The Most Wanted Man in China

by Fang Lizhi

  “I assume so.” Fang grinned.

  “Doesn’t that … bother you?” the reporter asked.

  “No,” Fang said. “For years I’ve been trying to get them to listen to me. If this is how they want to do it, then fine!”

  Conception of human rights. On June 4, 1989, hours after the worst of the massacre in Beijing, I went to Fang’s apartment. Li Shuxian answered the door, trembling with rage. “They’re mad! Truly mad!” she kept repeating, in a hoarse whisper. Fang, sitting at his desk, was managing to stay calm, although it seemed a struggle. Friends had been telephoning and urging the couple to flee, because word was already out that their names were at the top of the government’s wanted list of people responsible for the “counterrevolutionary riot.” But Fang said, “This is my home. I have done nothing wrong. Why should I leave?” In a situation where fear, anger, or confusion would overwhelm most people, Fang could see first principles first: no innocent person should have to leave a home.

  Youthful spirit. Not long before he died, I wrote to Fang praising his literary talent and saying I wished he would write more. He wrote back attaching an essay about a boyhood prank—one that does not appear in these memoirs. One of his neighbors at Messenger Alley in Beijing had been the famous opera singer Cheng Yanqiu. Fang and some playmates once had the bright idea of prying some gooey tar from the roadway and inserting it into the casing of Mr. Cheng’s doorbell button so that once it was pushed, the button would stick and the bell would not stop ringing. Then they pushed the button and ran away to watch the fun from a distance. I was struck in reading this essay that the boy who pulled that prank and the seventy-five-year-old man who sent me the essay about it were essentially the same person, the same authentic Fang Lizhi. In traditional Chinese literary culture, a “childlike heart” (tongxin) is a virtue that one works hard to preserve. Fang had such a heart and did not even have to work much to maintain it.

  In my talk at Fang’s memorial service, in addition to noting the eight salient virtues, I raised the question of how the world is different for Fang Lizhi’s having passed through it. I argued (as I did in my foreword to this book) that popular awareness of the notion of “rights” in China today has come as much from Fang Lizhi as from any other person one might name.

  Since then, I have asked others about Fang’s place in history. I put the question to Yü Ying-shih, who is arguably the greatest historian of China alive today; to Su Xiaokang, Zheng Yi, and other eminent Chinese writers; and to Xiao Qiang and others of Fang’s brilliant students.

  Some of them, Yü Ying-shih and Zheng Yi in particular, pointed out that Fang’s advocacy of rights in the 1980s should be seen as the resumption of a tradition that began in the first half of the twentieth century and then, with the Communist accession to power, was broken off for a few decades. Minquan (“people’s power” or “people’s rights”) was much discussed in the Shanghai press at the turn of the twentieth century, and thinkers like Hu Shi and Luo Longji wrote explicitly about rights during the “May Fourth era” of the late 1910s and the 1920s. Mao and the Communists obliterated this tradition in the 1950s, so Fang’s contribution in the 1980s should be seen more as a resumption than as an inauguration—although Fang’s was an especially courageous reprise, since the environment was so much harsher under the Communists.

  Nearly everyone I asked observed that Fang’s importance lay in his conceptual breakthrough. Other courageous dissidents were active in the 1980s, but their criticisms, in one way or another, were usually appeals that the existing system work better. The authorities, for their part, were also stressing constantly that their system had “Chinese characteristics,” that China, a unique civilization, is exceptional, and that they, the Communists, were the arbiters of what Chineseness is. Fang’s breakthrough was to highlight universal values, which were apparent to him in both science and human affairs. In the May Fourth era, sixty years earlier, “science and democracy” had been held up as twin ideals. Now Fang, who embodied both of the ideals as well as anyone, was saying that they are not twins so much as different aspects of the same thing. “Einstein did not do Jewish physics and I am not doing Chinese physics,” he said. Similarly, concepts of human rights did not change when one crossed a political border.

  Science was not only the fount of Fang’s thinking on human rights but the grounding that gave him both inner confidence and stature in the view of others. People deferred to him because he was a distinguished scientist; more important, though, it was his own mind’s grasp of the patterns of the universe that served as the internal rock that gave him confidence. No human authority, of whatever position in whatever hierarchy, could compete with this. Communist Party leaders who tangled with Fang were aware of this grounding and knew that—in science and logic, anyway—Fang had the upper hand. They could demote Fang, and did, but that was not science. Nor could they belittle science. It was named in the Four Modernizations, which in the 1980s was the guiding policy of the day. Moreover, Marxism claimed to be science. The leaders might not believe in Marxism in any serious sense, but they had to pretend that they did. Fang’s challenge-by-science frightened them more deeply than anything a writer or professor of Chinese might do.

  In the late 1980s, thanks largely to the regime’s miscalculation of how people would respond to his “bourgeois liberal” sayings, Fang found himself a popular hero across China. In the spring of 1989, the government ran a vilification campaign against him, but it fell largely on deaf ears. The “barefoot lawyer” Chen Guangcheng, working in rural Shandong Province at the time, reports that he heard not one negative word about Fang from ordinary people, who reflexively disbelieved what the government campaign was saying.

  After Fang’s exile in 1990, however, the government ban on the very mention of Fang’s name had its effects. His reputation lived on among colleagues at USTC, within China’s larger physics community, and among rights activists, but awareness of him in the broader public declined steadily. In this rise and fall of his reputation, the historian Yü Ying-shih sees a possible parallel between Fang and Hu Shi, the famous May Fourth thinker who proposed a literary revolution for China, more openness to the world, democracy, and other ideas that were, like Fang’s, conceptual breakthroughs in their time. Hu’s reputation with the Chinese public peaked in the late 1910s and early 1920s and eventually reached a low point with Mao Zedong’s denunciation of him in the 1950s, but today, nearly a century after his initial fame and a half century after his death, has seen a major resurgence. The staying power of Hu’s ideas could not be kept down, and Yü senses that the same may be true of Fang’s ideas. Universal values are, after all, neither Eastern nor Western but universal. The Communist Party’s attachment of “with Chinese characteristics” to words like science, democracy, and rights will not endure the test of time. Echoing Yü Ying-shih, Su Xiaokang observes that intellectual breakthroughs have always outlasted the political forces that have sought to repress them. “How many people today remember the name of the pope who persecuted Galileo?” Su asks.

  Today, as this book is published, China’s rise has brought the importance of Fang’s ideas onto the world stage. In the 1980s, a key question was “How can China find its way past a narrow-minded authoritarian regime?” Today that regime is challenging not just China but the entire world. It uses trade leverage, disinformation, intimidation, and other tactics to press its interests while advertising a “China dream” and a “China model” of development. The model borrows words like democracy, rights, and law but continues to claim that there are distinctive ways of conceiving these terms, ways that fit the “special conditions” of China (and perhaps of other places, if authoritarians in other places want to borrow them). Today the globe as a whole needs Fang’s wisdom more than ever, and we are lucky for its staying power. Fang tells us, today as before, that we are here together. No part of the world can be sequestered. Truth is universal. There is no “Chinese physics.”

  NOTES

  4. My Prime Movers<
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  1. Translator’s note: In the spring of 1989, the Chinese state media named Fang a “behind-the-scenes manipulator” of the “turmoil” at Tiananmen Square.

  5. On Campus at Peking University

  1. Translator’s note: Fang read Dirac’s book in English even though his English was so weak that he needed to look up nearly every word. Li Shuxian remembers him telling her that at first it took him a whole morning to read just one page, but later, encouraged by Dirac’s elegant illustrations, he could read faster and faster. She could still recall, in 2015, what Fang’s copy of Dirac’s book looked like. The margins of the first few pages were packed with notes on Chinese equivalents, while later pages bore fewer marks. In a sense he learned English on this book.

  6. My First Trip to the Bottom

  1. Translator’s note: I have borrowed this translation from Russian to English from Babette Deutsch.

  7. Life in the Fields

  1. Translator’s note: Fang was allowed the return trip, at his own risk, because officially he had “volunteered” to go to the countryside.

  14. Stepping Out of China

  1. Translator’s note: Li Shuxian did not accompany Fang on this trip because she could not get a work release from her teaching at Peking University. The authorities would not allow two spouses to leave the country at the same time for fear that they would not return.

  2. Translator’s note: This translation has been adapted from Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, translated by Stillman Drake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), pp. 186–87.

  15. In the Tides of Reform

  1. Translator’s note: Fang is referring to the story in which Zhuangzi and Huizi, his friend and rival, are on a bridge and see a fish swimming in the water below.

  Zhuangzi: “See how the minnow swims around as it pleases, so at ease? It is happy.”

  Huizi: “You’re not a fish; how do you know the fish is happy?”

  Zhuangzi: “You’re not me; how do you know that I do not know?”

  19. Spring 1989

  1. Translator’s note: The author reconstructed this letter from memory while writing inside the U.S. embassy. It differs in some minor ways from the original text.

  20. Thirteen Months

  1. Translator’s note: The U.S. diplomats pointed out that Fang had already been “noticed” by Chinese staff who were supplied by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; they noted, too, that the room in which Raymond Burghardt (deputy chief of mission), Russell McKinney (head of the embassy’s USIA office), Fang Lizhi, Li Shuxian, Fang Zhe, and I were talking was “not secure” from listening devices.

  Afterword

  1. Fang Zhe had been with his parents when they entered the U.S. embassy on June 6, 1989, but after only a few days found the captivity hard to take, decided on his own to leave, and returned to the family apartment. It was nearly two years before he saw his parents again.

  INDEX

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  Academia Sinica

  Academy of Sciences, see Chinese Academy of Sciences

  Acta Physica Sinica (later Physics)

  Alliance of Democratic Youth

  American Astronomical Society

  Amnesty International

  Anhui Province

  “Answer to the Fourteen Points, An” (Fang and Li)

  Anti-Rightist Movement

  Anti-Spiritual-Pollution Campaign

  April Fifth Incident

  Aristarchus of Samos

  Associated Press

  astronomy

  pre-modern

  astrophysics

  atomic bomb

  Australia

  Autumn (Ba Jin)

  Baade, Walter

  Babaoshan cemetery

  Bagong Mountain

  Bai Daquan

  Ba Jin

  Beidaihe

  Bei Dao

  Beijing. See also Tiananmen Square

  civil war and

  crystal city and

  sworn brothers and

  World War II and

  Beijing Intermediate People’s Court

  Beijing Library

  Beijing Normal University

  Beijing Observatory

  Beijing Science Technology Management College

  Beijing University, see Peking University

  Bell, Jocelyn

  Berlin

  “Biased Clustering in a Universe with Hot Dark Matter” (Fang)

  Big Bang

  Bird’s-Eye View of the Frontiers of Astrophysics, A (Fang)

  black elements

  Black Gang

  Blokhintsev, Dmitrii

  Blue Gang

  Bohr, Niels

  Bonnet-Bidaud, Jean-Marc

  Book of Documents

  Börner, Gerhard

  bourgeoisie

  bourgeois intellectuals

  bourgeois liberalism

  Boxers

  brick factory

  British embassy, Beijing

  Brokaw, Tom

  Bruno, Giordano

  Buddhism

  Burghardt, Raymond

  Bush, George H.W.

  BX Andromedae

  Calamity of the Proscription of Parties

  “Calculation of Nucleon Electric Radius” (Fang)

  calligraphy

  Cambridge Chinese Society

  Cambridge University

  camera factory

  Cao Cao, Emperor Wu of Wei

  Capital Defense Corps

  Capital of Heaven Peak

  cart pulling job

  Castel Gandolfo, Italy

  CBS Television

  Central Academy of Drama

  Central Commission for Discipline Inspection

  Chadwick, James

  Chang’an (ancient capital)

  Changyang farm labor

  Charter 08

  Cheng Fuzhen

  Chengtou Xiang

  Chen Guangcheng

  Cheng Yanqiu

  Chen Xiru

  Chen Yi

  Chernobyl accident

  Chiang Kai-shek

  China, ancient

  China, imperial

  China, People’s Republic of. See also Communist Party; and specific agencies; events; and individuals

  fortieth anniversary

  tenth anniversary

  China, Republic of

  China Evening News

  China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD)

  China-U.S. Physics Examination and Application (CUSPEA)

  Chinese Academy of Sciences

  amnesty letter of 1989

  Fang elected member

  Fang jobs

  farm labor and

  “Chinese Amnesia, The” (Fang)

  Chinese Association for Gravitational and Relativist Astrophysics

  Chinese Astronomical Society meeting (Suzhou, 1989)

  Chinese constitution

  Chinese embassy, Oslo

  Chinese embassy, Rome

  Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs

  Chinese Ministry of Justice

  Chinese Ministry of Railways

  Chinese Physical Society (Bohr symposium, 1985)

  Chinese State Education Commission

  “Chinese versus Western Culture” conference (Qingdao, 1986)

  Chi You (mythical beast)

  Christian church

  civil war

  Civil War in France, The (Marx)

  Classical Theory of Fields (Landau)

  class struggle

  coal dust

  coal mines

  Cold War

  Columbia University

  Combat Brigade 71

  Committee on Scholarly Communication with China

  Communism

  cosmol
ogy and

  Fang’s attraction to

  Fang’s disillusionment with

  farming and

  science and

  Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels)

  Communist of the Year Award (1983)

  Communist Party. See also Cultural Revolution; and specific campaigns; departments; events; and individuals

  bureaucracy and

  Central Advisory Committee

  Central Committee

  Central Propaganda Department

  civil war and

  Cultural Revolution and

  Fang expulsion of 1958

  Fang expulsion of 1987

  Fang joins

  Fang re-joins

  Fang’s early faith in

  Fang’s legacy and

  farmers and

  foreigners and

  founded

  intellectuals and

  Li Shuxian expelled

  Li Shuxian joins

  native place and

  reforms and

  speaking out and

  struggles within

  “three evils” and

  university appointments and

  USTC guidelines and

  “Comprehensive Map” (16th century map)

  Confucius

  conservation of energy

  Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A (Marx)

  Copernicus

  Cornell University

  cosmic microwave background radiation

  cosmology

  Cosmology, First National Conference on (Jiangxi, 1980)

  counterrevolutionary elements

  Course in Quantum Mechanics, The (Blokhintsev)

  Coyne, George

  Creation of the Universe, The (Fang and Li)

  Cronin, Alexander

  Cultural Revolution

  Dagongbao (newspaper)

  Dai Wensai

  Dante

  “Dark Matter” seminar (Munich, 1983)

  “Decision on the Correction of the Expulsion from the Party of Comrade Fang Lizhi”

  deep-plowing

  “Democracy, Reform, and Modernization” lecture (Tongji University, 1986)

  “Democracy Is Not Bestowed from Above” (Fang)

  Democracy Wall Movement

  Deng Weilian

  Deng Xiaoping

  Fang’s letter to

  Deng Zhongyuan

  Denmark

  denunciations of Fang

  “Dialectics of Nature” conference (Beijing, 1977)