China’s most wanted man

Press, 26 June 1989, Page 20

China’s most wanted man

Jonathan Mirsky, of the “Observer”

profiles a leading dissiden

THE MINISTRY of Public Security in Peking has issued the following “wanted orders” to “all regions, transport organisations, and ports.”

“Fang Lizhi, male, born on December 12, 1936, and a native of Hangzhou city, Zhejiang province, a research fellow of the Peking Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is 1.72 metres tall and slightly heavy. in build. He has long hair brushed to one side, a rotund square face and wears glasses for near-sighted-ness. He throws out his chest and looks up as he walks.

“Li Shuxian, female, born on January 28, 1935, and a native of Jiashan province, is an associate professor of the: Department of Physics, Peking University. She is 1.60 metres tall and slightly slender in build. She has short, permanent waved hair and a long rectangular' face, with noticeable freckles. She walks at a fairly fast pace. 1 ; “The two criminals,-; Fang and Li, have absconded to avoid punishment and currently are wanted ... Public Security organs in various districts and counties are requested to make immediate arrangements to track down their whereabouts and arrest them...”

Even the dimmest operative of the Public Security Bureau did not pull on his uniform and begin tracking down Mr Fang and Professor Li when he received this order, he knew already that the two “counter-revolutionary propagandists and instigators” — to specify their crimes — were inside the walls of the American Embassy, telephone 532-3831, which in official language is offering them shelter. Sheltering Mr Fang and Professor Li (asylum can only be granted on American soil) is causing the gravest difficulty between Washington and Peking since normalisation in 1980. The State Department is being unusually tight-lipped, although its spokesman has now identified Mr Derig Xiaoping himself as the man behind the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, which Peking insists did not take place, not a single demonstrator having lost his life. The Chinese charge the Americans with interfering in internal matters by sheltering two criminals. Some people in the United States, said the party’s “People’s Daily,” wish for civil war in China and “for the establishment of a capitalist republic.” As for Mr Fang, the “People’s Daily” said, he is not only a scholar of meagre accomplishments, and a "yellow-faced adopted son of foreigners,” but a “beggar now living on the breadcrumbs of foreigners.” In addition, the paper charges, “in the name lists of the leaders

of the protest movement there are several close comrades-in-arms of Mr Fang,” a particularly dangerous accusation in the light of the. arrests recently of more than 800 “hoodlums” in the protest movement, whose beaten faces and shackled hands were shown on Chinese television to maximise public awareness of what awaits the veterans of Tiananmen.

Even before Tiananmen, Mr Fang was a marked man. In February, when newly-elected President George Bush was in Peking, he included Mr Fang among his 500 guests at a barbecue at the Great Wall Hotel, together with President Yang Shangkun and the Prime Minister, Mr Li Peng. But although the leaders were delighted that President Bush had chosen to visit Peking during his first trip abroad .as President, they ordered their Security Police to intercept Mr Fang and his wife outside the hotel and bar their entrance.

Peking then let the Americans know that had they seen Mr Fang’s name on the guest list the supreme leaders would not have attended the barbecue, and after a bit of dithering, Washington lamely blamed the Embassy in Peking for inviting Mr Fang without weighing the implications. Within the fortnight Mr Fang had appeared on “Time’s” cover as “The man who didn’t come to dinner.”

The reason that Mr Deng and company were willing to risk offending their “old friend” Mr Bush is that Mr Fang Lizhi is the very model of what the party calls the Black Hand, the Bad Element, the Bourgeois Liberal and, as of last week, the CounterRevolutionary. This last is not a mere insult; it is a serious crime carrying heavy penalties, including execution. Despite the party’s attempt to downgrade his scholarship, Mr Fang is known among Chinese intellectuals as "our Sakharov” for both his scientific preeminence and as an astrophysicist, in a country profoundly backward in the physical sciences, and his outspoken criticism of the authorities.

In the early fifties, he and Professor Li Shuxian, who is also a physicist, and is, if possible, even more outspoken and libertarian than her husband, were the cleverest undergraduates and the most famous romantic pair at China’s super-elite Peking University. When they joined the party, years before their marriage, they were regarded as a great political catch. In 1957, they gently criticised

the party and Mao, during the 100 Flowers Movement, when the chairman invited intellectuals to tell him what was on their minds. “We had complete faith in the party,” Professor Li remembered. “What we wanted was more independent thinking which we thought would make us better communists and scientists.” After a futile attempt to extract a public recantation from their prize pair, the party ejected them from its membership. Earlier this summer, 32 years later and only a few weeks before the Tiananmen massacre, Mr Fang observed that like many patriotic Chinese he had joined the party in 1952 because it had led the struggle against the Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek and founded the New China. In retrospect did he think that Marxism-Leninism had turned out to be an empty concept? “Empty? Empty? Emptiness is a very interesting concept to astrophysicists. No, I think the word is trivial.”

Restored to party membership in 1979 after 12 wasted years without laboratory facilities and few Western textbooks, Mr Fang converted himself to cosmology. In his first paper he criticised the Marxist theory of creation. No theory can change until the old men die, he had noted about physics (this is called the Max Planck effect) and he applied the same notion to politics. “You can hardly expect the old gentlemen to change their views. So what you can do is apply the Planck effect, in other words wait until all of them die.” Soon after his reinstatement into the party in 1979, Mr Fang was sent to Anhui province as one of the academic stars of the newly established University of Science and Technology, intended to be China’s M.1.T., of which he was to become vicechancellor. There, in 1986, he told his students — and later those on other campuses — “I have always been opposed to the view that Marxism should be the sole theoretical guidance ... it has never produced correct results. “None of the Marxist academic criticisms since 1949 have proved correct: 100 per cent wrong. The record is really shocking.” By January, 1987, in the wake of the national campus demonstrations which had begun at Mr Fang’s university and provoked Vice-Premier Deng into demanding the resignation of his closest comrade, the party general secretary, Hu Yaobang, an avalanche of criticism descended on Mr Fang and two other intellec-

tuals; once again he was purged from the party. Mr Fang was brought to Peking, but far from falling silent he became the tribune of the intellectuals, ceaselessly chivvying away at the party on human rights and democracy, Mr Deng's pet hates. On January 6, this year, Mr Fang sent an open letter to Mr Deng calling for the release from prison of Mr Wei Jingsheng, the political activist sentenced to 15 years in 1980 for publishing a broadsheet at Peking’s Democracy Wall demanding genuine democracy and criticising Mr Deng by name. Freeing Mr Wei, Mr Fang wrote, “would be a humanitarian gesture and would have a beneficial effect on our social morale.”

When 33 leading intellectuals followed Mr Fang’s lead with a similar letter, the Ministry of Justice immediately termed such appeals “an incitement of public opinion” and a threat to China’s stability, harmony and democracy — very much the same language Mr Deng used two weeks ago when he congratulated the army for its brilliant work in Tiananmen on June 4.

In a conversation just as the Tiananmen demonstrations began in mid-April, Mr Fang charged that Mr Deng “wants to keep power like an emperor. Real political power means that the party must withdraw from every aspect of our life. But the party insists on controlling everything — the peasants, factory workers, intellectuals, everybody. What really alarms them is quiet simple: if the workers joined the demonstrations going on in Tiananmen right now.” This was a deadly forecast: it was the tents of the Federation of Autonomous Workers over which the tanks rolled first on the night of June 4, and it is that federation’s leaders — whose great crime was rejecting party control of workers’ organisation — who are now on the “name list” with which Mr Fang is said

to be associated. In a further plunge of the dagger, Mr Fang said: “The leaders have thrown out Marxism. For them it’s just a flag, with no real meaning. In 1987. the students supported the reforms and even cheered for Deng Xiaoping. Now they think the whole leadership is no good. They’ve even mentioned the top leaders’ names.” This time, fatally wrong, Mr Fang added, "But the army and the police will never beat the students.” Mr Fang poured scorn on the concept of modernisation with Chinese characteristics. "In 1980, I explained to Hu Yaobang that science didn't have national or political characteristics — it has to do with disproving as much as with anything else, and if that meant disproving Marxism, and he didn’t want that, he’d better not send me to that new technological university. “Any developing country must adopt the standards of the modern countries, in North America, Europe or even Japan. What they have in common, although they vary from place to place, is multi-party systems.” (This was a particularly unacceptable remark; even the most ardent reformers in the Politburo have laid down that Western-style democracy must never come to China). “Of course, that can’t happen here overnight. We will have to start with something simple — like the independent student association now developing in Tiananmen.” Again the simple analysis, the full deadly weight of which Mr Fang himself could not comprehend: the student leaders from, Tiananmen too, like their comrades who had inspired the workers, now appear nightly on Chinese TV with their faces smashed by police truncheons. Among other things, they are charged with doing Mr Fang’s bidding.

Copyright — London Observer Service.