by Fang Lizhi
June 18: Discussions are held on ICRA’s composition and research plans.
June 19: The Italian newspaper Il Messaggero reports on the founding of ICRA, referring to the founding roles of the University of Rome, the University of Science and Technology of China, and the Vatican Observatory. Voice of America also does a short report.
For the journalists, the “news value” was that people from China and the Vatican were doing something together. None of them viewed my role in signing USTC into the ICRA as having anything to do with the political relationship between Beijing and the Vatican, though. ICRA was seen as a purely academic activity. It was, moreover, not the first time China and the Vatican had officially been in the same organization—both were members of the International Astronomical Union, for example. So USTC’s support of the ICRA was not actually much of a precedent, and press interest didn’t last long.
June 20: No more media reports. No comment or analysis, either.
June 21: Pope John Paul II holds an audience for scholars attending the Grossmann Meeting. All of us, including me, shake hands with the pope and are photographed as we do so. The international media make nothing of this.
June 22 and 23: The Chinese newspaper Major Reference News [a classified publication, accessible only to high officials, that contains news stories reprinted from the international press] runs stories about ICRA on consecutive days, putting both in the “politics” column. The fact of repetition shows that somebody high up is getting very nervous about ICRA.
June 24: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in China sends to the Chinese Academy of Sciences a formal inquiry about ICRA and the Vatican Observatory’s telescope. The implication is that these matters have to do with Chinese foreign policy toward the Vatican.
As I noted above, authorities at the Academy of Sciences had been intimately involved in the plans for the telescope from the start. If they, at this point, had simply shared their records with the Foreign Ministry, it would have been obvious that only academic exchange was involved, and the matter might have ended there. But in Chinese Communist bureaucratic culture, whenever the question “Whose fault was it?” conceivably arises, the first response is always to deflect the question elsewhere. Accordingly, the Academy of Sciences “referred” the question without comment to USTC. In Hefei—luckily for me—many of my colleagues had been highly appreciative of my efforts to find funding for USTC in Italy. So USTC simply set the inquiry aside and meanwhile informed me about what was going on. USTC had been planning to select me as “model Communist” of the year, and it went ahead with that plan.
June 27: The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs sends an inquiry about the telescope to its embassy in Rome. The embassy’s science attaché (as noted above) had approved the memo of understanding when it was written. He well knew that the whole project was only about academic exchange, not foreign policy. But the embassy’s reflexive reaction, just like that at the Academy of Sciences, was to deflect responsibility. So they referred the matter to me, and I had to sit down and write down every detail of the whole story to show that nothing had violated any principle in Beijing’s relations with the Vatican.
If I committed any indiscretion, it was only that I did not tell the Chinese embassy in advance that I was going to sign on behalf of USTC in the launch of ICRA. But I am willing to take that rap, because that indiscretion was partly intentional. I knew at the time that to ask permission in advance would cost half a year of waiting for all the buck-passing to take place. The matter was both simple and reasonable, and my view was that it was better to present it as a fait accompli than as a request.
In any case, the embassy accepted my detailed report, and that should have ended things. Everything was now in black-and-white. No hijacking of diplomacy had occurred, and the fears of certain people in Beijing were but chimerical self-delusion. I left Rome and headed back to the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. I was looking forward to the elegant atmosphere of the Adriatic coast and to finishing a preface that I had begun for a little booklet called The Creation of the Universe that Li Shuxian and I had written. But—and it’s hard to say why—the self-stimulated agitation in Beijing persisted.
June 29: Beijing again interrogates the Chinese embassy in Rome. This time the inquiry apparently comes from a place higher than the Foreign Ministry. The Vatican telescope apparently has been discussed at the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
July 1: Today is the sixty-fourth anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. In Hefei, at a celebration of that milestone, it is announced that Fang Lizhi has won an award as “outstanding Communist of the year.” I am swimming in the Adriatic when the announcement is made and know nothing about it. As soon as I get back to my room at the Galileo Building, though, and before I even have time to wash the saltwater from my body, I hear that the Chinese embassy is urgently looking for me and demanding that I report to the embassy on the morning of July 3 no matter what. I wonder what the emergency can be. An order is an order, though.
July 2: I board an overnight train for the four-hundred-mile trip to Rome.
July 3: I go to the Chinese embassy in the morning, and it turns out that the urgent matter is only that Professor Lu Jiaxi, the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is arriving in Rome that day from Beijing. I am to meet him at the airport.
As a member of the Academy of Sciences, I might have wanted to do this anyway, if I had been nearby; but to ask me to make a special trip all the way from Trieste seemed a bit much. Later I learned that the decision that I must meet Lu Jiaxi had been made in Beijing. The Foreign Ministry had envisioned that he would be engulfed at the airport by journalists demanding to know more about the Vatican telescope. It was important that I be there to help handle the crowd.
At 2:00 p.m. a few embassy officials and I left for Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport to meet the president. The flight was late, and by 6:00 p.m. he still had not arrived. I kept looking around the terminal for journalists lying in ambush, but didn’t see any. The atmosphere at the airport was, to be sure, tense—policemen were patrolling with dogs. But this had nothing to do with Lu Jiaxi; the day before, July 2, Palestinian guerrillas had set off a bomb at the airport.
Lu did eventually arrive, but no journalist, either then or at any other time during his stay in Italy, showed any interest in asking him about ICRA. The Foreign Ministry had prepped him on answers to every question they could imagine—and the efforts went to waste.
July 10: I take a side trip to Venice with Lu. The gentle breezes wafting across Saint Mark’s Square finally help him to conclude that he is in no danger from aggressive journalists. He is almost as relaxed as the pigeons that strut on the pavement all around us. He opens up and tells me how, on July 3, the day he left for Rome, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had held one of its regular biweekly news conferences. The government spokesperson had carefully rehearsed what to say when foreign reporters asked about ICRA. But there, as in Rome, none of the reporters asked the question. Lu even wondered whether they had forgotten what the letters ICRA stood for.
From all of this evidence it was clear that both the understanding and predictions of the Beijing authorities had been utterly wrong. A great kerfuffle over nothing. Yet a problem remained for them, because to admit a gaffe like that would be a serious loss of face. What to do? They canceled the telescope project. But they could find nothing wrong with the ICRA agreement, or with the door that it opened for USTC to apply for funds from the Italian government, so they let that part go—in form, at least. In actuality, the way they put the project through the political wringer injured it internally, and even though I did my best for two more years to save it, in the end it failed.
Its “internal injury” was that it always carried the heavy stigma of having sprung from an unauthorized initiative. As Ah-X-X well knew, the authorities are averse to initiatives from others. Any independent proposal that runs counter to their wishes they of course
oppose. But the deeper problem is that they oppose even initiatives that do accord with their wishes, because these are examples of someone “usurping authority”—which, to a power-jealous superior, is the most taboo of errors an underling can commit. A Chinese proverb has it that “a great sage resembles a simpleton.” One facet of its meaning, I think, is that a wise man pretends stupidity in order to keep the emperor unaware that he, the wise man, can guess what is in the emperor’s mind before the emperor has said it.
Early July: The Chinese government releases a Vatican-appointed Chinese bishop after more than thirty years of incarceration.
July 21: In his regular Sunday address at Saint Peter’s Square, the pope offers a special salute to China.
July 31: In another of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s regular Wednesday biweekly news conferences, a spokesman says, “China has taken note of the pope’s salute to China.”
Some of my younger colleagues in astrophysics became very happy when they saw these last three news items. Maybe the telescope could be saved after all, they thought. Wouldn’t the project fit perfectly with the regime’s new rapprochement with the pope? But my older colleagues, who were more experienced in how things work, said no—precisely because the telescope project accidentally matched the regime’s posture, there was absolutely no hope of saving it, they said.
Both the telescope project and our ICRA membership perished because they ran afoul of the great taboo against taking initiatives. We failed not because we were smart enough to guess that the authorities were on the verge of “noticing the pope.” No, we failed because we were stupid enough to forget the imperative to pretend stupidity. So we deserved it.
My friend who wrote the article had it right all along: Fang Lizhi indeed was unsuited to be a vice president.
17. BOURGEOIS LIBERALISM
College students protest. Anyone who has helped to run a university campus knows that there is no way to stop student protests entirely. Still, one of the standard instructions that the government in China gives to university presidents is that they must be vigilant about preventing protests. At USTC Guan Weiyan and I periodically received lists of Chinese campuses on which student demonstrations had “broken out.” The tone of these circulars was that little disasters had occurred—something like fires—and that the causes of the disasters were failures of duty by university officials. When university presidents greeted each other at meetings, they often opened conversations by asking, “Anything happened at your place?” An answer of “nope, nothing” might be followed by a knowing smile. Everyone knew what the word anything meant: it meant student uprisings.
In my view, what student movements do for a society is akin to what sneezes do for a person with a cold. They perform a useful function. A more apt analogy might be to typhoons, which can be very destructive in the areas where they occur but at the same time are essential to the maintenance of balance in global temperatures. Student movements can be seen as society’s temperature regulators. If you solve the problem that is causing them, they will settle down on their own. In cases where there really is no underlying problem, you’re in even better shape: you just wait for the movement to run its course and peter out naturally. As long as nobody gets hurt and no property is damaged, student movements are benign.
Guan Weiyan saw things pretty much as I did. During the first year of our tenure at USTC, 1984–85, demonstrations took place at several dozen institutions of higher learning in China. The average was about one per week. Even though Guan and I had a “hands off” policy toward demonstrations, USTC had a perfect record that year—zero incidents.
When school opened in September 1985, students at Peking University were starting to fidget. Wall posters reading REMEMBER SEPTEMBER 18 went up. September 18 was the day in 1931 when Japanese troops invaded China’s northeast provinces. The Communist Party, not in power in 1931, back then had said “Never forget!” and had called for resisting Japan. But now, in 1985, the same Communist Party was stoutly opposed to remembering September 18. Now it wanted to do business with Japan, and this student initiative might ruin things. Both the students and the authorities understood, too, that the real issue behind the student protest was not the memory of the 1931 invasion; it was that high officials in China were taking big bribes in business with Japan in 1985.
September 18 came and went, and the authorities were successful in bottling the students up. The students, unwilling to accept defeat, then announced a plan for nationwide protests on December 9, the anniversary of the day in 1935 when the Communist Party organized a nationwide student movement against Japan. The date was a red-letter day of glory on the Chinese Communist calendar, but the authorities began two months in advance to deter students from marking the anniversary.
On October 21, the Communist Party Committee of Anhui Province sent orders to Guan Weiyan and me about preventing student demonstrations. We were instructed to go mix with the students and talk with them. We were to express our concern and soften their impulse to demonstrate. For me, the mixing part was easy, because I ate in the student dining hall every day anyway. I did not have to deal with the problem (that I had encountered at Cambridge University in England) of faculty eating at a “high table” and students at low tables. The student dining hall at USTC had no tables of any kind. They had been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. Everybody ate standing up.
Second, the document instructed us to show movies and to arrange other recreation for the students as the December 9 anniversary approached. The purpose was to dissipate their interest in demonstrating. We were further instructed to home in on the students who were most likely to be active and to invite them to buffets on the evenings of December 7 or 8. (There was no mention of where the dining tables would come from.) The students, comparing notes across campuses, discovered a principle: The more nervous Party Central was about a campus, the more elaborate its meal preparations were. They boiled this down to “The tenser they get, the fatter we get.” Even though USTC was not at the top of Party Central’s nervous list, we administrators were asked to invite more than a hundred students to buffets. At Peking University, Party Central sent in a whole work team to take charge of demonstration deterrence. Still the campus was tense.
In the end, December 9 passed without event. By that time, though, I had been caught in an imbroglio of another kind. It began in early November when I went to Beijing for a symposium of the Chinese Physical Society to mark the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Niels Bohr. The meetings were held in the main auditorium at Peking University. My own lecture, on November 2, was on semiclassical methods in Bohr’s quantum theory and quantum cosmology. The professional physicists came, but so did many students. The room filled to standing room only. My lectures on physics often drew a great many students, and, partly for that reason, they also drew the attention of the “concerned parties.” They would dispatch people to listen and “take notes on trends.” I had a friend who worked in Party affairs who knew a lot about these things. He would come up to me after my lectures and say, “You-know-who were here again today; I’m not sure they understood much, but they were here.”
After my lecture on Bohr, students surrounded me, asking questions. One of them—the chair of the student association in the Department of Radio Science—asked if I would give another talk, and I said okay. We agreed on a lecture title of “The Social Responsibility of the Intellectual” and fixed the time for the evening of November 4. The “concerned parties” picked up on this tidbit of information very quickly.
I was not surprised to learn that people from the work team on demonstration deterrence would be coming to my lecture to monitor and record it. How should I respond? My experience in such situations was that provocative language is seldom necessary; gentle irony and humor are usually quite enough to get one’s points across. Nothing brings a clumsy and overbearing ideology to its knees more deftly than the glee of an audience laugh. Moreover, the concerned parties—normally a dull-witted bunch
—almost never understand why students are laughing.
That night, though, my satire did get perceived, and the authorities were furious. The work team sent a recording of my lecture straight to Party Central. The staff of Hu Qiaomu, the Party’s top-level guardian of ideology, combed it for political error. I had chosen my words carefully, however, and the theoreticians had trouble pinning down exactly where my arguments had gone wrong. What most irritated them, in the end, was my reference to a scandal about a deputy mayor of Beijing who had pretended to be a physicist in order to go have a good time at a conference on synchrotron radiation that was held on Long Island, New York. I named the man—Zhang Baifa—and in that detail, in the authorities’ view, had gone too far.
I went back to Hefei the next day, and as soon as I got there Guan Weiyan told me that my speech in Beijing had caused dissatisfaction at the highest levels. Party Central had called to demand that USTC apologize to the Beijing Party Committee for my criticism of Zhang Baifa. Guan had refused to apologize. As it happened, he was one of the physicists who had been denied a place on the trip to Long Island in order to make room for Zhang and other non-physicists; moreover, he himself had been the first to expose the Zhang scandal at a meeting of the Chinese Physical Society. He replied to Beijing that the evidence was conclusive and there was no reason to apologize.
Guan’s answer further infuriated Hu Qiaomu, who sat down to draft a proposal: Fang Lizhi should resign from the Communist Party. He circulated his draft among other top leaders, many of whom affixed their little circles at the bottom. (Such circles, in Communist Party culture, indicate concurrence.) The situation was grim.
During the week of December 6 to 13, the provincial Party leadership in Anhui Province summoned me three times for “chats.” Anhui had a population of forty million people and a geographic spread comparable to England’s. That its highest-ranking officials could devote three days in a week to a single speech by one physicist is one indication of how much time China’s authorities spend working conscientiously for China’s development.