Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  The American scholar Andrew Nathan observed, a little waspishly, that in his speeches Fang often sounded less like the eminently practical Sakharov than like Dorothy addressing the Wizard of Oz20 in her decent, frank, and naÏve way. But if some of Fang’s statements on politics and science sound platitudinous, his vocabulary reflects an ancient tradition. From Confucius to Mao Zedong, moral platitudes were always an important part of Chinese political discourse, and Fang’s not only carried a high risk but made more sense than most—and excited all those who heard them.

  Xiao Qiang was Fang Lizhi’s student in Hefei. Everyone who becomes involved in the Chinese democracy movement overseas knows Xiao, a lanky, smiling figure with shoulder-length hair, rushing from meeting to meeting, in New York and Washington, D.C., accompanying famous dissidents here, putting out fires of factional battles there, cajoling congressional committees, stumping for support for his Human Rights in China organization, talking a streak in fluent English, and surveying the world from the lofty perch of his office in the Empire State Building. I first saw him in 1997, at the New York Public Library, introducing Wei Jingsheng to the press just after Wei had been released from jail. Dressed in blue jeans, his hair flopping about his forehead, he was barking in true northern fashion at some Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong journalists that “only questions in English or Mandarin will be tolerated.” But the barking manner melted into the mildest of smiles after a note was passed and a whispered conversation hastily took place. “Well,” Xiao burbled, “we are very democratic here. You can ask questions in any language you want.”

  In a small delicatessen in midtown Manhattan, I asked him what it had been like to be Fang’s student in 1979, the year of the Democracy Wall. The first thing to realize, Xiao said, was how arrogant the science students were. Only the brightest entered the University of Science and Technology (Keda, for short); they represented the best of their generation, indeed the future of science in China. Everyone wanted to be a genius. They all thought they would be an Einstein: “We were so special, so free, and so spoiled.” As he said this, I thought of Wu’er Kaixi, who had told me the same thing in the hamburger joint in Taiwan: “All Chinese students are arrogant. . . . We thought we could solve the problems of China.” And Xiao was not the first person to mention Einstein, a hero to Chinese dissidents.

  One of Fang’s closest allies, the distinguished historian of science Xu Liangying, had translated Einstein’s writings and kept his portrait on the wall. Shen Tong, one of the student leaders in Tiananmen Square, had named his political talking shop (or “salon”) at Beijing University the Olympic Institute, after Einstein’s group. Aside from his scientific achievements, Einstein, with his wild white hair and his interest in morality, freedom, justice, and peace, became an almost spiritual figure. It was precisely the linkage in Einstein’s thought of spirituality and science that appealed to his Chinese admirers. Like Fang, Einstein was seen as a wise man, a scientific guru. “God does not play dice” was a maxim made for scholars who battled with political superstitions on earth by invoking the higher principles of heaven.

  In the early 1980s, Xiao organized a seminar at Keda and asked Fang to talk about philosophy and science. In China, philosophy still meant Marxism. Fang, in his usual sardonic manner, bubbling over with barbed jokes, spoke about the big bang that triggered off our universe and explained that the Marxists, with their nineteenth-century notions of science and their dogmatic insistence on the infinity of time and space, simply had no idea what they were talking about. The students exchanged glances of sheer delight. One of them decided to be direct; he was sure Professor Fang wouldn’t mind. So he asked what Fang really thought of Marxism. And Fang answered: “Marxism is out of date.” The students burst into wild applause.

  Xiao Qiang’s epiphany about the true state of Chinese Communist society also came during a visit to a shrine. Like so many people who have grown disenchanted with Marxist dogma and Maoist faith, he was looking for answers in alternative religions. He was in a state of confusion, and hoped to find enlightenment from a spiritual master. So he set off one day in 1980, with a friend from Beijing University, to a famous Buddhist temple that had just been reopened in Anhui province, not far from Hefei.

  The temple was new, and looked it; the garish fresh paint still sparkled. The old temple had been demolished during the Cultural Revolution. Xiao and his friend asked the monks if they could stay there and work. They were allowed to sleep in the kitchen. The next day, local people arrived to consult the monks about their problems, as people had done for centuries, for the monks were thought to be learned men who knew how to soothe troubled minds. The harshness of the locals’ problems shocked the two spoiled students from the best universities in China. Women had been raped by Party bosses, others were being “squeezed” for money they didn’t have, and still others had fathers or sons who had been locked up for years in hard-labor camps without knowing why or having any prospect of being released. The monks, dressed in fine saffron robes, answered by repeating Maoist clichés.

  Xiao realized that the temple was a sham, a phony show to attract tourist money, and that the monks were frauds. The whole thing was just “bullshit.” It was also then, when the villagers turned in desperation to the two students, that Xiao saw it was not enough to want to be a scientific genius. “The experience,” he said, “was a kind of enlightenment. It made me care more about other people.”

  This was not quite the end of Xiao’s spiritual travails. After coming to America in the late 1980s, he spent some time at Notre Dame University learning about Christianity. He also dabbled in Islam and Taoism. There was even a murky episode in Washington, D.C., when he followed a girlfriend into the Unification Church of the Reverend Moon. But back in 1980, when he saw through the useless platitudes spouted by those so-called Buddhist monks, he was at least enlightened enough to see that Fang Lizhi had something important to say of a wholly secular nature. Fang promoted freedom of thought as an essential condition for the practice of science. He also argued that democracy was an essential condition for thinking freely. As he put it in his most famous speech, delivered in Shanghai21 in 1986: “Democracy is based on recognizing the rights of every single individual. Naturally, not everyone wants the same thing, and therefore the desires of different individuals have to be mediated through a democratic process, to form a society, a nation, a collectivity. But it is only on the foundation of recognizing the humanity and the rights of each person that we can build democracy.”

  A year before he spoke these words, Fang had made a similar speech at the University of Zhejiang. It was recorded on tape and one of Fang’s students in Hefei spent hours transcribing the words. The student then made two hundred copies of the transcription and sent them to other universities around the country. The speech also found its way to members of the Politburo in Beijing, who were of course outraged. Fang became nationally famous, as well as a marked man. Two years later, he would be expelled from the Party for the second time in his life. But the protest movements of the 1980s had begun. The student who had made those copies and sent them around China was Xiao Qiang.

  As the plane from Los Angeles to Tucson descended on a clear evening, the orange glow of the sun melting into a warm blue sky, I was getting to the end of a collection of articles by Fang Lizhi, entitled Bringing Down the Great Wall. They included his famous letter to Deng Xiaoping, dated January 6, 1989, the fortieth-anniversary year of the Chinese Communist Revolution. Given that it was also the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, Fang wrote, it would surely be a good idea to celebrate liberty, equality, fraternity, and human rights by releasing political prisoners, such as Wei Jingsheng. This remarkable act of courage marked the beginning of that extraordinary year of protest. Fang’s letter provided the first spark. But when the students revolted en masse in Tiananmen Square, he kept a sympathetic distance, for he felt that his direct involvement was neither in his nor the students’ interest. In fact, mass movements frightened hi
m. Still, like other liberal intellectuals, he was blamed for the “counterrevolutionary rebellion” as soon as the protest was crushed, and was officially described as “the scum of the intelligentsia.” To avoid arrest, he fled with his wife to the U.S. embassy, where he was sheltered for a year, until the Chinese government found a face-saving way to bundle him out of the country. (They said he had a heart problem.) And that is why he was now teaching astrophysics at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where even Jesuits gaze at the stars.

  I drove to the university in the morning, passing by low white adobe houses, fat green cacti, as tall as small trees, plush Mexican restaurants, and large billboards bearing such uplifting messages as happiness is a healthy cash flow. The sun was beating down; the dry heat was intense. A local country-and-western radio station was playing Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. A man in a low, slow, pleasing voice asked listeners who were looking for a job, a good job, a secure job, to call a toll-free number to find employment at one of the fine correctional institutions of the state of Arizona. I thought of questions to ask Fang. The topic I hoped he would talk about was his idea of “total westernization.”

  Tall, tanned, athletic students walked, cycled, and skateboarded across the campus, dressed in T-shirts, jogging shoes, and shorts. They were from every conceivable ethnic group, except that most were larger, healthier-looking, and better fed than the people on the continents they or their forebears had left behind. Here, on the Tucson campus, you felt you were in the presence of a new breed of physical supermen and -women.

  Fang did not look like a superman. His small, intelligent, slightly porcine eyes peered at me watchfully through thick glasses, perched above fleshy cheeks and a generous mouth, at the corners of which white flecks gathered when he spoke. His white sports shirt and gray slacks were rumpled. His office was cramped. The window offered a view of the milk-fed superrace zooming around campus below.

  So what about his idea of total westernization? Had he changed his mind now that he had moved West? Fang said he had not. Modern science, he said, was part of the Western “value system” developed in the Renaissance. Nothing like it had happened in China. He didn’t really know why. True, Mencius and other Confucian thinkers had put man in the center of their concerns, but that wasn’t enough to set off the equivalent of the European Renaissance. It was now up to Chinese intellectuals to start a Chinese Renaissance.

  Fang spoke softly, in a northern-Chinese accent. His answers were short. There were awkward pauses. In fact, he was not really in the mood to talk. He was polite but preoccupied; there was no sign of his famous irreverent humor. Perhaps he was depressed by the aftermath of the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. He told me that students of his old university in Hefei had just smashed the local branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken as a protest against “U.S. imperialism.” Only a little more than ten years ago, their older brothers and sisters had demonstrated for freedom and democracy by paraphrasing Martin Luther King, Jr. Their teacher’s vision of total westernization had excited them. Now students had turned their patriotism against the West.

  Fang sighed and said that China had awakened to the modern world only because of European and Japanese cruelty, beginning with the Opium War (1839–1842). So it was always easy to stir up anti-foreign sentiment. Look what happened in 1900, when the Manchu court encouraged the Boxers to attack the foreigners. Not that the Boxers had needed encouragement. They were xenophobic anyway. But as usual in Chinese history, their zeal could easily have been turned against the government, too.

  As Fang spoke about the Boxers, I thought of events in the 1980s, which, on a tiny scale, reflected China’s perennial xenophobia. Protests had erupted at universities in various cities because African exchange students had allegedly abused Chinese girls. Black students were pelted with ink. The young Chinese students who were inspired by Fang’s ideas might in some cases have thrown some of that ink: Visceral resentment of foreigners can coexist with a yearning for Western-style liberties; resentments are often sharpened by the lack of freedom.

  Total westernization, in Fang’s view, does not mean that Chinese should discard every aspect of their own culture. It means, as he said in one of his essays, “complete openness to the outside world, assimilating all of the cultural advances of the human race.” Fang admires22 “the spirit of the ‘complete Westernizers’ both before and after the May Fourth period, who had the guts to call for letting foreign ideas into China, where they could challenge what was not progressive in our culture.”

  What Fang and many May Fourth intellectuals before him were talking about was a particular road not taken. On this topic, Fang became livelier. He said the response to the Opium War had been all wrong. If only the Chinese government had done what the Japanese did when Commodore Perry arrived in Shimoda with his “black ships” in 1853, things would have turned out better. The samurai, who were shrewder than the Chinese mandarins about the implications of Western science, saw that it was futile to resist American might. So they started their own Renaissance and imported Western knowledge to modernize their country. The Chinese, however—uneasy, defensive, but still convinced that their empire was the center of the universe, like plump frogs in an old well—reacted to the Western challenge with hostility. They refused to learn from the outside world. China, in short, lacked not only a Renaissance but a Meiji Restoration.

  And that was, more or less, were our conversation ended. Fang was weary. He had said what he wanted to say about Chinese politics many times already. He was never an activist. The student demonstrations in 1986 had disturbed him, for he did not want to be responsible for getting young people into trouble. Unlike them, he knew from experience the ruthlessness of the Chinese state. Here in Arizona, he had left politics behind. From time to time he still wrote articles on Chinese affairs for American intellectual journals, and he was a board member of Human Rights in China. But I had the impression he really wanted to be left alone with his research students, and with the stars that sparkled like fat diamonds in the ink-blue desert skies. In a sense, he wasn’t really in exile at all.

  Perhaps there was one more reason for his reticence. Fang had been criticized by other Chinese for fleeing to the U.S. embassy in 1989 and then leaving his country. After all he had done to stimulate demands for political liberty in China, he seemed to have turned his back and isolated himself in the Far West. Fang himself told journalist Orville Schell that going abroad was a kind of failure, since he had had to leave his friends and colleagues behind23, and “naturally my effectiveness will now be marked by this.” It was the classic dilemma of exile: freedom gained but influence lost. Fang’s escape was widely seen as a blow to the democratic cause. Dai Qing, the caustic journalist, was one of the people who never tired of saying so. “He should never have left China,” she proclaimed. “He is useless now.”

  It is a common accusation made against political refugees, especially when they prosper abroad. Their foreign success is seen as treachery, their freedom to live as they like an affront to those who have to bear the strictures of life at home. Germans who fled the Third Reich in the 1930s were, on the whole, not made to feel welcome when they returned after the war. They had “had it easy,” they didn’t “know what it had been like.” The novelist Milan Kundera was never forgiven by many Czechs for leaving Prague and retiring to his French study to tend to his literary garden. But the absence of freedom forces writers and scientists to lie, and once they lie, their work is worthless. If they choose silence, there is no work at all. Or they risk the silence of prison. That is where Fang would have ended up, heroically perhaps—as a scientific martyr. But martyrdom is not something to wish upon others. Fang had come to America to work, and to get a closer view of the stars.

  Dai Qing blames it all on Fang’s wife, Li Shuxian. She was the “radical.” Her influence was always bad. She forced Fang to seek refuge among the Americans. I had heard too many denunciations of this kind before to take this on trust, so I want
ed to meet Li Shuxian. A formidable figure in her own right, a physicist like her husband, Li had always been more of an activist. In 1980, the government, in an effort to give more people a minor stake in one-party rule, had allowed elections for local “people’s congresses” (like soviets in the Soviet Union). Li won a seat for the Haidian district in Beijing, and irritated the authorities by speaking up for the rights of her constituents. She was also a regular speaker at the democracy salon organized on the Beijing University campus by Wang Dan, the student leader at Tiananmen. And she contributed to the small magazines that flourished in those early years of the 1980s known—much too hopefully—as the Beijing Spring.

  To get to the Fangs’ house, in the outskirts of Tucson, you have to drive through a quiet stretch of dry, empty desert land, interrupted only by the occasional cactus or dusty shrub. The house stands alone on top of a small hill and is furnished with all the accoutrements of westernized Chinese affluence: a large glass-topped table, a fine calligraphy on the wall, some gilded knickknacks from foreign travels, a pool in the garden. In her sixties, Li is still a beautiful woman. She wore cream trousers and a peach-colored shirt. Her carefully dressed jet-black hair was pulled back, which made her look handsome more than severe. Fang greeted me at the door. As soon as I had sat down with Li, he retreated to his study.