An Activist in ExiLe
TUNG, TIMOTHY
An Activist in Exile Bringing Down the Great Wall: Writings on Science, Culture and Democracy in China By Fang Lizhi Knopf. 336 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Timothy Tung Former research...
...In particular, he advises the tens of thousands of Chinese students currently abroad to "study, study hard...
...Earlier, in Europe, a correspondent for Der Spiegel had asked Fang whether he had considered emigrating to another country...
...It was edited by James H. Williams, a scholar of science and technology in China, and translated by Williams, Schell, Perry Link, and others...
...In China the term "intellectual" is used for anyone who has completed a high school education...
...Fang Lizhi was rehabilitated along with a number of other persecuted intellectuals in 1979, only to beousted from the Party again in 1987...
...Now I can no longer do it...
...In 1990, the same reporter from Der Spiegel asked Fang if he had second thoughts about seeking protection from a foreign power...
...He and his friends, all "Three Goods" (good health, good grades, good moral character), became tired of the usual Party rhetoric, and during a Youth League Congress meeting decided to liven things up a bit...
...His remarks were made during an interview with a Hong Kong magazine as he was returning to China from a scientific conference overseas...
...By this time he had already become a world-renowned scientist and his reputation as the "Sakharov of China" was quite firmly established...
...The changes we all wish for China are not only political...
...The writings of the astrophysicist turned social critic turned human-rights activist are divided into four sections: Fang as cosmologist, as cosmopolitan, as democrat, and as dissident...
...Complete Westernization means," he stressed, "complete openness, the removal of restrictions in every sphere...
...Reviewed by Timothy Tung Former research professor, China specialist, the City University of New York In 1949, when he was not yet 13 and only in the third year of middle school, Fang Lizhi joined the Communist League of Democratic Youth...
...The difference between the two is that the idealism of the older Liu was formed in his youth by a hatred for the invading Japanese and a disdain for the impotent and corrupt government of Chiang Kai-shek...
...I continued to believe in Communism...
...And if there is no change, the country [will] get rid of the Party...
...they are above all cultural ones...
...If thewholeof China awakens, starting with students and intellectuals, he says, life will improve...
...But Fang's brushes with Party functionaries and his mixed emotions about Communism had much in common with the experiences of many fellow intellectuals...
...Fang, though, was a rebel at heart...
...Forexample, LiuBinyan, former lead reporter for the People's Daily, likewise expressed feelings of hope, bewilderment, doubt, disillusionment, and despair throughout his Party affiliation...
...Addressing an audience of some 3,000 students and faculty at Shanghai's Tongchi University, he called for "complete Westernization" and pronounced Marxism obsolete...
...Fang flatly stated that "a university must possess a spirit of science, of democracy, of creativity, and of independence," but the Four Upholds reinforce precisely the opposite: superstition, dictatorship, conservatism, and dependency...
...His punishment was merely additional "ideological training...
...When he and his wife reluctantly took refuge in the United States Embassy, a few Chinese intellectuals were critical...
...Thus did Fang Lizhi make his first public appearance as a dissident...
...He answered that although his decision had "some positive effects on the events that followed," he could not really say that he "would do it again...
...Bringing Down the Great Wall is a collection of fiery speeches, plainspoken articles, travel notes, scientific essays, and interviews, all written in the last decade or so...
...Today Fang is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, but he remains an activist as an exiled dissident leader...
...I think that young people should be raised to think for themselves...
...He told Orville Schell, who wrote the Introduction to Bringing Down the Great Wall: "For a long time after...
...Should I leave now, I would abandon my students and my friends in China...
...Through this book, for example, he issues direct and powerful messages to China's intellectuals, admonishing them that democracy "requires a confrontation of ideas and not a leader who says one thing everybody follows...
...A reader comes away with the sense of having been in the presence of a man of enormous learning and courage, whois deeply troubled by what is happening to his beloved country...
...Hence, his brazen denouncements of Marxism's rigidity testify to the bankruptcy of Chinese Communist indoctrination...
...The ship is sinking and the rats are jumping off," he added, clearly undaunted by the reprisals that friends feared were in store for him...
...Among the pieces included here is the speech Fang made in 1986, and the exchange that followed, which led to his final removal from the Party...
...Even after I was expelled from the Party, I continued to have faith in Chairman Mao and believed that it must have been I who was wrong...
...The events of the summer of 1989 in Tiananmen Square changed his mind...
...Fang was then vice president of the prestigious University of Science and Technology at Hefei...
...He became a fullfledged Party member six years later, "convinced that Marxism should show the way in every field and [that] the Communist Party was absolutely good...
...Because Fang "had the loudest voice," he rushed to the podium, grabbed the microphone from the branch secretary and declared: "This meeting is boring and depressing...
...In answering questions after his talk, he went on to attack Deng Xiaoping's "Four Upholds...
...We should be discussing how young people are being educated...
...According to Fang Lizhi, bringing down the Great Wall seems to be, to quote a much used Marxist dialectical phrase, a "historical inevitability...
...These set forth the basic political and ideological guidelines for maintaining (1) the Socialist road, (2) the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) leadership by the Communist Party, and (4) the central role of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought...
...While all of this earned him the wrath of China's supreme leader, it endeared him to students throughout the country and triggered their demonstrations of December 1986-January 1987...
...As for the future of his nation, Fang is an optimist...
...He grew increasingly outspoken, however, and three years later was expelled from the Party, one of the youngest intellectual victims of the Anti-Rightist Campaign...
...He replied: "In the past I thought about it seriously...
...The younger Fang's thought process was nurtured in his formative years entirely by Communist dogma...
...Fang further infuriated Deng the next year by charging that there was "drug smuggling going on within the military" and accusing the Party leadership of nepotism...
...feeling deserted, they expressed the belief that he should remain a symbol of free speech, even at the risk of being arrested...
...He is convinced that the Chinese Communist Party is already in a situation where it must reform, whether it wants to or not...
Vol. 74 • May 1991 • No. 7
