The Most Wanted Man in China

My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State

Henry Holt and Company

Contents

MY ANCESTORS

I was born in Beijing on February 12, 1936 — or, on the lunar calendar, day twenty of the first month of the year called bingzi in the traditional sixty-year cycle.

The term "place of birth" has been something of a headache for me. Every time I have applied for a Chinese passport, clerks have filled in the blank after "birthplace" with the words "Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province." Clerks do this because Chinese government personnel files do not have a category called "birthplace." They list only "native place," which is a fundamentally different concept. A native place is the home area of your forebears, not necessarily the place where you were born. Somehow, though, it became standard procedure that the "birthplace" blank on passport applications was always filled in with whatever showed as "native place" in personnel files. The error has legs. Today, in a number of reference books around the world, my birthplace is listed as Hangzhou.

Until about a hundred years ago, it was largely true that "birthplace" and "native place" needed no distinction in China. People did not wander far from where they were born. The whole life cycle — birth, growth, decline, death — happened right where you were. For tenant farmers, the earth they tilled was their entire world; landlords, too, were pretty much bound to the land. Scholar-officials were the only ones who traveled much — to other provinces or to the capital of the empire — but they almost always left their families at home when they did so. It was a coveted goal, upon retirement, "to return in glory, clothed in silk, to the native place." Even people who did not achieve such honor wanted to go home to die, like "leaves falling onto roots," as the proverb had it. If for some reason one died far from home, one risked turning into a wandering ghost, never to be at ease in either this world or the next.

The glory of a family could be seen in the geomancy, or fengshui, of its ancestral graveyard. "Cleave to the land and be content" was an unwritten ethical principle. Most of the premodern "migrants" (to use a modern term) in fact were criminals, who were punished by banishment to remote places and prohibited from returning home. They were the true, albeit unwilling, pioneers in premodern Chinese society. But in modern times, the idea of remaining contentedly on one's piece of land began to disintegrate. More and more Chinese have taken the "path of criminals" and departed their native places. If you were to take a survey in a major Chinese city today, I think you would find that more than half of the people have a birthplace that is different from their native place.

In 1934–35 the Chinese Communist Party made its famous Long March, in which tens of thousands of people trekked about eight thousand miles from Jiangxi Province to Yan'an in Shaanxi Province. As seen from the viewpoint of traditional Chinese culture, a major consequence of the Long March was that it uprooted a large number of people from their native places. Since the Communists have always glorified the Long March, one might expect them to accept the idea of people departing their native places. This makes it all the stranger that after they came to power, they still chose to identify their subjects by "native place" instead of "birthplace." This shows how strong the Chinese cultural preference is for identification with ancestral lands. Even in modern Communist government files, that's where a person "belongs."

In fact, my own ancestral lands were not really Hangzhou but Huizhou, a place that takes pride in its proximity to the magnificent Huangshan Mountains, one of the most scenic areas in all of China south of the Yangzi River. Huizhou is also home to the highest concentration of Fangs in all of China. Fang is not a particularly common surname, but there are some villages in She County, in Huizhou, where literally every person is named Fang. In 1986, when I was vice president of the University of Science and Technology of China, local Communist Party officials in Huizhou began inviting me to visit and to "look up my relatives." They claimed that they had researched the question and found that I was closely related to the Fangs in their particular area, so it was appropriate — no, it was my duty — to pay tribute to my ancestors and to visit my living kin. Their not-so-hidden motive was to use my status as a scholar and university vice president to harvest a bit of glory, even be it empty glory, for their local area. Their plans went awry in January 1987 when I was expelled from the Communist Party, fired as vice president of the university, and demoted to the Beijing Observatory. After that, I wasn't of much use in the quest for glory, and the invitations stopped coming. There is something to the old adage that "the number of one's relatives is not fixed; it rises and falls with one's fortunes."

As it happened, I went to Huizhou three times during 1987 anyway, without any local invitations, because three scholarly conferences related to my work were held there. I knew a bit about my Huizhou ancestors, and these trips allowed me to get reacquainted. My branch of the Fang family had lived in Huizhou until the generation of my paternal grandfather, who left the area in the late nineteenth century. My parents told me that he had set out for the city of Hangzhou all by himself when he was only seven or eight years old. He never returned, and by now I do not have a single verifiable relative living in Huizhou.

She County town, in the heart of Huizhou, had no modern buildings when I visited in 1987. The city gates and the streets looked like antiques, even fossils. The stream that flowed along the city wall was still crystal clear; it showed no sign of the pollution that the modern world had brought elsewhere. A stone bridge about three hundred feet long that spanned the stream had been built more than a hundred years earlier with funds donated by a wealthy widow, and its only sign of modernity was that an automobile occasionally passed over it. Most of the streets were still paved with stone slabs, not asphalt. The most conspicuous structure on the city's main street was a great stone arch, blackened by time, a monument to the eternal glory of a lettered family that had produced a scholar who had once scored highest in the imperial examinations and had entered the emperor's personal secretariat, the revered Hanlin Academy.

The Huizhou region had produced many scholars. Traditional Chinese literati honored "the four essential tools" — paper, writing brushes, ink, and ink stones — and Huizhou or its environs were famous for producing prized varieties of three of the four: Xuan paper, Hui ink, and Hu brushes. I cannot, alas, find any evidence that the Fangs of Huizhou ever produced an outstanding scholar. (My research may be insufficient here; I may be sullying my ancestors.) Anyway, to the extent to which I myself can be called an intellectual, it's probably not because of any genes I inherited from Huizhou Fangs.

"Genetic inheritance," in Chinese thinking, can fall under the heading of "it has always been that way." The general principle is that for any phenomenon whatsoever, if you can find something in the past that resembles it, then you have an airtight explanation for why it exists today. This reasoning cannot explain why I turned out to be an astrophysicist. But, according to some people, it can explain why I was expelled from the Communist Party and fired from my job in 1987. It was an example of "it has always been that way."

The specific reference here was to Fang La, probably the most famous of the Fangs of Huizhou, who was executed in the year 1121 after leading a rebellion against the Song Dynasty. The rebellion arose in Huizhou and at its peak spread to parts of Anhui, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Jiangxi Provinces; then it lost steam and shrank back to Huizhou, where Fang La was eventually captured and killed. For some of my friends, this story from history became the basis for their "hypothesis" that Fang Lizhi's rebellious streak toward China's ruling regime is an inheritance from his distinguished rebel forebear, Fang La. Accordingly, during one of those 1987 conferences in Huizhou, they decided to "test" their hypothesis by organizing a trip, and inviting me along, to the Qiyun Mountains in Yi County, to the Cavern of Fang La — which was said to have been the rebel's last stronghold.

The cavern itself is not very big and is located on a steep cliff that is difficult to ascend. One can see why it was an ideal place for a last stand — it was hard to attack and easy to defend. Inside the cavern there was no longer any evidence of spear or scimitar, blood or rage; the only faint signs of anything at all were some charred rocks, but who could say whether those were from the fires of Fang La or from more recent visitors?

The only trail to the cavern passes by a stone monument that has been erected to the intrepid rebel. The stone is a homely thing, sturdy and thick, and its inscription is in coarse, unrefined calligraphy. Still, there is no denying that this was the largest monument of any kind to any Fang of Huizhou, and even though it was well known that Fang La had been little more than a big bandit, that "hypothesis" about my being his descendant still lurked in my mind. So I stopped next to the monument and allowed my friends to take a few photos. But the question of whether I was biologically descended from Fang La is something I never seriously looked into. After the visit to Huizhou, my interest in the question dwindled.

My grandfather was neither a Huizhou literatus nor a rebel like Fang La, but a merchant. Huizhou has a long, proud tradition of commerce. This is a strange fact, because the Huizhou area, with its rugged hills and winding roads, is not transportation-friendly. The first railroad line was completed only in 1987 — and it ran no express trains. But no matter: for about six centuries, Huizhou commerce was sufficiently dominant in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangzi River that the term "Hui merchants" became standard in historical records.

Commerce is also what led Huizhou people to begin migrating away from their native places. My grandfather, when he moved from Huizhou to Hangzhou, was part of a small tide.

I never met my grandfather; he died several years before I was born. To me he was always a sort of legend. I don't even know exactly what all of his given and assumed names were. What I do know is that I never heard anything but praise for him from my parents or from anyone else in their generation. They all told me how Grandfather, while still very young, left She County to work as an apprentice to a Hui merchant in Hangzhou and how, being smart, hardworking, and ready to help others, he had thrived and prospered until, in his later years, he was owner of several businesses. In terms of class analysis, he was an early-stage capitalist.

This question of his "class background" lingers in my mind for a special reason. When I joined the Communist Party in the early 1950s, my grandfather's class status and history were the grounds on which I gave him some severe posthumous tongue-lashings. Even though he was long gone by the time I grew up, and even though I inherited nothing from him (after his death his wealth dissipated fairly quickly among his relatives and friends), my blood relationship with him still made me the "grandson of a Hui merchant." In Marxism, merchants are exploiters and must be denounced. My grandfather especially needed to be denounced because one of his businesses was a pawnshop, and pawnshops were super-exploitative things that deserved nothing but eradication. (Actually, what Chinese pawnshops did was only a more primitive form of the secured lending that banks do today.) The purpose of my denunciations of my grandfather when I joined the Party was to repudiate the class inheritance that he presumably had passed on to me. In fact, his actual influence on me had been no greater than that of Fang La.

If my impressions of my grandfather are sketchy, this in part is because my father himself was young when he left my grandfather's home in Hangzhou and headed to Beijing. My father, Fang Chengpu (also named Fang Xingsun), was born in 1912, the year after the Qing Dynasty fell and the first year of the Republic of China. China's ancient culture seemed to be falling apart in those years, and my father decided to make a break with his family's traditions in commerce. He chose study, and moreover chose to venture far from Hangzhou and do his studying in Beijing.

I have never been clear on exactly why he did this. I did have plenty of time in which to find out, because, during the forty-seven years between my birth in 1936 and his death in 1983, we were never far apart. But he rarely spoke to us children about his personal history, especially about his thinking during his youth, so I can't even say whether his early attraction to Beijing was to the old Beijing or to the new Beijing. Beijing in the 1920s contained the oldest of China and the newest, the most conservative and the most progressive. It was the repository of the culture that the capital of an empire had accumulated during seven centuries of dynastic rule; but it was also the birthplace of China's modern scholarship and the fount of new trends in thought. Which of these two had attracted my father? Both, perhaps? By the time I was old enough to wonder such things, I could never observe him saying anything that was either especially conservative or particularly radical. His philosophy toward the world, which remained remarkably consistent through all kinds of ups and downs, seemed to be: pay no attention, do not care, don't be moved, don't get involved. But on the other hand, something must have caused him to set out for Beijing — alone, and only sixteen years old — to study. His move was not necessarily the boldest the Fang clan had ever seen, but it was highly unusual. Almost all the other offspring of my grandfather's extended family stuck close to the patriarch in Hangzhou.

My mother, Shi Peiji, married into the family and then became one of the ones who stuck close to the patriarch. She lived inside my grandfather's Hangzhou household while my father went to the university in Beijing. Both of my elder brothers, Fang Nianzhi and Fang Fuzhi, were born inside that patriarchal home. But then my grandfather died and his wealth quickly disappeared. My father, who had been relying on my grandfather to finance his studies, could no longer make ends meet and had to quit. He left the university in 1934 and, looking for ways to support himself, eventually found a job with the Ministry of Railways. He brought my mother and brothers to Beijing and set up his own separate little household. I was the first of my siblings to be born in Beijing.

For that reason I never got more than vague impressions of life in a big traditional-style Chinese family. In Beijing we were a small family and didn't even have any relatives living in the vicinity. We children saw none of the comings and goings of kin that are a normal part of Chinese big-family life. It was only when I visited Hangzhou that I got a better sense of my extended family — or, at least, a sense of what it once had been. Even now when I go back to Hangzhou, or even to the general area of Hangzhou, I get the sense of being immersed in a sea of relatives who appear and disappear under various labels — Younger Male Cousin This, Second Maternal Auntie That, and so on. All four of my grandparents lived in Hangzhou, and they seem to have had descendants of every possible kind. To make matters worse, there were all sorts of lateral interconnections. I often felt embarrassed to meet my relatives because I wasn't sure exactly how I was related — and this mattered, because it meant I didn't know the right word in Chinese to use in addressing them. For someone like me, who grew up in a nuclear family, the complex web of family nomenclature was always somewhat mystifying. This also might be why, every time I tried to read the great Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, I never got very far. All those family relationships, and the complex network in which they were embedded, seemed alien to me, hard to empathize with — and hence boring.

I don't know how much the ethical values in Chinese tradition have to do with these complex family networks, and I am not sure, either, that they represent the "essence" of Chinese culture. I do know that I am grateful to my parents for the wonderfully simple environment — parents and siblings only — in which I grew up.

Family webs aside, I have always been very fond of Hangzhou. Other than the cities in which I have worked, it is the one with which I am most familiar. In my youth, my siblings and I often traveled from Beijing to Hangzhou to visit my grandparents; later on, we brought our aging mother to visit her relatives there. The Hangzhou rail station became a very familiar place to me. My parents' wedding took place in the Hangzhou rail station hotel.