by Fang Lizhi
What happened next seems in my memory something of a miracle. The thousand or more students arose from their sitting positions, one by one, and began to trickle out of the back of the compound. I was stunned. I truly had not imagined that that final sentence would make any difference.
It was 2:00 a.m. when I finally got back to USTC—utterly exhausted, but too excited to fall asleep. A possible disaster had been averted, and peacefully. The next day I heard that the Anhui authorities had commended Guan Weiyan and me for our roles in the matter.
But the central authorities saw things very differently. I began receiving a stream of phone calls from Li Shuxian, who was in Beijing and had heard, on impeccable authority, that Party Central was right then holding a meeting on what to do about the Fang Lizhi problem. One of the alternatives, she had heard, was to arrange an auto “accident” and just be done with it. She wanted me to leave USTC and return to Beijing as soon as possible. I couldn’t quite believe everything I was hearing from her, though. Guan Weiyan and I were at the front lines of the problem, working hard to calm things down—and we had, in fact, calmed things down. How could Party Central not know this? Besides, my classes were still in session. I still had the teacher’s duty to hold class. You can’t walk away from someone else’s children, as the Chinese proverb says. So I stayed in Hefei until December 30, then left for Beijing.
The following events, from 6:00 p.m. on December 29 to 6:00 p.m. on December 30, occupied the last twenty-four hours (I did not know at the time they would be the last) of my twenty-eight years of working at USTC.
December 29, 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.: I taught my last class. It was on gravitation and quantum physics.
December 29, 9:00 to 11:00 p.m.: I did an interview with Tseng Hui-yen, a reporter from Hong Kong. She was the only non-mainland reporter covering the USTC events at the time, and it turned out that her photos of me, which she took on her little instant camera, were the ones the media later treated as the standard Fang Lizhi photos.
December 29, 11:00 p.m.: The results of the voting at USTC were announced. I was elected as the district people’s representative.
December 30, 8:30 to 10:00 a.m.: I did an interview with a reporter from the Associated Press. The authorities allowed the interview—the only one they allowed to a foreign journalist—but would not let the journalist enter the campus. So we met outside, at the Luyang Guest House.
December 30, 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.: I chaired a meeting to evaluate the performance of USTC instructors. Several were promoted to associate professor or full professor.
December 30, 6:30 p.m.: I boarded a northbound train for Beijing.
My principles during those days of student unrest were, on the one hand, to support the just demands of the students, while, on the other, trying to show that the Communist Party still could be open-minded. Whether addressing students or talking with reporters, I did what I could to resolve the binds that the authorities were getting themselves into. Still, it was on that same day, December 30, in Beijing, that Deng Xiaoping finally lost his temper and said, “As for Fang Lizhi, we no longer ‘advise to resign’; now we expel.”
After the overnight train ride I went to our apartment at Peking University. It was New Year’s Eve, but there was no holiday spirit in the air. The next day students went out to march on snow-covered streets. A protest on New Year’s Day? Hardly a good omen.
The speech in which Deng Xiaoping said I should be expelled from the Communist Party turned into Document No. 1 of 1987 and was relayed downward through the bureaucracy, nationwide. It also became the first headline news of the year. I had, of course, been expelled once before, in 1958, but the feeling this time, twenty-nine years later, was very different. Might I invoke that famous line from Karl Marx that “history repeats itself, the first as tragedy, second as farce”? If Marx was speaking of my Party expulsions, he had it right. In the days after my first expulsion, some close friends distanced themselves from me—and that, yes, felt tragic. After the second expulsion, though, my stock soared. It was as if I’d won the lottery. Being the subject of Document No. 1 in a new year was, statistically speaking, a less likely occurrence than winning a lottery, and its power to spread one’s fame was a thousand times greater than any advertisement could be. So when students asked me, “What do you think of your nemesis, Mr. Deng Xiaoping?” it occurred to me to say, “Well, first, I need to thank him; where else could I have found such a good public relations agent?”
I received another free advertisement on the evening of January 12. National television, in prime time, announced that Guan Weiyan had been removed as president of USTC, that Fang Lizhi’s vice presidency had been revoked, and that Fang had been transferred from USTC to the Beijing Observatory. Li Shuxian and I were a bit late having dinner that evening, and I did not turn on the evening news when I usually did. Just past 7:00 p.m. the phone rang and a friend said, “Congratulations!” I had no idea what he meant, and said so.
“You’re not watching TV?” he asked. “You got revoked! Your split-family problem is solved! Aren’t you happy?!”
So there it was in a nutshell: congratulations on a firing. But he was right, at least, about the reason to rejoice. Our family had been forced to live apart since 1969, and I never dreamed that one by-product of the student demonstrations that arose in Hefei would be the fulfillment of my eighteen-year wish to be reunited with my family.
I was in the newspaper headlines again on January 19, 1987, when it was formally announced to the nation that I had been expelled from the Communist Party. As noted in chapter 8, the Communist Party charter provides that the process for expelling a member begins with discussion at the local branch and that the decision is then sent to higher levels for approval—except during dire emergencies like wars or earthquakes. Yet this time, like the last, neither discussion nor earthquake proved to be necessary. I received a high honor—personal expulsion by the Party’s supreme authority.
Once again my fame got a major boost. It was highly unusual for the regime to lavish this much attention on a scientist, and yet the authorities seemed to feel my boost needed to be even bigger. They pulled together a two-hundred-page book of excerpts from my speeches, listed the editor as “Party Central,” printed half a million copies, and then sent copies to every Party branch in the country. The goal was to provide material for use in denouncing me, but the actual effect was the opposite. Nothing before or after has ever spread my ideas more effectively. Many people heard about me for the first time because of this little book, and quite a few apparently liked what they saw. When Party Central figured out what was happening, an urgent order went out to retrieve all those errant arrows. But it was hard to do. Pirated copies of the book were already for sale on the black market.
When news of my expulsion appeared, I started getting letters of support from all across China. Then, when the little book of wrong opinions appeared, there was a flood of them. One day I got 157 letters. They came from people of many kinds: college students, high school students, and a wide range of intellectuals, as well as some workers, soldiers, and officials—even officials in the central government. Some wrote to endorse my views, others to comfort me, and still others to rail against the stupidity of the regime. I received poems. Some were copied lines from ancient works, and some were original. This one sticks in my mind:
Leaving office, a person learns
The stars still shine, the sun still burns
But every hero always yearns
For the day when he returns
The poem got me right on the part about shedding official duties in order to return my attention to bright objects in the sky. But it got me wrong, I have to say, about the yearning to return. My youthful passion for the Communist Party had been but a distant memory when 1987 began, and by now even those faintest of vestiges were gone. I had friends who were indignant on my behalf; they said that Party Central had made a mistake and that I should be “rehabilitated” and my Party membership re-restored. The
goodwill of those friends moved me considerably, but their idea did not. It no longer mattered to me whether my expulsion was “correct,” or whether “rehabilitation” was warranted. I had no interest whatsoever in being a member of the Communist Party of China again. Good-bye, great, glorious, correct Party! Good-bye for good.
So what was I now? In the regime’s eyes, a “dissident.” The word was another foreign import to China. In Europe it had referred, originally, to adherents of unorthodox religion. Chinese society did not have religion in quite that same Western sense, and as a result there was no ready-made term in Chinese waiting to translate the word dissident. During forty years of Communist rule in China there had been, to be sure, plenty of people who did not subscribe to the officially enshrined ideology. In that sense I was no pioneer. But those other people had been called “counterrevolutionary elements,” “alien-class elements,” “bourgeois-rightist elements,” and the like. Not “dissidents.” One of the positive contributions of Deng Xiaoping’s opening of China in 1979 was that it allowed this concept of “dissident” to enter China. Under that label I was a pioneer. I was arguably the first open dissident in China.
For the regime, dissidents were a new breed and posed a new problem. How should they be handled? The authorities knew exactly what to do with all those counterrevolutionary elements, alien-class elements, and bourgeois-rightist elements, but what should they do with a dissident? Repress? Smash? Annihilate? Tolerate, in order to seem broad-minded? Try to buy off? For a time the regime seemed genuinely confused about what to do.
What happened to Li Shuxian and me in August 1987 illustrates the problem very well. An international conference on experiments in gravitational physics was to be held in Guangzhou that month under the auspices of Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) University. I was chair of the board of the Chinese Association for Gravitational and Relativist Astrophysics at the time, so it was more or less mandatory that I be invited. It was not very likely that such a specialized conference would draw much public attention, but still, to the Communist Party Committee of Guangdong Province, my pending arrival posed a major threat that the “dissident” virus might spread to Guangzhou. They proposed moving the conference outside the city to a remote county town—for “safety.” But that proposal brought stiff opposition from the foreign scholars who were the joint organizers of the conference. Some of them said that if the conference were moved in this way, they would boycott it. At that the authorities backed down, at least partway, and negotiated a compromise: the conference could stay just barely inside Guangzhou. It would be at the Nanhu Guesthouse in a suburb.
On August 2, Li Shuxian and I flew from Beijing to Guangzhou and settled in at the guesthouse. No problems. Everything was calm, and the conference began the next day. The day after that, though—August 4—Hong Kong journalists somehow figured things out and got my room number. I was scheduled to give a talk that morning—on gravitational waves and cosmology—and as I was going over my notes the phone kept ringing with requests for interviews. The meeting organizers reported that the lobby in the guesthouse was filling up with Hong Kong journalists and that some camera trucks were parked outside. All this bustle was over me, the dissident.
The Chinese organizer of the conference, Professor Hu Enke, was a colleague and a friend of mine. Not wanting my politics to upset his conference, I went to him and invited him to decide: “Should I do these interviews or not?” But this was not, unfortunately, a matter for someone at Professor Hu’s level to decide. Not even the president of Zhongshan University could decide it. It was an “emergency issue” that shot all the way up to the provincial Party Committee. There, we got a clear, if predictable, decision: no interviews, period.
But that word hardly stopped the Hong Kong reporters. Indeed, it seemed to attract more of them. The conference banquet was scheduled to be held that evening, and the reporters apparently calculated that I would have to emerge from my room around the banquet hour. That would give them, at a minimum, some photo opportunities. By afternoon the area outside our room was besieged by journalists. Mounted television cameras were trained on our windows. Any appearance by me at any door or window would yield footage. This scene produced another emergency report to the provincial Party Committee, who replied quickly with an order to pull all the curtains in the room and to unplug the telephone. After that, our meals were brought to our room—“every need filled at our feet,” as the Chinese saying has it—but we were not allowed to attend the banquet. The reporters were frustrated again.
Still they did not give up. It was printed on the conference schedule that I was to give a presentation the next morning, August 5. Quite a number of them decided to camp out in the woods near the guesthouse to wait to see, when the crunch came, whether the regime would let me out of my room for a scholarly presentation.
The authorities faced an excruciating dilemma. I learned later that on August 4 the Party Committees of Guangdong Province and of Zhongshan University stayed up all night trying to think the question through. In the end they decided to relent and to allow the journalists to do interviews and to make recordings for television and radio, but only during the time it would take me to walk from my room to the conference site. The next day that ten-minute walk took place as planned, but, for the reporters, it was over far too soon. Some who wanted more time tried to mix in with the conferencegoers to get inside the building, but none of them succeeded. The authorities had assigned about seventy highly experienced security personnel to guard the doors. These guards were very good at spotting journalists, and one by one they sent them on their way.
Right after my presentation, Professor Hu Enke informed me that Li Shuxian and I would have to leave the conference immediately. The Communist Party Committees of Guangdong Province and of Zhongshan University were jointly “inviting” us, as “honored guests,” for a deluxe tour of the Pearl River Delta. We understood, of course, that it was not up to us to decide whether we wanted to be honored guests. Professor Hu led us into a room adjacent to the conference meeting room. This room, it turned out, was connected to a secret underground tunnel that had been built for emergency escapes. (In foreign countries, the rooms in which scholarly meetings are held are equipped with normal fire escapes; secret underground tunnels are wholly a “Chinese characteristic.”) A car was waiting for us at the mouth of the tunnel. As we sped along—the tunnel was wide enough to allow cars to pass in two-way traffic—we could see lights of different colors flashing on the two sides. These seemed to be intersections with other tunnels. It was a separate underground world.
After about ten mysterious minutes, the car emerged into daylight. The Nanhu Guesthouse was nowhere in sight. We were in a large garden compound whose buildings were sequestered in foliage. There were soldiers guarding the grounds. We were met by a manager who explained that this was one of the sanctuaries for the very highest leaders when they visited Guangzhou. My goodness, I thought to myself, we were indeed “honored guests.” The staff at the compound were obviously unaware of our actual status; they must have assumed we were big shots from another province or maybe among the newly rich in Beijing, here in Guangzhou on tour. They eagerly reported to us about the Vice Premier of China who had just left, the chair of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference who spent the winter here every year, and so on.
Our short stay was very worthwhile—not because of the lovely setting or the great food, but because it gave us a glimpse into the lifestyle of the people who claim to represent the impoverished proletariat. We stayed in a suite for top Party officials. The bedroom alone was more than a thousand square feet. But what really puzzled us, as newcomers to all this, was why the bathroom, too, had to be so large. It was nearly 650 square feet. Was this so that, if both nature and nation called at the same time, a meeting of Party Central might convene here? The walls around the compound were more than ten feet high, impossible to jump over, and were more than three feet thick, enough to thwart a standard-caliber artillery she
ll.
For our three-day “honored guest” tour of the delta, we went to the small cities of Zhongshan, Xinhui, and Jiangmen. In each place we were “fortunate” to stay in the palace-villas of high officials. Some were French style, some American style. One had a golf course, and all three had separate quarters for retinues of servants and assistants. Local officials of the highest ranks came out to meet us at every stop. In Zhongshan, the mayor himself ate every meal with us, even breakfast. On our way back to Guangzhou from Jiangmen, we had to cross the West River, over which there was no bridge, only a ferry. When we reached the ferry about 180 vehicles of various sizes were waiting to cross. If we had stayed in line, the wait would have been at least an hour. But suddenly, as if from nowhere, a police car appeared in front of us. It cleared the way for us to drive past all of the waiting cars, trucks, and buses, straight to the ferry.
Why had the authorities decided, at this particular juncture, to regale Li Shuxian and me with this deluxe entertainment? This is hard to say. The whole thing may have been an experiment to see if “honored guest” treatment could soften dissidents in the way that, in the past, the method had worked on certain prisoners of war. It is undeniably true that when a person is whisked past a line of more than a hundred waiting vehicles, he or she can sense how wonderful it is to be attached to power, especially to big power.
But if that was the government’s calculation, it was fundamentally flawed, because even if it worked, it could hardly be used on every dissident. The authorities were afraid dissidence was going to spread like a communicable disease, and in the spring of 1987, something like that indeed was happening. More and more “dissidents” were popping up. To treat every single one as an “honored guest” would have been prohibitively expensive. Moreover, if the case of Li Shuxian and me were any guide, the treatment did not work.