February 23, 2016
The 1989 arrest warrant, shown on China’s state TV, for the dissident Fang Lizhi, right, and his wife, Li Shuxian.
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A couple of years ago, in what was titled “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” China’s Communist Party banned, among other things, “historical nihilism,” by which was clearly meant writings that dwelled excessively on the party’s many disastrous past mistakes. Here we have two books, both searing eyewitness accounts of past ideological fanaticism written by eminent Chinese intellectuals, that clearly fit the description of “historical nihilism,” though, Ji Xianlin’s “The Cowshed” was actually published in China a couple of decades ago, when things were a bit looser than they are today.
There is virtually no possibility, however, that Fang Lizhi’s “The Most Wanted Man in China,” marvelously, idiomatically translated by Perry Link, will be published in China. Fang, who died in 2012, was for a quarter of a century probably his country’s most famous scientist. Like Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet dissident with whom he is often compared, he was a powerful advocate of the notion of universal human rights (another concept barred by the aforementioned “Communiqué”). After the bloody crackdown on the student-led demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, Fang and his wife, Li Shuxian, also a physicist, were named the chief “black hands behind the turmoil.” The couple took refuge in the American Embassy in Beijing, where they remained until they were allowed to leave for permanent exile in the United States 13 months later. It was mostly during that time in the embassy, constantly worried that he could be seized and abducted, that Fang wrote his memoir.
But though composed in the heat and terror of a dangerous moment, this is a remarkably cool, precise and in places even good-humored book; Fang generally prefers to lampoon China’s authoritarian bureaucracy than to dwell on his own suffering. The book reflects its author in this sense — a skeptical rationalist and a brave man who, it turns out, was also a fine writer with an irreverent and sometimes poetic touch. Fang’s underlying theme is the fundamental incompatibility between science and the kind of faith in their own infallibility demanded by the China’s leaders, and his book is a manifesto of the sort Galileo might have written had he been a Chinese physicist in the middle of the 20th century.
Fang’s book recounts his entire life, from his origins in a small-business family from the fabled city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province to his departure from China in 1990 — after which he taught physics at the University of Arizona until his death at the age of 76. He covers all the major twists and turns of the Maoist regime up to 1989, providing learned, witty digressions on a host of topics from the importance of banquet scenes in Peking opera to what Fang calls the “hallucinatory megalomania in Communist culture,” though he readily admits that, like many Chinese intellectuals, he was for years a true believer in Chinese socialism and the greatness of the Chairman.
But here is where science came in, science and what Fang calls the “subversive” effect of its basic requirements — “free inquiry, a spirit of skepticism and reliance on evidence.” Galileo himself came to Fang’s mind in 1973, when he wrote a paper on modern cosmology that the authorities attacked as “bourgeois” and “depraved,” thereby establishing a kind of doppelgänger relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and the medieval Catholic Church. Ridiculous though it may seem in the 20th century, post-Einstein theories of the universe contradicted some (incorrect) jottings by Engels — which leads Fang to note, “No one who understands physics can turn around and accept a claim that Marxism-Leninism is special wisdom that trumps everything else.”
Here and there, Fang’s account waxes lyrical, as when he describes the late stages of the Cultural Revolution when he labored in a coal mine in southern Anhui Province. A new political turn had led to a surge of suicides among former Red Guards. Physics students stood watch at the local morgue to keep wild dogs away from the fresh corpses, and these grim circumstances imparted to Fang a profound love of astrophysics. “What could match the divine purity of a firmament packed densely and deeply with stars — and also wash away the stench of wild dogs haunting a morgue?” he writes.
It is statements like that, combined with Fang’s international prestige, that will surely exclude his book from China. Ji Xianlin’s haunting “The Cowshed,” however, which focuses on the 10-year period of the Cultural Revolution, was published in the People’s Republic in 1992 and remains in print, though as Zha Jianying points out in her informative introduction, “the authorities also quietly took steps to restrict public discussion of the memoir, as its subject continues to be treated as sensitive.” Ji, who died in 2009 at the age of 97, was a German-educated scholar of Pali and Sanskrit. Like Fang, he supported the Communist revolution, but less critically, and in his memoir, he confesses some shame over his obedience to the party’s authority. “I never once gave a thought to the feelings of the people wearing hats,” he admits — meaning the people singled out by Mao for national condemnation, people whom Ji duly criticized in China’s Orwellian rituals.
Ji had a rude awakening when the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966, and he found himself wearing the “hat” of a “reactionary capitalist academic authority.” Before he knew it, he was a victim of one of Mao’s chief contributions to 20th-century totalitarian practice, the “struggle session,” during which, over a period of weeks and months, the targeted person was harangued, humiliated, starved and beaten in front of mobs howling slogans.
At the center of Ji’s account, ably translated by Chenxin Jiang, is the “cowshed” of the title. This was a makeshift prison of the sort built all over China at the time to house inmates undergoing “reform through labor,” in Ji’s case on the very campus of Peking University. His description of this institution, really a kind of mini concentration camp, is unforgettable. Other writers, including Fang, have described the Cultural Revolution largely as a massive waste of time during which atrocities were frequent. For Ji, the atrocities themselves, the savage excesses, the sadism and the infliction of pain were the intentional points of the exercise, whose perpetrators were encouraged in the belief that the more brutal they were, the more admirably “revolutionary” they could claim to be.
Readers of books on China have over the years been presented with a mounting body of material about the cruelty and destructiveness of the Communist revolution, from the takeover of power in 1949 to the military crackdown against the Tiananmen protesters in 1989. What these two books show in their sober, elegiac way is that it was even worse than we thought.
Richard Bernstein is a former foreign correspondent at The Times. His latest book is “China 1945: Mao’s Revolution and America’s Fateful Choice.”
