MCLC: Link on Fang Lizhi

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Link on Fang Lizhi
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Source: NY Review of Books (4/13/12):
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/apr/13/on-fang-lizhi/

On Fang Lizhi (1936­2012)
By Perry Link

Fang Lizhi, a distinguished professor of astrophysics, luminary in the
struggle for human rights in contemporary China, and frequent contributor
to The New York Review, died suddenly on the morning of April 6. At age
seventy-six he had not yet retired, and was preparing to leave home to
teach a class when he commented to his wife that he did not feel quite
right. She urged him to stay home and he agreed, saying he would call his
department secretary to explain. A few minutes later he had died in his
chair at his home office.

News of his passing spread quickly on the Chinese Internet. Students whom
he had taught in the 1980s and admirers of his eloquent championing of
human rights wrote their accolades. State Security officials noticed, and
within hours ordered Internet police to delete all messages that mentioned
the words ³Fang Lizhi.² After that, tweets about Fang on weibo (the
Chinese version of Twitter) disappeared about a minute after posting.

Fang¹s father was a postal clerk and he grew up in modest circumstances.
But soon it became clear that Fang had a brilliant mind, and his
outstanding work as a student led him to the Physics Department of China¹s
elite Peking University in the early 1950s. The campus atmosphere of
optimistic socialism attracted him, and he joined the Communist Party. In
courting his girlfriend (a fellow student who later became his wife, the
physicist Li Shuxian), he once invited her to ³watch me grow into a good
Communist.² During Mao Zedong¹s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, he
was persecuted and confined in a reeducation camp at a coal mine in
southern Anhui province. It was this treatment that led him to specialize
in theoretical astrophysics, which he later told me was ³the only field of
physics I could pursue without equipment.² After Mao died Fang¹s star rose
again, and in 1984 he became vice-president of China¹s prestigious
University of Science and Technology in Anhui.

By then he had shed his attachment to Marxist dogma and, in addition to
teaching physics, began delivering trenchant speeches on human rights and
democracy. For example, when the government of Deng Xiaoping began using
the slogan ³modernization with Chinese characteristics² (i.e.,
modernization without power-sharing by the Communist Party), Fang
responded satirically by asking students if they believed in physics with
Chinese characteristics. Students were charmed; the authorities were not.
In January 1987 they fired him from his university job (for this and other
speeches), expelled him from the Party, and compiled excerpts from his
speeches that they then distributed to campuses all across China as
examples of ³bourgeois liberalism² that students should avoid. But
students found the excerpts themselves far more attractive than the
warnings, and Fang suddenly became famous everywhere in China. He became
the spirit behind the nationwide pro-democracy demonstrations in the
spring of 1989. He lived on the outskirts of Beijing at the time, but
refused to go to Tiananmen Square. He wanted to make it clear to the
authorities that the students were acting autonomously.

After the June 4 massacre that ended the protests, the government
published a list of people wanted for arrest. Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian
were numbers one and two. On June 5 they took refuge in the US embassy in
Beijing, where they lived for thirteen months in a basement apartment that
had no windows. On being told that Deng, in a conversation with Henry
Kissinger, had said he wanted him to write a confession, Fang wrote one in
the form of a forthright statement of human rights principles
<http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/fang-lizhi/>. In June 1990 the
Japanese government negotiated the release of Fang and Li by offering
economic concessions to China, and for the next nearly twenty-two years
they lived in exile.

Fang¹s path through life observed a pattern that is common to China¹s
dissidents: a person begins with socialist ideals, feels bitter when the
rulers betray the ideals, resorts to outspoken criticism, and ends in
prison or exile. Liu Binyan, Wang Ruowang, Su Xiaokang, Hu Ping, Zheng Yi,
Liu Xiaobo, and many others have followed this pattern. Most have been
literary figures‹writers, editors, or professors of Chinese‹who base their
dissent in the study of Chinese society and culture. Fang was a natural
scientist, and this made him different in important ways.

He was good at explaining how, for him, concepts of human rights grew out
of science. In an essay in these pages
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1996/oct/17/the-hope-for-china/>,
 he named five axioms of science that had led him toward human rights: 1.
³Science begins with doubt,² whereas in Mao¹s China students were taught
to begin with fixed beliefs. 2. Science stresses independence of judgment,
not conformity to the judgment of others. 3. ³Science is egalitarian²; no
one¹s subjective view starts ahead of anyone else¹s in the pursuit of
objective truth. 4. Science needs a free flow of information, and cannot
thrive in a system that restricts access to information. 5. Scientific
truths, like human rights principles, are universal; they do not change
when one crosses a political border.

Science was not only the origin of Fang¹s thinking on human rights; it
remained for him the grounds of authority on the issue. When he began
speaking on human rights in the 1980s, his audiences paid him special
attention because of his high position in Chinese academic life. No
Chinese intellectual who has chosen to speak out on human rights has ever
been as high ³within the system² as Fang was when he began. To Fang,
though, authority of this kind‹the kind that derives from bureaucratic
position‹meant nothing. His own authority was the truths, discoverable by
science, that lay within the patterns of the universe. This kind of
grounding gave him confidence to confront high Party officials.

It was also the authority of science that created in those high officials
an inexorable fear of Fang. Deng Xiaoping in particular appears to have
had something of a Fang Lizhi complex in the late 1980s. (In his review
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/10/real-deng/> of Ezra
Vogel¹s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Fang describes
Deng¹s hypersensitive reaction, including an orchestrated press campaign
and a quixotic lawsuit, to some casual comments that Fang had made in
Australia about the foreign bank accounts of Chinese living abroad.)
Measured by civil authority, the Party leaders of course outranked Fang.
They could demote him, and did. But in science? There Fang had the upper
hand. A Party leader could not belittle science. Science was part of the
Four Modernizations, the guiding policy of the day. Moreover it was in
Marxism. The leaders no longer believed in Marxism, but had to pretend
that they did. Fang¹s challenge from science frightened them more deeply
than anything a writer or professor of Chinese might do.

Of the many comments from Fang¹s Chinese admirers that I have heard in the
days since his passing, here are three of my favorites:

<<Some call him China¹s Sakharov, and that¹s fine. But to me, Fang and the
Communist Party are more like Galileo and the Roman church. An
astrophysicist against powerful and arbitrary authority; the authority
persecutes the physicist, but the physicist gets the truth right.>>

<<In the 1980s the words ³human rights² could hardly be uttered in China.
Today they can, and the term weiquan (³support rights²) is everywhere. No
one person made this change. But no one person had more to do with it than
Fang Lizhi.>>

<<Fang shows us a better way to be Chinese in the modern world. To be
Chinese does not have to mean ³supports Bashir al-Assad at the UN² or
³puts a Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison.² We can be better. Teacher
Fang is our example.>>

Others of Fang¹s friends have noted his literary talents. He occasionally
wrote charming essays on topics such as his courtship with Li Shuxian, or
about how, as a boy, he and his friends rigged the doorbell of a famous
opera singer so that it wouldn¹t stop ringing, then hid to watch from a
distance. His wry wit was a constant joy to friends as well as a stiletto
in political debate. I remember watching a Western journalist interview
him during the student protests in spring 1989. When the interview was
over the reporter asked if there were a way he could ask follow-up
questions, if necessary. Fang said ³sure,² and gave the reporter his
telephone number.

³We¹ve heard that your phone is tapped,² the reporter said. ³Is it?²

³I assume so.² Fang grinned.

³Doesn¹t thatŠbother you?² the reporter asked.

³No,² said Fang, ³for years I¹ve been trying to get them to listen to me.
If this is how they want to do it, then fine!²

Borrowing Fang¹s wit, we might note that the authorities did more than
listen. They wanted him. The 1989 warrant for his arrest was never
dropped, so that when he died he was still officially ³wanted²: for ³the
crime of counterrevolutionary incitement² and as ³the biggest black hand
behind the June Fourth riots.²

April 13, 2012, 11:45 a.m.