by Ian Buruma
As if she wanted to make up for her husband’s diffidence, Li spoke without stopping, in fluent English, which she had learned in school, just before the revolution. It did not surprise me to hear that she was from a distinguished family of landowners. (Fang’s father had been a postal clerk.) She had the poise that comes with her class self-confidence, which even years of Maoist torment were unable to wipe out.
First of all, to get that topic out of the way, Li explained why they’d had to leave China. They had not really wanted to leave at all. Indeed, if they had wanted to come to the West, they could have done so before, under better circumstances. There had been no lack of offers. Anyway, the day after the Beijing Massacre, they were staying at a hotel, the Shangri-La, since their house was under constant police surveillance. Fang was about to go to work at the Beijing Observatory. But students had phoned to tell him that both he and his wife were on the most-wanted list and would certainly be arrested. So Li decided it was time to get out of the country. She thought Fang might be killed. He agreed. They applied for a U.S. visa, and asked whether the embassy could offer them temporary shelter. The embassy, not sure what to do, suggested they might apply for refugee status. They declined the offer and returned to their hotel. But after midnight, they were picked up as “guests of President Bush,” escorted out of the hotel through the back gate, and driven away in a black car by the head of U.S. embassy security. For more than one year they were virtual prisoners inside the embassy.
Since I knew Li had been close to the students, especially Wang Dan, I asked her where she stood in the debate about Tiananmen. Had the student leaders been too uncompromising? Should they have backed down?
“They were too young. They didn’t know history. They were simply too young.” Unlike their elders, who had suffered for years under the Communist regime, they didn’t understand the true nature of the Party, she continued. They thought they could imitate Gandhi. But you couldn’t be a Gandhi in China. Gandhi’s opponents represented a constitutional democracy. China was too big and had too long a history of tyranny. China’s problems couldn’t be solved in a few days. The students would be crushed. That is why she went to the Square on May 5 and tried to persuade them to retreat. They wouldn’t listen. It was the last time she saw Wang Dan in China.
Li and Fang were colleagues at Beijing University when they married in 1961. Like her husband, she had been in deep trouble several years before that. But she had begun as a passionate supporter of the revolution, celebrating the “liberation” in Shanghai. A Party member and a patriot, she believed in social equality and restoring greatness to her country. When Mao invited criticism in 1957, she talked to fellow students at Beijing University about writing a letter to Party headquarters. This was not an act of rebellion. In fact, she believed that the greatness of China would be enhanced if students were encouraged to think for themselves instead of following Marxist-Leninist dogma without question. The letter was never actually sent. But rumors of her intention were enough to brand her as a “rightist” when the crackdown came, and she spent the next two years feeding pigs in a tiny village northwest of Beijing.
Li probably never stood a chance anyway. Perhaps she is lucky to be alive, for her family background was all wrong. Her father, who died in a car crash before the revolution, had been a surgeon and had served with the Kuomintang during the war. Her mother came from a family of rich landlords. There were relatives in Taiwan. Thus Li was never trusted. During the Cultural Revolution, she was tormented as a “stinking reactionary” even as she was about to give birth to her second child. Her first son, an eight-year-old “Little Red Guard,” publicly railed at his mother for being unfit to bring him up. After further denunciations and struggle sessions, she was sent to the countryside once again, this time to labor in a mine.
Li was matter-of-fact about all this, as though these events were a normal part of everyone’s life. The tragedy is that such a life was indeed normal for a person of Li’s background. She was one of many victims of Mao’s loathing of upper-class intellectuals. During a rare moment of silence, we both looked through the window into the blinding afternoon sun. A white shaft of light cut into the room like a knife. Still gazing into the sun, which lightened her brown eyes, Li suddenly said softly, almost as if she were speaking to herself: “The worst thing is that they control our memories.” I looked at her, waiting for more. “Especially when they have done something terrible, they hide history or force people to forget. Even my son doesn’t know what happened in those days. That is why we must educate people, step by step, about the truth.”
Li had always been ambitious. Her mother had taught her never to depend on a man. Anything a man could do, she could do better. She was the brightest pupil in her high school class in Shanghai. After she graduated in 1952, her teacher asked her what she wanted to do. She replied that she wanted to study the most difficult subject there was so she could prove herself to be as good as any man. He said physics was the hardest subject. So she studied physics. But then, branded as a rightist and a class enemy, Li was unable to have a career in scientific research and took up teaching instead.
Her husband had the career she had aspired to. She became the politician; he was the scholar. She claims she was glad when Fang was sacked as vice president of his university in 1987, for then he could concentrate on his scientific work. And she was happy when he was expelled from the Party. History would prove him right anyway. It was his scholarship that should come first.
And now they were in America, where he could finally work in freedom. After thirty-two years of struggle in China, defeated in their efforts to build a better society, they had started a second life. Arizona was good for Fang, Li said. I thought I detected a wistful note in her voice, and I asked whether it was good for her, too. Her mouth tightened. She felt homesick at times, she admitted. Her mother and brother had died after she and Fang moved to the West. She would love to go back to China, but on her own terms—openly—and not furtively, after cutting some shabby deal with the Party. Li repeated: “This is a second life for us.” She silently smoothed her slacks with both hands. And with an air of resignation—not anger or resentment—she said: “You know, I used to be a good teacher, but here there is no one for me to teach. Now I am finally free to talk, but there is no one for me to talk to.”
After leaving the house of Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian, I decided to go for a drive through the desert landscape down to the Mexican border. The road to Nogales passes through several Native American reservations. Here and there, minute specks in the shimmering horizon suggested human dwellings; the rest was empty, dry land, with no Native American in sight. I saw a sign to the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Museum and made a note to swing by on my way back.
Something Fang had said came back to me: “I am anti-religion. Modern science is part of the Western value system.” He implied that science was able not just to supply explanations for the natural world but also to tell us how to live. Through science, social harmony could once again match the mathematical harmony of the stars. It was a Platonic, as well as a very Chinese, notion.
The political scientist Yan Jiaqi, who was trained as a mathematician at the University of Science and Technology in the 1960s, went one step further. (He went many steps further than Fang in several ways. In May 1989, he openly supported the students in Tiananmen Square while also denouncing Deng Xiaoping as a “senile dictator” who should be brought down.) When I saw him in his apartment in Brooklyn, a month before visiting Arizona, amidst the usual émigré clutter of newspaper cuttings and unfinished articles, he told me why he hadn’t become a Christian. It was “because I’m a scientist. I can use science to explain the world. I want to know God through science.” He gave me a small book he had written, which I read afterward. Science, he wrote, was “the wellspring of human optimism.” Why? Because “with the use of science, people can create the conditions or alter existing conditions in order to deal with the concrete problems they need to so
lve.” In other words, for Yan, and perhaps Fang, democracy is more than a flawed system that works better than others: it is the only scientifically correct system.
Chineseness is not an adequate explanation for why many dissidents in China are “scientists,” those who believe in science as an alternative to religion. For almost a hundred years, scientism was in fact part of a deliberate attempt to get away from Chineseness. To make sure China would not be humiliated again by superior Western powers, Chinese reformists in the early twentieth century wanted to modernize China by adopting the “scientific spirit.” They felt that China had been held back for centuries by hoary philosophy and spiritual flimflam. The new scientific spirit would sweep the cobwebs away, free the Chinese from their shackles, and invigorate the nation. The debates in those years leading up to May 4, 1919, were not so different from similar arguments between “ancients” and “moderns” in seventeenth-century Europe. Then, too, some wanted to forge ahead by exploring the outside world by scientific means, while others put their faith in cultivating the self by studying the classics. The difference is that science in twentieth-century China was associated with Western thinking, and philosophy with the ancient Chinese classics. Science was modern; philosophy was history. That is why “scientists,” or even scientists, were quickly associated with “total westernization,” although they did not necessarily wish to destroy all Chinese traditions.
Cultural conservatives saw modern science not only as a Western but also as a purely materialistic enterprise. Matters of the spirit, or the soul, belonged to the ancient tradition. Since the late nineteenth century even reformers made the distinction between Chinese learning to cultivate the spirit and Western learning for practical use—to build guns, say. The Chinese “scientists,” including Fang Lizhi, tried to break away from this distinction by identifying science with values, or indeed with a “spirit.” This is difficult to grasp without knowing the Chinese context. For Chinese scientism is not quite the same as Einstein’s moral concerns. The “scientists” are optimists and believe that science will lead to enlightenment and truth, whereas Einstein worried that people would not use scientific discoveries responsibly. As he observed24: “Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an ax in the hand of a pathological criminal.”
Einstein’s quote was not really on my mind when I drove up to the gate of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Museum. But it is hard not to reflect on the dangers of pure science when you enter the museum, which is really a silo containing a gigantic Titan nuclear missile once aimed at several sites in the Communist world, perhaps even Beijing. From this spot in the desert, forces could have been unleashed that would have killed millions. The missile still stands underground, like some malign giant phallus. But the exit has been sealed.
I bought my entrance ticket from a woman in her sixties. Her hair was painted a light shade of blond. She spoke rather brusquely in a German accent—a former GI bride perhaps? I joined a group of tourists, mostly young people, of various nationalities. Our guide was a roly-poly man with a ready smile and a baseball cap perched above a beefy face. The cap identified him as bob. Bob was a retired military man who had worked on the Titan when it was still operational. Another tour group emerged from an elevator that had come up from the underground control center. Their guide was an equally jolly-looking figure; pete according to his cap.
Aboveground, Bob informed us about the various technical details of the Titan—how much fuel it took, its weight, its speed, and so on. He pointed out the various devices to camouflage the Titan’s location from prying enemy satellites. He told us everything except how much damage the phallus would have done in the event of its deployment. Perhaps it was squeamishness or perhaps he simply did not know. Psychiatrists have identified a kind of numbing effect on scientists and soldiers who deal with death on a massive scale. It is difficult to be morally engaged and think of the possible consequences of your job. It is at any rate not easy to imagine the death of millions.
Down in the bowels of the Titan missile complex, dozens of feet underground, we entered the control room through a long succession of thick steel doors, which clanked shut with a peculiar hissing sound, as though sucking the air from the tight little spots we found ourselves jammed in. Bob showed us the control panel with the buttons, in red, yellow, and green, that would have set the missile off. A middle-aged lady in tight shorts and Nike running shoes was invited to assist Bob in a mock-up nuclear attack. She giggled as Bob led her pudgy finger to “Target One.” I asked him what the targets were. He said that was something they were never told. Not knowing, he said, made the job easier.
Was this the nightmare side of the Enlightenment? Had Bob and Pete been the pawns in a game of science gone mad? Is the human capacity to blow up our world an argument against pure science? On my way back to Tucson, with the evening sun bathing the Native American reservations around me in a warm pink light of extraordinary beauty, I could not think of any rational reason why man’s freedom to explore the nature of our world, and the universe beyond our world, should be shackled. The question is how we use these inquiries. The nuclear bomb was developed by refugees from Nazi Europe and used on other human beings by the most democratic nation on earth. This was a terrible thing. But if Hitler’s scientists had gotten the deadly new weapon first, the results surely would have been worse. The problem, then, is not science as such. Nor is it the artificial and fruitless battle between “materialist” science and “spiritual” tradition. The problem is the nature of the society in which the fruits of science are employed. It is absurd to expect scientists to be more moral, responsible, spiritual, or wiser than the rest of us. That is where the “scientists” are wrong. And the notion that science supplies moral truths is equally wrongheaded. But it is not scientists who must be chained, but governments. We need ways to stop our rulers from ruling arbitrarily or absolutely. The first principle of good science and good governance is the freedom to be critical. In this respect, Fang Lizhi and his fellow dissident scientists are an example not just to China but to us all.
Chapter 4
Mr. Wei
Goes to Washington
It was, as far as Washington, D.C., news goes, not a major incident. Indeed, it was barely reported in the American press, which was, in the freezing month of January 1999, still dominated by details of President Clinton’s sexual transgressions with a lovestruck young woman on the White House staff. But for Chinese living in exile in the United States it was a big event, discussed with great gusts of emotion in émigré journals and on Internet websites.
It all began when Wei Jingsheng, together with several other Chinese dissidents, was invited to testify before the United States House of Representatives’ Committee on International Relations. Wei, the author, in 1978, of the democratic manifesto that got him jailed for fifteen years, was neither a Christian nor a blind disciple of Mr. Science. The occasion was prompted by the arrests in China of a number of people whose crime was to have founded the so-called China Democracy Party. Their aim had not been to overthrow the government but to take part in legitimate local elections. But since unofficial parties threaten the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, this initiative was swiftly dealt with: the Democracy Party was banned and its leaders put in prison. One was a veteran activist named Xu Wenli, who had already been driven to the limit of his endurance in the early 1980s, when he was locked up for twelve years, much of the time in a kind of concrete cage that was too small to stand up or lie down in. His hair turned white; he lost his teeth, and almost his mind. In 1998, this gentle magazine editor, who had always advocated socialist reform, not revolution, was sentenced to another thirteen years in jail.
I sat directly behind Wei in a large room inside the Rayburn Building, where congressional hearings are usually held. Hideous oil paintings of former U.S. congressmen added a somewhat contrived democratic gravitas to the clubby wood-paneled walls. The starched Stars and Stri
pes stood out boldly against the sea of sky-blue curtains. Facing us, on an elevated stage, rather like judges in a courtroom, sat the committee members. They included a Democrat from San Francisco, who told us that the Chinese sitting before them were the “heirs” of the liberties imparted to “our great country” by “our Founding Fathers,” a Republican, also from the West Coast, who got very red in the face and said the dictatorship in China was “evil, just as the Nazis were evil,” and a large, smiling Samoan Democrat in a string tie, who reminded us of the human-rights abuses in the United States, beginning with the slave trade two hundred years ago and continuing in our time with discrimination against Pacific Islanders. The Democrat from San Francisco nodded wisely and added something about women. The testifiers, some of whom had only just arrived from China, where they had been kept in prison until the day they left, looked mystified.
But not Wei. I noticed his broad back stiffen as he drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair. Tufts of short-cropped black hair stood up in little spikes around the collar of his blue open-necked sports shirt. Wei had heard this kind of waffle before and was itching to speak. I could just make out, over his shoulder, his pointed chin jutting toward the committee members. I was reminded of the photographs taken of Wei during his show trials in Beijing, in 1979 and 1993, when he was charged with “conspiracy to subvert the government.” His head shaved, like a monk’s, he had had that same look of determination, of knowing what (and who) is right and wanting to tell the world all about it: a man with a mission.
Although the questions from the congressmen were addressed to Wei as well as to his colleagues, Wei did most of the talking, while the others peered around and took in their strange surroundings: the flag, the portraits, the large foreign men and women looking down on them, smiling with an air of what might be described as parental pride. Later, also in the Rayburn Building, I was in an elevator with Wei when the bluff Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee stepped in with a colleague. He wrapped a big, blue-blazered arm around Wei, patted him on the back, and boomed that here was the greatest human-rights activist from China. “Now, tell me, how long were you in jail for?” Eighteen years, said Wei. “Oh my goodness! God bless you, sir.”
