by Fang Lizhi
My talks with provincial leaders were only the overture to a symphony whose theme was “Advise Fang to resign.” On December 16, I received a notice from the provincial authorities that Wang Heshou, the deputy director of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, would receive me that same day. This commission was in charge of “rectifying” Party members, so I was expecting more advice to resign. But when the appointed hour arrived, the meeting was abruptly canceled—with no reason given.
I went to Beijing the next day, by prior arrangement. As soon as I arrived I was called to an audience with Professor Yan Jici, the man who in 1965 had helped to save me from exile to Liaoning Province. Yan was now eighty-six years old. He lit into me for my “untimely” speech to the students. I had been scolded by elderly people before and had learned that the best strategy is to offer no defense but just to wait until they get tired and stop. What surprised me in this case was that after a tirade that lasted forty-seven minutes, Yan stopped suddenly. His attitude changed immediately. He reverted to the way he had always treated me before. He cheerfully pulled me away for a couple of drinks and acted as if the harangue of a few moments earlier had never occurred. I don’t drink, but on this occasion I did my best to keep the old man happy.
The next day, December 18, I was summoned for yet another exhortation. This one came from Academy of Sciences president Lu Jiaxi, the same man I had accompanied in Italy the previous summer. Lu made his face as stiff as possible for his oral performance, and I had to purse my lips hard to keep from smirking during this most austere of ceremonies. Near the end, Lu pronounced that my punishment would be indefinite postponement of my proposed trip to the United States. (I had been planning a visit to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton for half a year beginning January 2, 1986.) So there it was: my criticism of an illegitimate trip abroad had finally resulted in the loss of my right to take a legitimate trip abroad. I guess I had it coming.
Okay, I thought—I don’t go to the United States. Anyway, that should bring the exhortations to an end. I slept well that night. The next morning, seeking a break from the ordeal, Li Shuxian and I went to a friend’s home to relax. When we returned to Peking University at noon, we saw notes—posted in several conspicuous places—saying, “Li Shuxian, tell Fang Lizhi as soon as possible that Party Central is looking for him.” It turned out that the office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, beginning early that morning, had been sending a stream of messages to both the Academy of Sciences and to Peking University, searching for Fang Lizhi.
The person in Party Central who wanted to see me was Hu Qili, whom I had met in my college days when I did my ad-lib speech at the Youth League congress in 1955. Now Hu had risen to be—at least in theory—number five in the Party. I didn’t know what to expect from him. Another exhortation? A scolding? I arrived at Zhongnanhai, the cloistered compound that holds the offices of the highest Party and government leaders, at 3:00 p.m. on December 19. The guards outside were expecting me and immediately let me in.
Hu greeted me with a beaming face, the exact opposite of the face the president of the Academy of Sciences had worn the day before. This was my sign that Hu was going to play the role of “good cop.” The alternation of good and bad cop—in Chinese, called “white face” and “red face,” in a metaphor that derives from opera roles—is a standard control technique. A white-face treatment often follows a red-face treatment. Hu’s talk to me was entirely explanatory in nature. He made no criticism of what I had said in my speech to the students. He kept repeating that “Party Central has noticed [the same corruption problems that you have noticed], but such problems are not easy to solve, so don’t worry, just be patient.” His attitude, I have to say, was commendable. I later learned that it had originated with instructions from Hu Yaobang, the General Secretary of the Party. I also came to understand what had happened on December 16 when the Discipline Inspection Commission had wanted to see me and then abruptly canceled: Hu Yaobang had issued a directive saying that three times is enough to press a person to do something, and he did not agree that there should be any further efforts to urge Fang Lizhi to resign from the Party.
At the end of my meeting with Hu Qili, he made a special point of saying, “We in Party Central trust you, and you are free to go on visits abroad. My direct telephone line is 397007. Call me personally if you have any problem.” So just like that, the light was again green to go to Princeton. The Academy of Sciences reversed course and approved the visit for March. The “indefinite postponement” announced to me in person by the Academy president had lasted indefinitely for twenty-four hours. The reason for the about-face in policy was nothing more than a clog in the information flow between Party Central and the Academy of Sciences. The Academy received an order that “Fang should resign from the Party” and began to act on it without knowing that another order—“Don’t pressure Fang to resign from the Party”—was in the pipeline. The clog in the message tube had made a 180-degree reversal inevitable. I had to feel for our Academy president. Nearly ninety years old, he still had to be so nimble afoot. It must have been exhausting.
That is how my near-miss with political trouble ended in 1985, but there was more to come in 1986. During my meeting with Hu Qili, he asked if I would write an open letter to students that he would recommend to the People’s Daily for publication on New Year’s Day. I understood, of course, that he wanted me to counsel students to stay calm during the year. I wrote a piece called “How to Be Responsible When Sensing a Crisis” and sent it to Hu a week later, but it never appeared in People’s Daily. My views apparently were still unwelcome at the top. Here is part of what I wrote:
Someone predicted to me, partly in jest, that “you astronomers” are in for more crises in the new year, because Halley’s Comet is making a return visit in 1986. Astronomers do not believe in astrology. And yet there have been, in fact, some historical coincidences between the return of Halley’s Comet and noteworthy shifts in human societies … Might it be that the return of the comet this year will coincide with a turning point in the march toward prosperity that China’s reform is bringing?
I did not imagine that I would personally play a role in causing my “astrological prediction” to come true.
* * *
March in Princeton was still very cold. Li Shuxian and I set up a temporary household at 23 Hardin Road at the Institute for Advanced Study. We kept it simple, because we were not planning to stay long.
Pretty soon, though, friends began advising us to figure out how to remain in the United States, and there were some fairly easy ways we could have done this. More and more Chinese scientists, especially younger ones, were making this choice. Some in our own generation, including people at the Institute for Advanced Study, were doing so as well.
I am not, in principle, opposed to emigration. It is a normal phenomenon, and every person should have the right to choose where he or she wants to live. It had already occurred to me, moreover—more than once—that living in a developed society would offer advantages in my research as well as in daily life for my family. Whenever I ran into political troubles, I sensed how liberating it would be to live in a place where academic freedom and freedom of speech were assured. By 1986 I had traveled outside China more than ten times, and each time could have stayed outside if I had chosen. But I always opted to go back.
The reason I always went back was not that I am in love with Chinese soil. Words like “Great earth, my mother!” are the playthings of poets, in my view. For me it was just that life feels very different inside China and outside. Inside, all kinds of trouble and interference are constantly causing worry and disgust; but outside, although life is steadier and more peaceful, it somehow is less engaging. I found that political trouble could be oddly addictive. A person who grows up with it, when suddenly released from it, can feel somewhat at sea. It can even seem that it would be better to be back in trouble-land earning the sense of achievement that comes from doing
battle with obstacles. At the end of 1985, when I was still smarting from recent political exhortations, I was very much in escape mode. But after a while in Princeton, my “addiction to trouble” slowly grew back.
Princeton was enjoyable, of course. It had no “red” or “white” opera faces, no exhortations, no post-exhortation banquets, no Zhongnanhai and no sly smiles inside Zhongnanhai. It had only the free-roaming spirit of Einstein. Not far from where we lived in Princeton there were some woods, and it seemed, somehow, that free souls were roaming around in there as well. At dusk there were deer—does and their fawns, usually—that ventured out to graze around; they behaved as if they, too, were aware that this was the home turf of a great spirit who enjoyed free wandering.
Still, I did not want to stay here long. Li Shuxian and I decided to go back to China in July as scheduled. One factor that drew me homeward—perhaps in satisfaction of my “addiction to trouble”—was the challenge of organizing the 124th symposium of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). In a developed country, a meeting like this would be a routine matter, but not in China. No IAU symposium had ever been held in China before, and the topic this time was “Observational Cosmology.” Only a dozen years earlier, modern cosmology had been a forbidden zone in China, so the very meeting itself was important. It was a statement that cosmology had officially arrived in China.
As of 1985 it was still not entirely safe to write about cosmology. In May of that year, I published an article in the Chinese journal Science in which I introduced quantum cosmology and referred in passing to the view that “the universe arose from nothing.” In November, when Hu Qiaomu circulated his proposal that I be removed from the Party, he simultaneously wrote a letter to the editors of Science stating that Fang Lizhi’s ideas on quantum cosmology were non-Marxist “subjective idealism” and advising that the editors publish an article “that took a different view from Fang Lizhi’s.” (In such contexts, “take a different view from” is a synonym for “denounce.”) Science of course thrives on criticism and denials—but it does not welcome political interference. I was a deputy editor of Science, and my fellow editors resisted Hu’s interference. What the incident did show, however, was that even as late as 1985, top ideologues in China felt entitled to rule with authority in the field of cosmology.
When I shared this story with some colleagues at Princeton, one of them, the possessor of a sly wit, suggested that this great teacher of ideology be invited to the 124th IAU symposium to speak on the topic “Cosmology Today.” It was a joke, of course. The great teacher fell well short of the minimum standard for symposium participation. The ABCs of the field were over his head.
Cosmology as a field was hardly alone in this predicament. The problem illustrated a much broader paradox that was hampering China. Almost everyone was strongly in favor of “modernization,” seeing it as a goal that the country had been pursuing for more than a century. But at the same time, a modernization phobia was loose in the land, especially in ruling circles. Any noun that followed the word “modern” was automatically suspect: modern cosmology was “objective idealism”; modern physics (quantum mechanics) was “subjective idealism”; modern art was emptiness and decadence; modern music was profligacy and spiritual pollution; modern Western countries were founts of bourgeois iniquity. Modern technology wasn’t so bad, and moreover, much of it had been invented in China long ago. The upshot of this line of thinking was that if you wanted modernization, Chinese tradition was the place to look for it.
So, as I saw things from Princeton, the project of getting modern science and civilization accepted in China still seemed urgent. I felt fortunate to have played a role in getting cosmology accepted. I reflected on the fact that three centuries earlier, five of my predecessors at the Beijing Observatory had been executed for attempting to use modern methods of astronomy to figure out calendars. Those pioneers had paid with their lives, and today we were luckier. Still, it was our job to keep diehards like Hu Qiaomu from messing up an IAU symposium.
The IAU meetings in Beijing went smoothly. The forms and procedures of these symposia are always the same, so I needn’t review them here. The high point in our case was a banquet, done to the standards of a state dinner, that was held on the evening of August 29 in the State Dinner Room of the Great Hall of the People, next to Tiananmen Square. The Chinese proverb “Money can make ghosts turn millstones” in recent times had acquired a new version: “Money can make the Communist Party turn millstones.” This was why we scientists, even though we didn’t have any state-level guests, could get state-banquet treatment. We had the money to buy it.
At the end of the banquet the astronomers—sated, slightly inebriated, and heady with the sense of being national-level guests—virtually floated out of the Great Hall and into Tiananmen Square. The gentle winds of the autumn evening may have magnified the inebriation, because Allan Sandage, a forty-year veteran in the field of cosmology, was led to make the immoderate pronouncement that “this meeting marks the true beginning of observational cosmology.” The next day Malcolm Longair, the distinguished British physicist, invoked Sandage’s words to open his summary remarks on the meetings, and the line later appeared prominently in the published symposium summary. It had become famous. It seemed to add a new item of glory to Tiananmen’s storied history: the great square was now the official birthplace of observational cosmology.
In retrospect, Sandage’s colorful remark seems to me not only the climax of that IAU symposium but also coincident with an apex for China in the 1980s. From that point on, the society slipped toward crisis.
The storm clouds gathered quietly, and hardly anyone noticed them at first. I for one had no sense at all in the summer of 1986 that any blow-up was imminent. On my way back from America I had chosen to take a little detour to visit the Arctic Circle. I went to Stockholm for the Eleventh Conference of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation, and when the meeting was over I went up to a little town in northern Sweden called Kiruna to see what the “midnight sun” was like. Like most people living on most parts of the earth, I was accustomed to the alternations by which it is always either day or night, and either a warm season or a cool one, so my first impression of the Arctic was that everything had gone haywire. A day did not divide into light and dark hours, and all four seasons were present at once: the flowers of spring, the long days of summer, the layered clouds of autumn, and the cold of winter all shared a stage. The normal borderlines had been erased.
Kiruna’s indeterminacies led me to recall a letter that a friend in Beijing had sent to me, shortly before then, about the “culture fever” that had arisen in China. People were debating whether China’s reforms should be based in Chinese culture or be an explicit step into Western culture. The premise of the debate seemed to me the same as the day-or-night pattern that most people live within. It had to be either light outside or dark outside, one or the other. The friend who had sent me the letter about culture fever wanted me to express an opinion about it, but I had never replied. I hesitated in part because culture is not my special field and I felt less than fully qualified—but also, in part, because I am always confused by the imprecise definitions in such discussions. What should we say about the “socialism” that China had been practicing for thirty-seven years, for example? Was that “Chinese culture” or “Western culture”? For a scientist trained to work with definitions and evidence, debates on culture could be hard to follow. We scientists, moreover, like to focus on questions of truth versus error, or more advanced versus less advanced understanding; we very seldom raise questions of East versus West. At the earth’s poles, in fact, the very concepts of north, south, east, and west are useless. So why do we have to worry so much about Easternness?
As I watched the ever-circling sun in the sky over Kiruna, it suddenly dawned on me how I could reply to my friend: what China needs is precisely to get away from confining questions like “East versus West.” Our reform should “open up in all dire
ctions.” We should welcome anything that is good, not asking whether it is “East” or “West.” This was the origin of what the authorities later called my “bourgeois liberal thinking”—which, in their view, did so much to disturb the peace in China.
A few days before the IAU symposium in August, a group of young scholars had pulled me away to a one-day conference in Qingdao on “Chinese versus Western culture.” That was where I first spoke publicly about the idea that had occurred to me in Kiruna. Later, at the IAU meetings, journalists of many kinds wanted interviews, and they kept asking what I thought about reform. Sticking with my principle of “opening in all directions,” I said China should begin with academic freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.
The “errors” in my speech and behavior at the end of 1985 must have been still fresh in the minds of the authorities, because they were very quick to pick up on my new advocacy of these freedoms. The ideas were not my invention, of course; they were already inscribed as rights in China’s constitution and could hardly be viewed as illegal. My innovation was only to say that on-paper rights should be actual rights. Later, when students realized that the constitution could be invoked in this way, they began to refer to their “right to demonstrate” and their “right to assemble” in places like Tiananmen Square. Those claims in turn led Deng Xiaoping later to charge, in fury, that “people are taking advantage of our constitution!” Here Deng established in a single blow that one characteristic of “Chinese democracy” is that citizens lack the right to take their constitution literally.