The Most Wanted Man in China

by Fang Lizhi

  This told us several things. For one, it showed that the highest priority of the highest-ranking agent in charge of security for the U.S. president was not the security of the U.S. president.

  Countermeasure Three: Suspension of public transportation.

  With advance impossible, retreat was our only option. We decided to go to the U.S. embassy to seek a determination about the alleged “Secret Service name list.” Our car and driver were by now nowhere to be seen. We lined up for a taxi at another nearby hotel, but after a few hundred yards police forced that car, too, to stop. Next we tried the public bus system, but once again the police were a step ahead. As we waited at a bus stop, we could see police flag down buses before they arrived. Something was said to the drivers, who then drove past our stop without stopping. No one could get either on or off. Passengers on the buses and would-be passengers waiting to board were of course puzzled and frustrated. Our plight (if not our taint) had spread to them.

  Countermeasure Four: Accompaniment on a nighttime stroll.

  We abandoned the idea of boarding any sort of vehicle and set out toward the embassy on foot. It was already 7:00 p.m. or so; the sky was dark and the temperature was falling. But we were never alone: in front, behind, and on both sides, police were always “accompanying”—some in uniform, some in plainclothes—and a police car always tailed. At each intersection an armed motorcycle with a sidecar awaited, engine humming, ready for action. The visible police that night must have numbered at least a hundred; the number behind the scenes, invisible to us, must have been that many or more. So there you have it: a single dissident, just one person who says, “I will be free,” is reason to deploy more than a hundred armed police.

  We reached the embassy district around 8:30 p.m. By chance we met a Canadian diplomat, David Horley, who was out with his wife for an evening stroll. When they learned of our predicament they invited us to their apartment. We accepted, and this move stymied the police, who could not enter the home of a diplomat and therefore could no longer “accompany” us. But police vehicles pulled right up to the gate of the Horleys’ apartment building, where they waited, at the ready.

  Countermeasure Five: A police escort to a press conference.

  This was the most baffling of the countermeasures. During the hour between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. at the Horley apartment, we received calls from journalists. They had noticed that the seats for Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian at the banquet were empty and they had called our residence to find out why. Our son Fang Zhe, who was at home, knew we were at the Horleys’ because we had called him from there right away, just to assure him that we were all right. He gave the Horleys’ number to reporters, and the stream of their calls was incessant. We decided to go to the Shangri-La Hotel, where hundreds of international journalists who had come to Beijing to cover the Bush visit were centered. This would be more efficient: we could answer everyone’s questions at once. We had to assume that the authorities were listening in when we mentioned the plan on the telephone, and we worried that police might once again appear to prevent us from seeing the journalists. Horley volunteered his car, and we indeed were followed—but not blocked. We reached the Shangri-La with no problems.

  Why did they let us go? The most plausible explanation for the peculiar forbearance is that the authorities, in drawing up their plan for the evening, had omitted the journalism question. The job of Chinese police is to carry out plans; if something is not in a plan, they do not take initiatives on their own.

  Let me insert an anecdote to illustrate this mentality. In October 1987 a researcher at the Beijing Observatory was killed in an automobile accident. The traffic police requested, repeatedly, that the death be recorded as “accidental,” not as a “traffic death.” They wanted this because the quota for traffic deaths in their annual plan was nearly full. If the number of traffic deaths were to exceed the number in the plan, they would not get their bonuses for plan fulfillment. Their problem was that the bereaved family would not honor the request. The family insisted that the death be truthfully recorded as a traffic death while the police continued to make up reasons why “accident” was a better label. The family eventually prevailed, but in January of the new year, the police unfurled a splendid banner in front of the Beijing Observatory. I can’t remember it word for word, but it was something like STRUGGLE HARD TO FILL THIS YEAR’S PLAN FOR THE NUMBER OF TRAFFIC DEATHS!

  In any case, at 11:30 on the evening of the banquet, at an impromptu press conference for international journalists, we explained what had happened. The reporters were excited. From the police point of view, the work plan of several hundred personnel had been successfully executed. But the success had stolen from President Bush the headlines in the next day’s newspapers all around the world.

  After the banquet affair, the authorities redoubled their “care” for me.

  On the evening of March 6, 1989, I boarded the Beijing–Shanghai Express to go to the annual meeting of the Chinese Astronomical Society in Suzhou. Three colleagues from the Beijing Observatory traveled with me, as did a graduate student who had been my assistant when I served as vice president of the University of Science and Technology of China. The trip was uneventful, and we arrived on time the next morning at the New Shanghai station.

  Three people were there to meet us—or to meet me, I should say, because they paid little attention to the others. The chief greeter was Yang Yiquan, deputy director of the famous Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing. It was clear that the authorities had deputized him to “care” for me. I knew Yang as a colleague and, not wanting to cause him trouble, readily accepted his care and got into the car that was waiting for us. We departed Shanghai, where “problems” in the wake of the banquet affair were still rife, and headed for Suzhou.

  Yang was straightforward. As soon as our car had left the station, he turned to me and said, “Do you think we could avoid setting off any atomic bombs in Suzhou, my good fellow? We’re old friends; please promise me this.”

  I knew, of course, what he meant by “atomic bombs.”

  “I’m here for the Big Bang in the cosmos, not for any other,” I answered.

  This reply accorded with my general policy. Ever since that conference on gravitational physics in Guangzhou in 1987, I had made it a point to limit my activity at scientific meetings to the reading of scientific papers and to say nothing about political or social questions. I did this to save trouble for my colleagues, and the meetings in Suzhou would be no different. I would read my paper on the origins of the universe. My only other goal would be to visit Guanqian Street to buy some of the dried tofu for which Suzhou is famous.

  The main difference between the situations in Suzhou and Guangzhou was that here, for five days, every single one of my activities got special care. (This included even a special car and special companionship for my stroll along Guanqian Street.) The other astronomers, through their association with me, received care as well. For the duration of the conference, no one but formal participants was allowed inside our hotel. The manager had orders that the hotel receive no guests other than astronomers and that no outsiders be allowed to visit any guest. The official reason offered for this policy was that the stars and the universe that the scientists were studying were extremely sensitive secrets that had to be protected at all costs. The astronomers, bemused at this dramatic elevation of their status, felt an odd elation.

  Certain others, though, experienced train wreck. Two editors from the Education Publishing House in Shanghai, for example, were staying for a few days at Suzhou University, and one of them had been the editor for my book A Bird’s-Eye View of the Frontiers of Astrophysics. When they heard that I was in Suzhou, they invited me to dinner at the Suzhou University dining hall on the evening of March 8. I accepted. No one else was present when we spoke, and yet, less than three hours later, authorities at Suzhou University summoned the two editors for interrogation: How had they made contact with Fang Lizhi? Why were they inviting him, of all people, to e
at at Suzhou University? And so on. My two friends answered the questions, one by one, with the plain truth, and in the end their punishment was thankfully light: it was that they must leave Suzhou University immediately, and never, ever, try to eat there again.

  Astrophysicists are fond of puzzles, and when word of this episode spread among the conference participants, the question of the day became, “Exactly how did the authorities know within only three hours that Fang Lizhi was going to Suzhou University for dinner?” The theoretical astrophysicists applied their rigorous methods of logic to rule out a number of possible explanations, while the observational astronomers invoked the methods with which they were most familiar: detection of which personnel in the hotel were the most likely moles for State Security.

  With heaven’s favor, and despite the minor distractions, the five-day conference ended in success. When we said our good-byes, Yang Yiquan was effusive in his warmth. Clearly grateful to me, he noted that “no atom bomb went off.”

  But there was, alas, another atom bomb whose explosion was edging ever closer in that season.

  As it happens, atomic explosion provides a surprisingly apt metaphor for Chinese society in the spring of 1989. Three elements, basically, are necessary for the detonation of an atomic bomb: (1) fissionable material in sufficient amount, (2) a means to coalesce the fissionable material into a critical mass, and (3) timely neutron bombardment. China in 1989 had, metaphorically speaking, all three.

  First, the supply of fissionable material: Ever more obvious corruption, stalled political reform, and tight constraints on freedom of speech and of the press were producing anger, frustration, and resentment among students, intellectuals, workers, small-time entrepreneurs, Party functionaries, and even some high-ranking officials. The potential for explosion was growing steadily.

  Second, factors that could bring the fissionable material to a critical mass: The several anniversaries in 1989—the seventieth of the May Fourth Movement, the fortieth of the People’s Republic of China, and the tenth of the Democracy Wall movement—could become vortices in the sea of unorganized popular resentment.

  Third, neutron bombardment: Flying neutrons were in pretty steady supply. Small skirmishes kept popping up, now here, now there, in response to various ham-handed moves by the government. The clumsy handling of the “open letters on amnesty” was one of those bombarding neutrons.

  The death on April 15 of Hu Yaobang, the reformist former General Secretary of the Communist Party, accelerated the coalescence of the fissionable material and eventually exceeded, by a considerable margin, the threshold for a critical mass. Next: explosion!

  * * *

  When the student demonstrations began, my daily life fell into a pattern: in the mornings I went to work at the Observatory, in the afternoons I stayed at home receiving various visitors—mostly friends and students, but also reporters—and in the evenings I did my writing. Between April 16, when the student movement started, and May 20, when the regime declared martial law, I finished a paper called “Biased Clustering in a Universe with Hot Dark Matter and a Cosmic String.” I met with reporters a total of fifty-seven times.

  I always expressed support for the student movement when reporters asked me about it. But I never joined the demonstrations and never went to Tiananmen Square. My reason for staying away was that on April 20, just a few days after the demonstrations began, municipal-level authorities were already issuing internal memoranda saying that the uprising was the personal handiwork of Fang Lizhi and his wife. It was their justification-in-waiting for the moment when an order to crush the movement might arrive from the top.

  I owe a debt of gratitude to my colleagues at the Beijing Observatory for finding ways during those days to shield me from the thrusts the authorities were delivering. An important example came on April 27, when students organized a large demonstration to protest an editorial in the previous day’s People’s Daily. That editorial had labeled their movement “turmoil” and said it had been instigated by “a tiny minority” of people with “ulterior motives.” The language was obviously intended to prepare a case for suppression. It was a standard tactic, which had been used many times before, and my astrophysicist colleagues had little trouble guessing that the iniquitous “tiny minority” included me. Sure enough, when people came back from the demonstration that evening, they reported that word had been passed through the crowd that Fang Lizhi was mixing with the demonstrators—“running around giving orders.” This was a bad sign.

  I was lucky that my colleagues at the Observatory were such astute readers of official tactics. An event at the Observatory had long been scheduled for the morning of April 27—the French astrophysicist Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaud was to speak on “Millisecond Pulsars.” Should my colleagues cancel the event because of the “turmoil” on the streets? Not only did they not cancel it; they assigned me to chair it. Then, as they walked into the seminar room, quite a number of them said things like, “We can be witnesses: Fang Lizhi was not on the streets with the protesters today.” That was before anybody had reports about the Fang Lizhi rumors running through the streets; my colleagues had divined the authorities’ plan in advance.

  April 28, the next day, was the first time anyone advised Li Shuxian and me to leave our home and go into hiding. A group of younger colleagues came to us with this proposal, and they put it to us in no uncertain terms. They had heard, from well-placed sources near the pinnacle of state power, that “the relevant offices” were drawing up concrete plans to “deal with” Fang Lizhi. My movements were already being closely monitored, they said. (One piece of evidence that they were right about this is that the film the government later released to show that I had been a turmoil instigator included footage of me going to work at the Observatory during those days.) My young colleagues had already prepared a hiding place for us and had devised some special ways to communicate (which included, for example, picking up the telephone only after the eighth ring). They also offered training in how to throw off tailers on bicycles.

  I respectfully declined their offers. I did not feel that the situation had deteriorated to the point where hiding would be necessary, and I felt reluctant to pull out so abruptly from my work at the Observatory. But I did heed the warnings: I paid more attention to who was following by bicycle, and I avoided walking outdoors at night. One never knew.

  On May 12 the protesting students began a hunger strike, and a few days later, when the strike was at high tide, it so dominated the news that even the visit to Beijing of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was bumped from the headlines. The protesters in Beijing had riveted the attention of the world. For a few days it seemed that a brighter day for China was just around the corner, and those were the days when I really did wish that I could go down to Tiananmen to have a look at the stirring scenes. A number of students and friends—especially overseas friends—urged me to do it. “It’s time!” they kept saying. “You should go!” But colleagues who were closer to the realities at home were unanimous in insisting that I not appear at any public occasion. The road ahead was not nearly that bright, in their view, and the danger that “an unfortunate accident” might befall me was still very real. My colleagues at the Observatory, as they gathered to head out to the demonstrations, sometimes stopped by my office to say, “You stay here, and don’t worry—we will represent you.”

  On May 18, Professor Zhang Wuchang of Hong Kong University telephoned me with an earnest plea that I go to Tiananmen Square to persuade the students to end their hunger strike. I, too, felt that it would be better to end the hunger strike, and Zhang’s passionate appeal was almost enough to nudge me into action. For a moment I thought I should try. But on second thought, I stifled the impulse and stayed home. My experience of December 23, 1986, when I persuaded the USTC students to end their sit-in at Hefei, had shown me the furthest limits of my influence. There was no way I had the power to persuade the students at Tiananmen Square to end their hunger strike.

  In the days
after martial law was announced on May 20, rumors of arrest lists spread through Beijing. Who were the people the government was ready to nab and “rectify”? These lists came in several versions, but my name was on every one—sometimes higher, sometimes lower. My friends at the Observatory all thought that I should leave Beijing, perhaps by finding some scholarly meeting to go to.

  The mood in the city was abnormal in those days. Even traffic was odd. Many scholarly meetings were simply canceled. The world of astronomy soldiered on, however, persisting with a plan to hold a meeting from May 24 to 29 in Datong, Shanxi Province, on “high-energy stars.” Was this an atavism of the habits of ancient Chinese astronomers? For them, the more unstable society was, the harder they worked, because troubled times were exactly when society most needed their astrology.

  In any case, on the evening of May 24, a colleague and I left Beijing by train for Datong. At the Changping station on the northwest outskirts of Beijing, our train had to thread its way through the station on the only available track, because all the other tracks were crowded with military carriages. These were the cars that would carry the troops who, a few days later, would kill their way eastward into the heart of Beijing.

  Despite its perilous context, the meeting of astronomers in Datong went off without a hitch. My paper was on “High-Energy Processes in Supernova 1987A.” On May 26 the conference had a day off, and some of us went to visit the famous nearby Hanging Temple, whose construction is truly stunning. None of its several dozen halls of various sizes rests on a foundation in the ground; the whole edifice clings to the side of a towering vertical rock wall. The philosophical point that the construction suggests is that in order to cultivate oneself into Buddhahood, one must leave the earth, must transcend, must rise above the troubles of mundane human life.