The Most Wanted Man in China

by Fang Lizhi

  The idea of “opening in all directions” began to spread, and when it did, it collided repeatedly with Deng’s “Four Insistences” (on Marxism, the socialist system, the leadership of the Communist Party, and the people’s democratic dictatorship). On those four points, anyway, opening up was forbidden. By unfortunate coincidence the People’s Daily, around that time, published an article on four principles we had been promoting at USTC: science, democracy, creativity, and independence. This made it seem (although we had not conceived them as such) that our four principles were being offered as alternatives to Deng’s four.

  Not wanting to go near that explosive problem, I headed back to USTC to begin teaching in the fall term. I began a course on atomic physics that met four hours per week. That left me little time for travel, so I turned down a good number of speaking invitations. I did make an exception, though, to go for two days to Zongyang in southern Anhui to attend a memorial for Fang Yizhi, a scholar whose book A Physics Primer, published in the seventeenth century, was the first in China ever to use the word “physics” in its title. His surname was the same as mine, and Yizhi was almost like Lizhi, so I really had to go. The event was unrelated to politics, and September and October went by smoothly for me.

  In the larger society, though, unrest was growing. The reforms were stagnating, graft and other corruption were spreading, and a deep dissatisfaction was building up, especially among students. In November these things caught up with me. I traveled again to Rome, for a conference on Halley’s Comet as observed from space, and on my way back I stopped for a few days in Shanghai and Ningbo. Li Shuxian and I wanted to visit Shanghai Jiaotong University, where I had been an adjunct professor since 1984, and Ningbo University, where the president was an old colleague from USTC.

  As soon as I arrived in Shanghai I got a message that originated inside the Shanghai Department of Propaganda: I should cut back on what I say in public. I don’t know whether the message was an attempt by the authorities to deter me or a tip from a friendly insider who knew that the authorities would be scrutinizing me. The bottom line, in any case, was the same. My arrival was not welcome in the eyes of the Shanghai authorities.

  That did not bother me much. By then I was accustomed to government monitoring, and the students who had invited me to speak were clear-eyed about what they were doing. In those days the students seemed to have a principle that the less the authorities welcomed somebody, the warmer their own welcome would be. The result, in this instance, was that instead of cutting back on my words, I ended up speaking more than had originally been planned. At Jiaotong University I gave a seminar for colleagues on “Particle Astrophysics” and then gave a talk to graduate students entitled “Intellectuals Have Both Duties and Strengths.” From the questions the students asked during Q&A it was obvious that they were intensely dissatisfied with the way things were going in China:

  “What do you think of the fact that the Party worms its way into every possible cranny?”

  “What percentage of Chinese officials would you say are corrupt?”

  “Are the Four Insistences blocking China’s progress?”

  Things got even tenser at a subsequent lecture at Tongji University on November 18. My topic was “Democracy, Reform, and Modernization,” and thousands of students showed up. They even held up a banner that read THE REPUBLIC NEEDS YOU, FANG LIZHI! They were itching for action, and I was lucky they didn’t carry that banner out into the streets. But now I had been drawn in. I was at the center of another storm and there was no way out.

  This time the highest officer in charge of monitoring me was Wan Li, First Vice Premier of the State Council. When I arrived in Shanghai, Wan Li arrived in Shanghai. Four days later I went to Ningbo, and Wan Li flew to Ningbo. He was collecting recordings of my lectures as he went. At Ningbo, though, the university people, from the physics department right up to the president, were my friends, and when Wan asked for tapes of my lectures, everyone politely declined. They pretended they didn’t have any. Wan responded by saying that, all right, then I won’t leave Ningbo. My official aircraft will stay on the ground until the university gives me recordings of Fang Lizhi’s speeches. In a bind, the university did hand over a partial set of tapes.

  I arrived back in Hefei on November 22. Wan Li followed a week later and announced that a roundtable on higher education would take place on November 30 at the Hall of Rice Fragrance—the grandest conference site in all of Anhui. The conference began that day about 9:00 a.m., with about a hundred people in attendance. In addition to Wan Li and his entourage, all of the highest officials in Anhui were there, as were the Party secretaries and presidents of all the Anhui universities. Some professors came, too. Television reporters and other journalists were at the ready, set to record the august pronouncements of the First Vice Premier.

  Wan Li opened with some formalities but then moved quickly to the cold remark that “Someone has been saying that the State Education Commission should simply allocate funds to campuses and then leave them alone.” Hah! Those words of “someone” were exactly what I had said just a few days earlier in Shanghai. Wan Li had come with an agenda—it turned out that the whole reason for this big meeting was to criticize Fang Lizhi. Fortunately, my lifetime of experience with criticism allowed me to remain calm. I sat there thinking “Bring it on!,” opting to say nothing.

  But that wouldn’t do. About two hours into the meeting, Wan Li referred to me by name and invited me to come sit next to him to offer a response. The television crews, seeming eager for a dramatic clash, homed in on the two of us as I took a seat to Wan’s right. I noticed he had a little notebook in his hand. It turned out to be a record of things I had said in my speeches in Shanghai and Ningbo. What preparation. He may have been anticipating that, under the glare of his austere and morally invincible reprimand, I would tremble, confess my errors, and send bourgeois liberalism to its final death. But that didn’t happen.

  If Wan Li had launched his criticism of me one-on-one, in the privacy of his office inside Zhongnanhai, I would have had no interest in locking horns with him. I would probably have just mumbled a few polite phrases and let it go. But out there in front of an audience of a hundred or so, in the elegant Hall of Rice Fragrance, the teacher’s intuition to explain the truth to others took over inside me. Sorry, Your Highness Mr. Vice Premier, but you leave your humble servant no choice. I’m going to contest you point by point and we’ll see who wins. Are you ready?

  A ferocious debate ensued for the next hour and a quarter. I can’t possibly record all the jabs and hooks of every round, but I can attest that both speaking speed and voice volume of the two combatants rose steadily as the debate progressed. The full drama of the melee cannot be captured in words; one would need to watch a videotape for that. But as one measure of the degree to which His Highness was, by the end, incensed, it is enough to record the following exchange, which happened in the bout’s final round:

  Wan Li: “When did you join the Party?”

  Fang Lizhi: “Thirty years ago.”

  Wan Li: “For me it’s fifty.”

  Touché. He had me. Who wins an argument can be hard to measure. But numbers are numbers, and here he had won—fifty to thirty. The significance was more than numbers, though. Readers who don’t understand Chinese culture might not appreciate how age alone establishes superiority. Every child growing up in China knows that when an argument reaches a standoff, it can be decided by asking:

  “How old is your father?”

  “My dad is thirty.”

  “Hah! Mine is fifty! I win!”

  It is worth noting, though, that even though the Vice Premier had landed a devastating blow in the final round of our match, the Xinhua News Agency sealed the entire match from the public. All of the audiotapes and videotapes that the journalists had made were stashed away as secrets.

  After the debate a number of people came up to shake my hand. Some of them were friends. But some, too, were high officials in Anhui Provinc
e.

  All of this may not have mattered, however. By now the student movement was running on its own momentum.

  18. DISSIDENT

  On December 5, 1986, five days after my debate with Wan Li, more than a thousand USTC students took to the streets of Hefei in protests. The Wan Li debate was not the reason, but, both then and later, students often invoked one of the concepts that I had stressed in the debate: democracy is not a gift bestowed by higher-ups.

  The students’ immediate cause was to democratize elections for “district people’s representative.” The Chinese constitution stated that every three years, at the district level—the lowest level—representatives of the people were to be elected directly by the people. This was the only direct-election right that citizens had. Election law provided further that any person who had the support of ten or more voters could stand for election. In several decades of practice, however, that right had never been exercised. The authorities had always named the candidates, and the voters had merely drawn circles to indicate concurrence.

  The election in the district that contained USTC was scheduled for December. The government’s election committee had prepared its list of candidates as usual, had announced it on November 28, and had set the election for December 5. On November 30, the day I debated Wan Li, a wall poster went up on the USTC campus asking that the candidates meet with voters to answer questions. A flurry of similar posters followed the next day. The students were refusing to recognize the government-appointed candidates. They said that if the rules of the election law were not followed rigorously, they would boycott the election. A confrontation was shaping up.

  Because the students had the letter of the law on their side, the government’s election officials were obliged to cancel their plans and begin the nominating process anew. They announced that an assembly at which candidates and voters could interact would take place on December 4. This meeting became an almost unheard-of event in China: several thousand students crowded an auditorium for what was essentially a free political convention.

  Even though the authorities themselves had called the meeting, it was clear to me that in Beijing’s view, it counted as a “student disturbance” of the kind that a university official is supposed to minimize. This put me in a bind. It was my job to put out the fire, but on the other hand, the students were not wrong and it was my duty to protect them. I decided to sidestep the dilemma by staying away from the meeting and monitoring its progress from my apartment. Perhaps a third way would emerge, I hoped.

  My sidestepping didn’t work. Around 10:00 p.m. the student convention was showing no sign of winding down. No longer able to resist, I went to take a look. But then, as soon as I set foot inside the hall, I became a sort of prisoner of the situation. The students were still at fever pitch and still, at that late hour, numbered a thousand or more. They seemed ready to explode the place. They waved for me to go onstage and state my view. To refuse to speak would have been wrong (as well as impossible, actually), and to speak against conscience in such a situation was even less thinkable. So I went onstage and said some things extemporaneously, and what I said became the basis for my article “Democracy Is Not Bestowed from Above.” I closed with these words:

  It really is true that democracy will arrive only if we all work for it … The only reliable democracy is a democracy that is built on popular awareness and won by struggle from below. A thing bestowed from above, after all, can always be taken back from above (cheers and long applause) … What we see here this evening—free competition for election, everyone able to express his or her own view—is genuine progress. Once before, six years ago, students at Peking University tried to hold free elections. They elected two representatives. And then what? Those two students were given especially bad job assignments when they graduated (mass groan from the audience). The obstructionists are still with us today, still doing what they can to block the progress of democracy … and that is why this evening’s event here at USTC, where everyone is free to express an opinion, is so extremely important. Tonight’s meeting is democracy in action, and it is why I, as a vice president of your school, am here to say I will defend any person who, tonight, has stood for election, has cast a vote, or has expressed an opinion, no matter what that opinion may have been (lengthy cheers throughout the hall). I hope tonight’s meeting will be the starting point of a process of democratization at USTC and I promise again that I will do what I can to protect this sort of activity. If anyone tries to persecute those who have spoken out tonight in the way those two students at Peking University were persecuted six years ago, they will have to fire me first (joyous, lengthy cheers throughout the hall).

  The students reached their goal. They successfully claimed the right to nominate candidates for election as the law provided. But they did not want to stop there. They wanted to take their victory to the rest of society. They decided to go to the streets on the afternoon of the next day, December 5, to spread their ideas about how local elections ought to be conducted.

  I was not in favor of this move. Going off campus would precipitate problems at another level and, unless there were very careful preparations, might amount only to a big show with no real progress. Besides, as university vice president I felt a responsibility for the students’ safety. On campus, I could have some say over that; off campus, what could I do?

  On the morning of December 5, I called in six or seven of the student leaders and tried to dissuade them from their afternoon plans. But I failed. At 12:30 p.m. students were already gathering in front of the USTC library, ready to march. At 1:00 p.m. I went to the library myself, hoping to spend the modicum of prestige I had earned with the students to persuade them, at the last moment, not to go to the streets. My words worked with about 40 percent of them. The rest—more than a thousand—marched off, holding up banners that read, among other things, DEMOCRACY IS NOT BESTOWED FROM ABOVE. They really were too young, I felt. Some of them, in response to my plea, had said, “Please let us go this one time, Teacher Fang! We’ve never been to a demonstration before!” They saw it as a sort of game. They had no idea how serious the consequences could be under a political system like China’s.

  Luckily, on that particular march, nothing bad happened. The police had been notified of the parade route in advance, and neither the students nor the authorities caused any trouble. Traffic police along the route facilitated the march and even exchanged some salutes with the marching students. The provincial government authorities were reasonable as well; they announced that the right to demonstrate is provided in the Chinese constitution and that this demonstration was legal. After the march the students gradually calmed down.

  This was not the first student demonstration of the season, but it was the first to make a political demand: a call for real elections. The issue had broad resonance. Soon students at other college campuses—in all, 156 campuses in twenty-nine different cities—were out marching as well, and the slogans echoed the ones that had appeared at USTC. If the authorities everywhere had responded as wisely as the authorities in Anhui Province had on December 5, things could have proceeded peacefully throughout the country. But that did not happen.

  Shanghai authorities took the lead in the nosedive. On December 17, students in Shanghai went to the streets after applying, as the Hefei students had, for recognition that their demonstrations were lawful. But the Shanghai authorities ignored the application and instead called in police, early in the morning on December 19, to disperse the demonstrators by force. This move enraged students all across the country.

  About 3:00 p.m. on December 23, students at USTC took to the streets again, this time in support of the Shanghai students. Their mood, in marked contrast from the last time, was combative. They marched downtown and gathered in the square in front of the Hefei municipal government offices, where they demanded that the Anhui authorities announce a condemnation of the violence that the Shanghai authorities had used. The Anhui officials rebuffed that demand, and commu
nication between the students and the authorities broke down. Both sides stiffened. Refusing to disperse from the square, the students began a sit-in. Crowds of onlookers grew. When evening arrived, the Anhui Party Committee began to consider whether it, too, should use force to disperse the students. The situation was extremely tense.

  Guan Weiyan and I made a quick decision to go talk with the students. Around 10:00 p.m., we squeezed through the crowd and into the city government compound, where we found that the east side of the main building had been occupied by the students while city officials continued to inhabit the west side. The two sides were not speaking. The first thing Guan and I did was to run back and forth carrying messages, trying to mediate. After two hours, a compromise emerged: the students would end their sit-in if Hefei officials promised to forward the student demands to their counterparts in Shanghai. But a big question loomed. Would the students outside the building—more than a thousand and still very energetic—accept the compromise that had been reached on the inside? If even a minority of them rejected it, the sit-in would continue. The student negotiators, hoping to increase the likelihood of agreement, asked Guan Weiyan and me if we would accompany them outside to announce the deal and to urge its acceptance. For me, this was a fearsome challenge. I had no confidence at all that I could address a throng of a thousand agitated young people and, with a few words, persuade them to end a sit-in. If I failed, though, violence would be the certain result. There wasn’t much time, either. Early morning was the time the authorities normally chose for the application of violence. So, confident or not, I had to go try.

  The order of speakers was: student leaders, Guan Weiyan, me. I have no memory of the exact words I chose that night, and even if I could remember them, and were to write them down here, I’m afraid they would strike the reader as incoherent floundering. In that kind of situation—facing shouts of protest, the chanting of slogans, and triumphant cheers, all woven together into one continuous undulating cacophony—logic could hardly be the tool of choice. Only by opening my heart, in full, could I hope to capture even a shred of credibility. I can remember only my last sentence: “So I think it’s best if we just end today’s protest here and go back to campus.”