousand graduate students. Teachers and researchers totaled fourteen hundred and support staff was fifteen hundred. The campus covered thirteen acres and its buildings comprised a bit more than two million square feet of space. It had more than thirty research units and these turned out about eight hundred articles or other research products per year.

  The quality of the students was very high. Average scores for USTC students in national examinations of various kinds consistently put the school among the top three in the country. USTC physics students showed well in the nationwide competition for the one hundred spots offered every year, beginning in 1980, in Professor Tsung-Dao Lee’s CUSPEA program to pursue doctoral studies in the United States. One year, thirty-six of the one hundred were from USTC.

  I learned that being a university vice president is easier than being a physics professor. This was perhaps especially so in a country that uses central planning, in which the government in the national capital specifies all the crucial numbers concerning personnel, pay scales, standards for admission, building plans, and the like. The university president is spared the burden of having to decide such things.

  My initial charge as vice president was oversight of expenses for scientific research. A bit later I was named first vice president, and that brought more duties. When Guan Weiyan was off campus, I needed to stand in for him.

  The first thing I learned was that many things didn’t need any management. The university was full of educated people, and results were much better if you let people decide things for themselves than if you ran around trying to micromanage. Of course this meant that you couldn’t flaunt your know-it-all “leader” image. But if you were okay with that, it also meant that your workload fell by about 40 percent.

  The next thing I learned was that most of an administrator’s workday is taken by saying yes or no to all kinds of applications. It reminded me of the true-or-false questions on physics tests. I found that 80 percent of the questions were ones I could decide in less than a minute; 15 percent of the decisions needed ten minutes; and only 5 percent raised issues that needed more time than that. I had never been able to go that fast on physics tests.

  Allocating funds was less easy. The school’s budget at the time was about twenty million yuan, which, on a per capita basis, was one of the highest in the country. But it still was not enough to cover ever-expanding needs. This meant that every year at budget time there were a few days that had to be spent entirely on calculating, arguing, persuading, and negotiating. It was tough going. But we always did get through, because everyone knew that in the end compromise was inevitable.

  Another very time-consuming activity was eating. China has a custom—it’s hard to call it a bad habit—that says that any time a guest appears, a host offers a meal. For a university vice president, the problem was that university procedures required one to host—or at least to attend—too many such meals. Guests were arriving at USTC in ever-greater numbers in those days. There were nearly a hundred per year from foreign countries and even more from inside China. Eating and drinking was becoming a burden. I had to comfort myself with the thought that eating was still easier than teaching. Even the most elementary classes were harder than eating.

  This is part of why I say being an official was not very hard. Communist functionaries sometimes appear, on the surface, to be extremely busy: attending meetings, giving speeches, issuing directives, and continually appearing in all kinds of places, large and small. We scientists, though, can observe one empirical regularity: they usually put on weight. Moreover, there is a positive correlation between the height of the official position and the weight added to the body.

  Right from the start I had a sense that I would not be an official for very long, so I adhered to two principles: one, every meal that was not an official banquet I ate in the student dining hall; two, I always taught beginning physics, four hours per week. I also kept up with my astrophysics research—I could not do without that. I produced about ten articles per year while serving as vice president. In 1985 I coauthored a paper with Professor Sato Fumitaka of Kyoto University titled “Is the Periodic Distribution of Quasar Redshifts Evidence of a Multiply Connected Universe?” that won first prize in a competition sponsored by the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation.

  On average, I spent about four hours per day working in the vice president’s office on administration. It was pretty clear that if I had just remained a functionary—a screw in the machine—I could have expected routine promotions every few years. The normal career path for Communist officials is “up only.” So long as you manage to do literally nothing, you can expect to float a level higher in rank every few years. I learned this principle for bureaucratic success from a Uighur official, and the story is worth telling.

  In the fall of 1983, the president of the Science Association of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, whom I will call Ah-X-X, visited the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. Abdus Salam, the ICTP’s director, was Muslim, as was his Uighur guest, and this led Salam to want to do something special for the Uighurs. He proposed that every year two physicists from Xinjiang visit his center—all expenses paid. He asked nothing in return. Ah-X-X, though, repeatedly declined to put his name to any formal agreement. A colleague of mine from Xinjiang was puzzled and asked him what was wrong. Ah-X-X then revealed the secret of his success: “Never, ever, do anything. Even more important—never take an initiative.” Soon after that Ah-X-X got another routine promotion.

  The underlying reason why things did not work out for Guan Weiyan and me at USTC was that we violated Ah-X-X’s principle, and in a big way. We took initiatives. I devote the rest of this chapter to an extended example.

  In 1983, on a visit to the Vatican Observatory, I learned that many of its telescopes had been sidelined because the night skies of Rome were too bright with man-made light for the telescopes to be effective. One of these was a one-meter Schmidt telescope of very high quality; in a suitably dark location, this instrument could be extremely useful to researchers. I suggested that the observatory might donate that telescope to China. China had a number of observation sites at latitudes very close to Rome’s, and it would not be hard to find a good spot for it. Professor George Coyne, the director of the Vatican Observatory, happily agreed.

  It was to be a purely scientific gift, nothing more. But since it involved China and the Vatican, we approached the matter very cautiously. We thought it better that the telescope be donated from the Vatican to some kind of international organization, which in turn could donate it to China.

  A full year of talking back and forth ensued, and in the end the
authorities at the Chinese Academy of Sciences agreed to a plan. They determined a specific physical site at an observation station in Urumqi, Xinjiang, where the telescope could be mounted. Then, in the spring of 1985, they dispatched a delegation of five (not including me) to the Vatican to discuss the particulars of dismantling, packing, and shipping the telescope. The science attaché at the Chinese embassy in Rome joined the group, and the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding. So far, so good.

  The next logical step was to identify an international organization to be the intermediary. It would need to be a group that worked with both China and the Vatican. That summer, I traveled to Rome for the Fourth Marcel Grossmann Meeting. This happened to be right when the University of Rome was setting up an International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics (ICRA) that was going to include the Vatican Observatory, the physics department at Stanford University, the U.S. Space Telescope Science Institute, and many other groups. It would be hard to imagine a better conduit for the telescope transfer. I took the initiative to list USTC’s Center for Astrophysics as a supporter of ICRA.

  I thought this was the least a university vice president could do—it would not only help with the telescope transfer but would also enhance a funding opportunity for USTC. Just the year before, the Italian government had established a fund for projects in developing countries, and it seemed to me that ICRA membership for USTC could only help in applying for them. I was, after all, USTC’s “financial vice president.”

  I will set down the rest of the story in log form:

  June 17: ICRA is formally founded. The chairman of the University of Rome’s Department of Science and Engineering, Antonio Ruberti; Vatican Observatory Director George Coyne; and USTC Vice President Fang Lizhi, each representing his own institution, sign their names to a draft of the bylaws of the new center.