by Fang Lizhi
As I looked down from the Hanging Temple on the people below, I saw them there still: plainclothes police—watching, waiting.
20. THIRTEEN MONTHS
Precisely ten days after coming down from the Hanging Temple, I walked into the United States embassy in Beijing to take refuge. Who could have imagined such a turn of events? I daresay that almost no one in Beijing, almost no Chinese person anywhere, and almost no television viewers around the world were ready to believe that what was about to happen during those ten days could ever happen. Here’s what happened: the central government of China mobilized two hundred thousand regular troops, supplied them with regular military weaponry (tanks and submachine guns), and used regular military formations and tactics to force an entry into its own capital city—territory that it already held.
Then, about 9:00 p.m. on June 3, a massacre of students and other citizens began. At 9:30 Li Shuxian and I received a phone call from a student at Muxidi, the first of the massacre sites. The caller urged us to flee. We could hear gunshots in the background.
The outbreak of killing, horrible in itself, was also a sign to Li Shuxian and me that our own situation had taken a sharp turn for the worse. We felt this because a few days earlier the Chinese authorities, in preparing the ground for what they were about to do, had organized a “demonstration” in a Beijing suburb. They issued straw hats to farmers, paid them 15 yuan apiece, and ordered them to go out and chant “Down with Fang Lizhi!” At the end of the demonstration the farmers burned a paper effigy of me.
Some of my colleagues overseas were intensely worried when they saw this news. Remo Ruffini called from Italy about twice a day. He just wanted to hear my voice in order to assure himself that I had not been arrested and that some kind of unpredictable thing had not happened. I myself, preoccupied by immediate events, did not sense that much danger. Seeing the effigy burn actually gave me a sense more of ludicrousness than of terror.
A journalist asked one of the protesters, “Do you know Fang Lizhi?”
“No.”
“Then why do you want to knock him down?”
“They said he won’t let us go into the city to sell watermelons.”
After the massacre, though, no humor of any sort was appropriate. We got quite a few phone calls. They were all short, like the one from the student at Muxidi: “Run.” “Get out now.” “Save yourselves.” Still I felt hesitant. Flee our home during peacetime? Something seemed wrong with that. About 11:00 a.m. on June 4 we got a phone call from an old friend, a man who used to work in an organization at the highest level of the government. Afraid that the police who regularly tapped our phone might recognize his voice, he substituted the dialect of his hometown for the standard Mandarin that he normally used with us.
“I’m using a public telephone on the street to call you,” he said. “What are you waiting for? Why aren’t you out looking for a clean place to stay?”
In the past, his information had always been reliable. His call made us realize that we really did have to consider leaving home.
We had four alternatives. Two were to go hide for a while in nearby homes of friends. The two friends who made this offer both came to see us on the afternoon of June 4. The third alternative was to go to the home of a professor who lived rather far away; a friend had already arranged a car that could pick us up at 8:00 p.m. The fourth alternative was to go to the U.S. embassy. Professor Perry Link had said he could help.
After thinking it over we ruled out the first three alternatives. We did not want to pull friends down with us in our ill fate. But we did not want to go straight to the U.S. embassy, either, because we worried that once this fact was known, the regime could use it to “show” that foreigners had instigated the whole student movement. So we chose a compromise. We went to the Shangri-La Hotel, where CBS Television helped us, and spent a night there.
At that point we were still underestimating the seriousness of the matter. We still thought that after a few days of flying bullets and prowling soldiers, it might be safe to go home again. That’s why, when I left home, I carried only a small briefcase holding a few daily-use items plus partial drafts of two articles. A half hour before we left home, I asked a friend to come pick up some research manuscripts and letters and take them to the Beijing Observatory, where I thought I could use them when I returned to work after a few days.
But the next day, June 5, conditions got no better. Sporadic gunfire continued. It was clear that we couldn’t stay very long at the Shangri-La. Around noon, we headed for the other side of the city, to the U.S. embassy, accompanied by Professor Perry Link and a CBS employee who carried an emergency telephone. At the embassy we made two requests: that we be allowed to stay a few days, and that our presence be kept secret. The embassy people told us frankly that the second request would be almost impossible to meet.1 So, still not wanting to create news that the regime could exploit, we left the embassy around 5:00 p.m.
We went to the nearby Jianguo Hotel for the night. Beijing remained in a warlike state. Cannon fire was audible in the distance, and as midnight approached we still could not sleep. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. It was Raymond Burghardt and another official from the U.S. embassy. They were dressed in casual clothing but seemed burdened and tense. Was their workload too heavy? Were the streets under martial law too gloomy? What was it? In any case they lowered their voices and said, very formally, “We invite you to our embassy as the guests of our president; you may live there as long as you need.”
Matters had clearly escalated. By now it would be hard to make any other choice, so we accepted. A few minutes later we got into an embassy car that was waiting at the back of the hotel. Like other formal guests, we were driven straight to the ambassador’s residence. We arrived at midnight on June 6, 1989, and that moment began our thirteen months (384 days and 10.5 hours, to be precise) of life in refuge.
That same day a White House spokesman confirmed our location. The fact was public now, and this was both good and bad. The good part was that our friends all knew where we were and that we had protection. In the next twenty-four hours we began receiving sympathetic telegrams and faxes from both inside China and overseas.
The bad part—the dangerous part—was the risk of precipitating a forced entry of the embassy by Chinese soldiers. Diplomatic protocol forbids this sort of thing, but for a regime that had just carried out a massacre, who could say? Protocol was no guarantee. In 1967, rampaging Red Guards had burned the British embassy to the ground. In 1989, might an irrational regime crash in to grab Fang Lizhi? It could have happened.
The first three weeks were the tensest. James Lilley, the U.S. ambassador, had just been appointed and had not yet moved into the ambassador’s residence, where we were housed. The building was basically unoccupied. The daylight hours seemed safe enough, but at night only a lone watchman was there, and under cover of darkness it would not have been hard to break in and whisk two people away. The regime could thumb its nose at diplomatic objections and just say “the angry masses” had demanded it.
The best defense, the Americans told us, was to make it seem that the entire building was empty. This meant avoiding any sign on the outside that anyone at all was inside. Tactics included: make no phone calls, and do not answer the phone; allow only the ambassador and one or two other people to have contact; at night, keep any interior light far dimmer than the exterior light in the adjacent streets; in the toilets, flushing and drainage must be soundless; in sleep, no sleep-talking or sleep-singing. That last item was the most difficult, but we managed.
We felt constantly on edge. The tension reached a peak on June 12 when the authorities published warrants for our arrest. Even the night watchman, who was afraid of a replay of the incineration of the British embassy, wore a haggard expression. We made contingency plans, just in case. But two weeks passed and nothing happened. There were not even any staged protests—no burning of effigies—outside the embassy gates. The danger seemed to be subsiding
.
Was this forbearance on the part of the authorities, or pursuit of their own interests in another guise? It was the latter, I’m sorry to say—it is always the latter. Consider the following story, which was relayed to us by Ambassador Lilley: In the days right after the massacre, the number of applications for U.S. visas from the children of the top leaders remained the same or was even slightly higher than it had been before. One day in July, Teng Teng, the vice chair of the State Education Commission, summoned Ambassador Lilley to deliver a stern protest of the recent decision by the U.S. Congress to allow Chinese students in the United States who had spoken out against the massacre to extend their U.S. stays indefinitely. After the denunciation, the ambassador returned to his residence and, in less than an hour, received a telephone call from the secretary of the same Teng Teng. The reason for the call was to entreat the ambassador to see to it that Teng Teng’s wife’s application for a U.S. visa be approved. In addition, could he please arrange that Madame Teng Teng be given “indefinite residence” status? It turned out that the couple’s four children were already in the United States and already had this status. Now let’s ask this: How likely is it that officials like these, so intensely focused on getting their families out to America, would be so stupid as to risk all by breaking into an embassy to grab a couple of criminals? Many a weird thing has happened in human history, and here, certainly, is one: the psychology of the shameless bureaucrat had become our first line of defense.
But we couldn’t, of course, put too much trust in a defense built on people to whom fundamental morality was alien, and that is why, for the entire thirteen months of our stay in the embassy, our location had to remain just as secret as it was on the first day. The windows of our “apartment” were nailed shut with thick boards, a security alarm was installed on the door, and we never dared to walk in the courtyard.
Underground tunnels were a considerable worry. In the early 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution, a web of tunnels about six to ten feet below the surface had been built all across Beijing. Entrances to this tunnel maze were everywhere, and some, although now blocked off, had already been found inside the ambassador’s residence. One had to wonder: Had they really been blocked off? And where did they lead? There were no maps for this sort of thing. Deep at night we could hear, quite clearly, the muffled sounds of footsteps—plunk, plunk—somewhere, and it was frightening. It was only a modest comfort to realize, when we thought about it, that since those sounds were so audible, if someone really were to try to dig an illegal tunnel to us it would not be hard to hear them coming.
In any case, our blanket of protection extended from the skies above into the earth below. The regime, too, watched everything between heaven and earth to prevent us from slipping out. During August and September a rumor spread that Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian had been spirited out of the embassy by some secret means and now were already living outside the country. The Chinese authorities gave some credence to these rumors and made a number of formal demands through diplomatic channels that Ambassador Lilley promise that the Fang couple not be transported out of China secretly. The ambassador declined to respond to those inquiries, and his nonresponse fed further speculation that the Americans were preparing (or perhaps had already accomplished) a secret evacuation of the Fangs from China.
On October 28, 1989, the U.S. embassy hosted a Halloween party. By custom, at such events, invitees wear masks, and some Americans that evening had the bright idea of wearing Fang Lizhi masks. When the Chinese authorities heard this, they panicked. They ordered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to summon the U.S. ambassador and to deliver a stern warning that the Fang Lizhi couple not be smuggled out of the embassy using Halloween disguises. To this the ambassador did respond. He guaranteed that he would not choose Halloween as the day to see his guests off.
We ourselves never had any impulse to sneak out. We were guests. Should guests have to steal out a side door? But we cooperated in the secrecy, which of course was necessary. At one point the embassy ran a test to see how the secrecy was doing. Since all of the non-American embassy staff had been assigned their jobs by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it was impossible to know which of them had covert espionage duties. The embassy’s test was to put out an item of false news about asylees in order to observe the reaction of embassy staff. The result of the test showed that the authorities did not know which area of the embassy compound held asylees and did not know how many there were.
At least three foreign embassies in Beijing protected people after the Tiananmen massacre, but our case was the only one the media and the public knew about. In matters like this, negotiations between two governments are normally easier if the media are kept out, because that leaves more room to maneuver. In our case, the Chinese government had to worry about saving face, and the U.S. government felt pressure to be seen as upholding principle. Room to maneuver shrank on both sides. The other post-Tiananmen cases, which did not hit the media, were all resolved within three months, but ours remained locked in stalemate.
Asylum in embassies elsewhere, in earlier times, had sometimes lasted five or ten years. We were prepared, therefore, that the stalemate in our case might hold for some time—something like three or five years, until the people who had ordered our arrest had stepped down, or perhaps had died.
I felt fortunate that my professional work was a kind that could survive through long-term solitude. One day, during an informal visit by the ambassador, he said he felt sorry that “you’re an astrophysicist but we can’t even give you a room from which you can see the sky.”
“That’s okay,” I answered. “I’m a theoretical astrophysicist. I don’t need to see the sky in order to tell you what’s going on there.”
What I needed was a computer. Again I was fortunate, because one of the diplomats, who originally had been a student of mathematics, was being transferred back home and was ready to part with his first-generation Apple computer. It was an old machine, not as good as the one I had left at home—which by now had been confiscated in a police raid and could not be retrieved in any case. That old Apple was less than ideal but it would do. I could study the universe with it. I reflected on the fact that the great physicists who had designed the first atomic bomb did not even have calculators. I programmed the Apple so that it could run all night doing calculations. I think the regime’s surveillance equipment could probably detect the ultra-high-frequency signals that the machine was emitting, but I seriously doubt that they could understand that what they were hearing was a model for a multiply-connected universe.
Shortly after we entered the embassy, astrophysicist friends around the world began sending me materials—books, articles, and copies of the major professional journals. These grew to be so numerous that the man who delivered mail at the embassy joked with us, “Your mail is overloading the diplomatic pouch—you should ask your physicist friends to pay postage to the State Department.” We felt better when an American physicist wrote to us saying, “I paid my taxes today and felt okay about it—with you living in our embassy, at least my government is getting something right.”
The first article I finished inside the embassy, which I sent out for publication in September, was called “An Upper Limit to the Intrinsic Velocity of Quasars.” The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the United States then began distributing preprints of my articles, and colleagues inside China could obtain them that way. This was important for more than scientific reasons. Our entry into the embassy had meant that we were completely and abruptly cut off from our friends in Beijing. My scientific articles at Fermi were the first new signs they had of us. One colleague who figured out a way to get a letter to us in the embassy wrote, “We were relieved to see your article; it gave us confidence that you could hold out until those people die off.”
This colleague had it right. We could hold out. There was no problem at all with our spirits. Our problem was physical—we didn’t have enough space for activity. For thirteen
months, the area in which we could move was only forty-two paces at its widest. But we were prepared to be patient. A year? Two years? Three? Five? We could wait.
The men who ruled China, though, could wait only four months. When we entered the embassy they at first were elated. They had been dealt wonderful cards to play both internationally and domestically. To the world they could say, “Look how the United States is meddling in our domestic affairs,” and to the Chinese people they had “evidence” that the student movement had been manufactured and directed by the Americans working through Fang Lizhi. Apparently judging that this card would be useful for quite some time, the authorities brushed off several early proposals from the Americans to resolve the crisis by sending us to a third country. Brent Scowcroft, the U.S. National Security Advisor, who was sent by President Bush as a special emissary to China, ran into a brick wall on this issue. Chinese authorities told him that Fang Lizhi was now a burden on America’s back that the United States would just have to bear.
Meanwhile the official Chinese press was busy denouncing us. Its message was monotone: anyone under protection in a foreign embassy is a “traitor.” The authorities were apparently calculating that if they just kept repeating, “Fang Lizhi is a traitor, a traitor, a huge traitor,” the United States would eventually come to feel that the burden was indeed too heavy to bear and would turn Fang and Li over to the Chinese government to face punishment. What they didn’t realize was that the thief’s tactic of crying “Stop, thief!” could work only inside their own country; it didn’t work in other countries. In fact, the more loudly we were denounced as traitors in China, the more mail we got from U.S. citizens who wrote that the Chinese government’s repression and persecution of us increased the pride that they felt in our being guests in their country’s embassy. Perhaps because American administrations are beholden to voters who have sentiments like this, it seemed that the more the Chinese government shouted “Traitor!” the more the American government felt that the “burden” was becoming valuable. After each new volley of invective from the Chinese press, our treatment from our American hosts seemed to improve. At one point, when Li Shuxian got a toothache, the Americans flew a top-quality dentist all the way from Tokyo to pull the tooth and fix the problem.