by Ian Buruma
In his despair, Su turned to Christians, Buddhists, and a famous Chinese master of Qi Gong exercises. The master told Su that the crash was punishment for his work on River Elegy. Wounded by Su’s insults, Chinese civilization had turned into an angry dragon and come back to destroy his life.
I went to see Su at his house near Princeton together with Perry Link, a professor of Chinese literature who had helped give him refuge. I was not expecting an easy interview. Su had become something of a recluse. He told many of his friends that the old Su Xiaokang had died. Although I found a man who sighed a great deal and shivered, like a horse wishing to shake off its burden, Su nonetheless was quite happy to talk. The wooden house was large and comfortable. Piles of books and magazine articles lay on the table, and there was evidence of the teenage son: pictures of American movie stars and rock musicians. Su, who is in his fifties, doesn’t speak much English. And his son is bored with his stories about China, a place he can barely remember. Like his mother, though in a different way, the American teenager is living in a different country from his father too.
Su is still haunted by a sense of responsibility for Tiananmen. He told us why in the form of a story. After lecturing about River Elegy at a university in New York, he was asked a question by a young student from China. Did he think his film had had a big influence on the Tiananmen rebellion? He said that he thought not, for the students, in his view, were interested in individual freedom, while the documentary was all about the nature of Chinese civilization. The girl was furious and yelled at him that he was irresponsible, like all Chinese intellectuals, who talk big and then duck the consequences of their words. After telling this story, Su sucked his teeth and looked out of the window at the wintry New Jersey landscape. “I still can’t figure it out,” he said softly. Then, raising his voice, he said: “What she meant is that we fled! We fled!”
He handed me an article he had written for a Hong Kong magazine. When I read it later that day, one sentence in particular impressed me: “We created an atmosphere that encouraged the students to be radical, and then, when they did, we turned around and lectured them about their extremism. That is surely something they will never forget.”
I asked Su about the film. What did he think about River Elegy now? Here, too, he was critical of his old self. He had made the mistake, he said, of projecting the West as a perfect counter model to China even though he knew nothing about the West. At the time, he had never been outside China. He understood America better now. He still admired the political freedom, but he couldn’t get used to the commercialism. His own son was a good example. All he cared about was entertainment. He resisted his father’s control: “He wants to be free and all that.” As Su spoke, I noticed something moving from the corner of my eye. A pale figure in a track suit shuffled from the bedroom to the kitchen with the help of a steel frame, looking at us with dumb incomprehension. It was as though Su was not aware of his wife’s presence. So we politely pretended that she was not there.
Like Xie Xuanjun, Su is a troubled man. Most middle-aged Chinese dissidents in exile are. Their English is poor. They are too old to forget the past and become Americans and too young to retire with their memories. Besides having to look after his wife all the time, Su told me he didn’t know what to write about. He was out of touch with Chinese culture and politics. There was nothing much he could do. In fact, he was writing his memoirs. That was at least something. I asked him about religion and about the Christian conversion of his former colleagues. Su looked pained. He said: “We intellectuals in exile all struggled with Christianity. We all experience a spiritual crisis. I was very depressed after the car accident. I felt I was being punished and I couldn’t survive without contact with God, a Chinese God.” So he visited the Chinese church in nearby New Brunswick, and twice a week an American student came to his house to read the Bible with him. But he could never quite bring himself to believe.
A common cliché about the difference between East and West is that Oriental cultures are driven by shame whereas the Judeo-Christian West is driven by guilt. In the West, God sees our sins even if no one else does, so we feel guilty. By contrast in the East, which has no God, it is only when the neighbors notice that one needs to worry, and then one feels shame. This has always seemed to me a rickety distinction. What troubles Su, Xie, Wang Chaohua, who once tormented her father, and many other refugees from China’s dictatorship sounds more like guilt than shame—with or without the all-seeing eye of God. And the guilt goes deeper and back further in time than the events of 1989. Su said: “All of us who went through the Cultural Revolution feel guilty—of beating our teachers, denouncing our parents, that sort of thing. At least we intellectuals can talk about it. Ordinary Chinese have it all bottled up.”
So why was it, I asked, that Su ended up rejecting Christianity after all? His response was a melancholy echo of a distress I would come across often among the survivors of the Maoist era. He said that since people of his generation lost their faith in Maoism, they felt like plants cut off at the roots. It had become impossible to believe in any religion or any ideology, he added: “I tried hard, but I can’t believe in anything at all.”
Chapter 3
Stars of Arizona
Professor Fang Lizhi’s epiphany, of a secular kind, came to him on December 2, 1979, during a celebration of the Advent of Christ, in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. It was only one year after the famous astrophysicist had first been allowed to travel abroad. And one of his first trips had been to the Vatican to discuss cosmology, a piquant occasion for this Chinese admirer of Galileo, so he was not inexperienced abroad. But Fang was still a Party member, staunchly anti-religious, and unsure of what to do in a church. And his epiphany had a very different character from those of the Christian converts.
The atmosphere in King’s College Chapel was strange to him: the slow shuffle of men in white-and-crimson robes on the black-and-white marble floor, the boys’ trilling voices echoing from the vaulted ceiling, the light bouncing off dark saints in stained-glass windows. Professor Fang was so moved that he translated the words of a Bach hymn as soon as he returned to his rooms that same night: “A pristine rose has blossomed. . . . Rays from its tender bloom / Light up this cold, cold winter / This dark, dark night.” Moved but also baffled, for there he was, in the most famous chapel of an ancient university, known for its scientific bent (and its communist spies); how was it possible that free men of science could sing the praises of Jesus? Science, after all, was not just a secular enterprise, it was the rational alternative to religious superstition. How could an enlightened person possibly believe in both?
Then Fang had his epiphany, the insight that made him see the English dons around him, but also China, in a different, or at least much clearer, light. He realized that Chinese intellectuals had made a big mistake by not paying sufficient attention to the Reformation, which had carried on the humanistic tradition of the Renaissance. Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the King’s College Choir singing Bach were all celebrating human nature in the image of Christ. The Europeans had humanized their symbols of divinity, turned their gods into men, brought them down to earth.
The story of China, and specifically Fang’s story in China, was rather different. Only ten years before witnessing the celebration of the Advent of Christ in Cambridge, Fang had been persecuted in a society where people had turned a human being into a god. They had become worshippers of a divine leader who, in the words of a popular song of praise, rose from the East, like a crimson sun. They sang hymns to him and bore his image, in gold, blood-red enamel, and sometimes porcelain (fearfully, for porcelain was breakable, and at one time a broken image of the deity could mean many years of hard labor).
Fang wrote about his Cambridge experience for a small Chinese magazine called Life. The magazine did not survive the article. One can see why. This is how Fang ended his piece16: “As far as our ‘Hymns’ are concerned, with their braying tone and imbecilic lyrics—‘The Cultural
Revolution is good, oh it’s good’—one could only lament the depths to which Chinese civilization had fallen.”
Fang Lizhi was already a troublemaker as a nineteen-year-old student of theoretical and nuclear physics at Beijing University in the 1950s. Instead of repeating the dogmas of Maoist devotion, he used a meeting of the Communist Youth League to advocate independent thinking—a heresy. His Party secretary warned him that truths had been settled by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao and that it was the duty of intellectuals to come up with fresh ways of restating them.
Fang graduated in 1956. Months later, Chairman Mao decreed that a “hundred flowers must bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend”: Intellectual criticism of Party policies was not only allowed but positively encouraged. It is still unclear whether Mao set a deliberate trap for potential enemies or genuinely thought criticism would be a good thing, but after a month or so of cautious silence, people came forward to say what they thought, in small numbers at first, discreetly, and then in ever larger numbers, ever more vociferously. Some even challenged the right of the Party to monopolize power. Fang was not one of those. A loyal Party man, he simply suggested that scientific research would surely benefit from less political interference. For this, or at any rate for refusing to recant, he was expelled from the Party when, after a few months of criticism, Mao decided enough was enough and critics were to be silenced—many of them forever.
Fang was made to “wear the hat” of a rightist. Wearing a hat meant years of absolute misery for many thousands of people. But at least Fang, unlike others, was neither murdered nor driven to commit suicide. Scientists were too useful to be so casually cast aside. Ten years later, however, when the Cultural Revolution gathered steam, even scientists were no longer protected. “Bourgeois science” had to be eradicated. Barely literate Maoist ideologues were put in charge of scientific departments. Laboratories were ransacked. Research was supplanted by lunatic debates on Maoist doctrine. Fang was subjected to struggle sessions, with baying lynch mobs cursing him as a “reactionary” of the “stinking ninth category.” For one year he was locked up alone in a so-called cow pen—reactionary intellectuals were said to have “cow spirits.” After that, he was put to work in a mine and, later, on a railroad. Two things happened as a result: For the first time, he began to doubt the benevolence of Mao’s leadership, and the lack of a laboratory and scientific books made him turn his attention to the stars. The only book he had managed to keep was The Classical Theory of Fields, by the Soviet physicist Lev Landau. So he read it over and over again17. And he decided to drop solid-state physics and study cosmology instead.
The way we look at the stars has often been a contentious, and indeed dangerous issue and is intimately linked with religion—and, by extension, with the right to dissent. In Fang’s words18: “Over history, new cosmologies have more than once led to the downfall of orthodox beliefs.” Galileo got into trouble with the Catholic Church for saying that Copernicus was right in his view that our planet was not the center of the universe but only one among other planets revolving around the sun. This was a serious enough challenge to Catholic dogma. Worse was the idea that physical reality could be understood by applying mathematics. What about Genesis, what about God’s creation, what, indeed, about the monopoly of truth held by the priests? And so Galileo became a hero to the prophets of scientific socialism, from Engels to Bertolt Brecht.
Chinese astronomers had already started recording solar eclipses more than eight hundred years before Christ. And foreign knowledge, from Persia, India, and later from European Jesuits, influenced Chinese speculations on the workings of the cosmos. And yet, according to Fang Lizhi, Chinese, with rare exceptions, were never interested in finding common laws to explain the natural world. For the natural world, in Confucian eyes, was governed by moral rather than scientific principles. Shooting stars, earthquakes, and the like showed the degree to which harmony ruled in the Chinese cosmos. Since all human relations, including those of the exalted emperors, are subject to moral as well as immoral influences, we cannot expect nature to behave otherwise. The idea of unvarying, scientific laws, then, would have struck traditional Chinese thinkers as absurd.
The Chinese notion of cosmic harmony made astronomy more a matter of political than scientific importance. Court astronomers read the stars carefully for omens, but in Fang’s view, the question of what holds up the stars in the sky was not something that exercised Chinese thinkers. He quoted the Tang dynasty poet Li Po to make his point: “Why waste time worrying about the collapse of the heavens, like the people of Qi.” Confucius, likewise, thought speculation about the nature of gods was a waste of time: “We have so little understanding of man, how can we possibly understand the gods.” A solid basis for skeptical thinking, one might reason. But one could also interpret it as a lack of curiosity about the laws of the universe.
This is what former student leader Li Lu meant when he told me at his office in New York that Chinese lacked a deep understanding of metaphysics. He said the Western fascination with creation had led to modern science. This is why he admired “the mentality” of those Western scientists who wanted to find out the laws of God’s creation. Clearly, like many Chinese students of his generation, Li Lu had been influenced by Fang Lizhi.
It is Fang’s contention that universal principles inherent in a monotheistic tradition are a necessary basis for scientific inquiry. He does not stop to wonder how the Greeks developed those principles without the benefit of one God. In fact, the Greek view of the universe is similar to that of the ancient Chinese. Plato’s idea of the cosmos is profoundly moral. Cosmic harmony is governed by divine causes, and man’s duty is to study celestial movements to imitate their innate goodness.
Fang doesn’t pay much attention to Taoists, either. This is a pity, for the Taoists represent a dissident tradition in Chinese history. Unlike Confucian mandarins, who supported the orthodox tradition, Taoists were relatively free spirits. They were fascinated by universal principles, and their view of the cosmos was less moral, more individualistic, and thus more inquiring than that of the Confucianist mandarins. They had a mystical idea of universal harmony, which they called the Tao, literally “the Way,” but they certainly did not believe in one God. Indeed, thanks partly to Taoist scholars, the Chinese had a more accurate understanding of the cosmos than the seventeenth-century Jesuits who arrived to instruct them. The Jesuits were more sophisticated mathematically than the Chinese, but they still believed that stars were immutable, while the Chinese had observed since the first century that stars were born and died. But European missionaries imparted their scientific knowledge to the Chinese to prove the superiority of their religion, so they disparaged Chinese science and argued that superior Western science was rooted in the Christian faith. One of the ironies of modern Chinese history is how often Chinese intellectuals, especially in moods of cultural self-hatred, reflect the prejudices of Christian missionaries and barbarian conquerors.
In any case, Galileo’s problems with the Church came about precisely because of the latter’s claim to being the guardian of universal truths. And so did Fang Lizhi’s problems with the Chinese Communist Party. For the Party ideologues, whose flimsy knowledge of science was based on what Engels and Lenin had once said, behaved much like the priests who had opposed Galileo. That Lenin and Engels had based their notions of science on Galileo’s theories is ironic but irrelevant. The important thing is that Party hacks, like the priests, believed in universal laws, which only they were allowed to interpret. And because of that, they also believed that any challenge to their monopoly of the truth was a challenge to their monopoly of power. So when Fang proposed, entirely in line with modern scientific discoveries, that our universe began with a big bang, this was considered a heresy, for Engels, following Galileo, had believed that the universe was infinite in both time and space.
Fang was replacing the principles of Confucius and Marx with those of modern science. And these he associated with d
emocracy, just as a previous generation had done in 1919, at the time of the May Fourth Movement. Perhaps this explains why so many Chinese scientists became dissidents and reformists in the 1980s. Instead of having a Christian church to rally around as an alternative institution to the Party, with an alternative dogma and an alternative catechism, Chinese scientists had the church of science. The Communist Party itself, as the organized expression of “scientific socialism,” had once been worshipped as a product of that church. But by the time Fang came out in opposition to it, the Party had become like the ossified imperial system, jealously guarding its orthodoxy against any challenges, rational or otherwise.
In the mid-1980s, Fang began to make speeches about the need for intellectual and academic freedom19. He wanted to “straighten” the “bent backs” of his fellow academics, and argued that “without democracy, the academic community will make no progress.” For the first time since the Communist revolution, a prominent Chinese intellectual openly used the phrase that had gained currency during the May Fourth Movement: “total westernization.” Nothing less would do. China had to catch up with the Renaissance and the Reformation and have its own Enlightenment. Fang’s words were explosive. In December 1986, thousands of students from his University of Science and Technology in Hefei took to the streets demanding democracy, and similar demonstrations spread almost instantly to twenty other cities. The American journalist Orville Schell remembers seeing wall posters that read “I Have a Dream, a Dream of Freedom. I Have a Dream of Democracy. I Have a Dream of Life Endowed with Human Rights. May the Day Come When All These Are More Than Dreams.” In January 1987, Fang was sacked from his post as vice president of the university and denounced for spreading “erroneous statements reflecting ‘bourgeois liberalization.’ ” He became known to the outside world as China’s Sakharov.