The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State, Fang Lizhi (translated by Perry Link), Henry Holt and Co, 2016. $32.00 (352 pp.). ISBN 978-1-62779-499-2 Buy at Amazon
The day after the 4 June 1989 student protests that ended tragically near Tiananmen Square, Fang Lizhi and his wife Li Shuxian sought and received refuge inside the US Embassy in Beijing. It was during his embassy stay, which lasted until June 1990, that Fang penned his autobiography. It was published in Chinese a year after his unexpected death in 2012 with the title, The Autobiography of Fang Lizhi.
The new, English version—The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State—was edited and translated by Perry Link, who had convinced Fang and his wife to seek protection in the US embassy. It features selected parts of Fang’s memoirs, and the title is markedly different in tone from the more sober one of the Chinese edition.
Unlike the scientific books by Fang and Li (also a physicist), this is a political book. It includes Fang’s particularly compelling firsthand account of the dramatic events in Chinese universities during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76. The book is beautifully written and includes many lively anecdotes. It centers on Fang and his decades-long struggle in defense of liberty, dignity, and integrity in scientific thinking—traits that earned him the 1989 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.
Fang writes that he worked several times in the “fields” during his academic life: On four separate occasions from the 1950s to the 1970s, Fang had to abandon his physics studies in field theories to work the literal agricultural fields on rural farms. He humorously describes chasing pigs on a farm during the labor camp period, developing muscles in his chest, and later, using his physical strength to wrestle his way through the windows of packed trains for free rides during the Red Guard “revolutionary tourism” activities as head of an imaginary “combat Brigade 71 of USTC” (the University of Science and Technology of China).
We follow Fang descending deep into the mines to dig coal as part of his “re-education” at Bagong Mountain in 1969. Reflecting on a literary classic, he writes, “the famous words from the Inferno section of Dante’s Divine Comedy: … ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’ My feeling, as I ascended with naked body from a thousand feet deep in the mine, was that the great poet had hung his sign over the wrong door.” Fang, unlike Dante, testifies of events not just imagined but directly observed.
We read as well how excited Fang was to get a hold of a copy of The Classical Theory of Fields by Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz. “Each evening as night arrived, my fatigued body retired under a net while my liberated spirit leaped toward the wide universe in pursuit of the beautiful and moving question of its ultimate origin.” Fang’s luck was to have laid hands on the shortest and best- written text on Einstein’s theory of relativity—several sections of that Landau–Lifshitz treatise. In July of 1976, under Fang’s leadership, USTC launched its astrophysics division. That year also marked the end of China’s Cultural Revolution and the beginning of an era of modernization.
The book does not cover Fang’s life following his departure from the US Embassy in Deng Xiaoping’s car—a scene that may well be illustrated by another phrase from Dante, “And thence we came forth to see again the stars.” Fang would spend his later years with his wife and relatives at the University of Arizona, teaching, researching, and vigorously encouraging international cooperation in an effort to facilitate the exchange of Chinese students, postdocs, and scientists dedicated to advanced relativistic astrophysics research. All the while, he was planning his eventual return to China on his Chinese passport.
In October 2011, at the 3rd Galileo-Xu Guangqi Meeting in Beijing, I learned that Fang’s research articles were again being published in China. He was greatly pleased to hear that. Fang worked up to the last minutes of his life, discussing over Skype the organization of the 13th Marcel Grossmann Meeting in Stockholm, which took place two months after his death.
There I commemorated Fang and also recalled a few historical events. The Nobel laureate Abdus Salam had established good relations with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Enrico Fermi’s former students, Nobel laureates C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee, were responsible for the massive program of sending thousands of young Chinese students and scientists to study in American universities. Salam, Yang, and Lee arranged for the Chinese Academy of Sciences to invite me to China in 1978. Fang was appointed as my guide. He and I gave lectures all over the country on the new results on black holes, gravitational waves, and cosmology—in universities that still showed scars from the Cultural Revolution.
I also recalled how Zhou Peiyuan, president of Peking University, had arranged on behalf of the academy to hold the 3rd Marcel Grossmann Meeting (1982) in Shanghai. It was the country’s first truly international meeting, thanks in part to Zhou’s facilitating the admission of Israeli scientists into China. The Confucius-inspired saying, expressed as “friends from all over the world are welcome,” acquired a more modern version, “scientists from all over the world are welcome.”
All those events helped to promote China’s momentous transition from a closed country, constrained by a dogmatic application of Marxist rules and lacking the methodology to approach real social necessities and scientific knowledge, to the China of today, characterized by its tremendous support for science, the pursuit of knowledge, and technological development admired all around the world.
I don’t know if Fang would have liked the title of this book. In an interview of him by our common friend Tiziano Terzani, Fang was asked, “Your name was put at the top of the ‘most wanted’ list in China. You might not like to be called ‘conspirator,’ but would you accept the term ‘inspirator’?” Fang’s reply: “Yes. This is a label I have to accept.”
Remo Ruffini is a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome and director of the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics Network (ICRANet). He coauthored Black Holes, Gravitational Waves and Cosmology (Routledge, 1974) with Martin Rees and John Wheeler.
