Flaws revealed in China’s education
CHINESE physicist Fang Lizhi was world famous once. He has been forgotten in the US, where he finished his life teaching and doing research at the University of Arizona. Publication of his name is forbidden in China.
He died in 2012. When I met him in 1989, I found him to be soft-spoken, maybe a little dull. I was wrong. It turns out that he wrote an amazing book about his life, and it was just published. It is an instant cure for the US’s inferiority complex about China’s schools.
There is still a tragic flaw in the Chinese education system, a fear of truth and freedom that Fang spent his life trying to fix; he never succeeded. His story is full of wit, mischief and surprises, particularly for Americans, because it speaks to their two cultures’ shared love of family, suspicion of authority and taste for snark.
Fang presents China, even at its worst moments, in a way Americans understand. It is very funny. We can laugh as the Chinese do, even in places where we know it’s inappropriate.
The title, The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey From Scientist to Enemy of the State, is misleading. It suggests a spy thriller on basic cable. The book is more like my favourite American sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. Young, irreverent physicists have fun and get themselves in trouble by telling the snide truth about their lives and their work.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s was a horror – chaos, massive closing of schools and offices, at least 1.5 million deaths. But Fang and his buddies saw it as an excuse for a road trip. “So many young people threw themselves so passionately into the worship of Mao Zedong in the fall of 1966,” Fang wrote, because “they could ride the railways free of charge”. Fang and friends told conductors they were Red Guards stirring up revolution.
At first I was uncomfortable with his take on the tragic event. But Mel Brooks sent up the Holocaust in The Producers, so Fang should be allowed to make fun of this disaster. By calling themselves the “Combat Brigade 71”, his group got free lodging and food. The trains were so crowded that the young scientists found themselves going in the wrong direction. At a favourite tourist stop in Hangzhou, the weather turned against them. The gorgeous scenes “were foggy at best”, he recalled. “The combat brigade was acutely disappointed.”
Eventually, Fang and his friends were sent off to do labour on farms and in mines. His science career resumed only when the Cultural Revolution exhausted itself. But he and his physicist wife, Li Shuxian, could not suppress their sharp wit. They thought the political interpretations of astrophysics they laboured under were ridiculous, and they dangerously said so to their students.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that the universe was unlimited, a widespread notion in the 19th century. Then they died, and their outdated theory became state doctrine in the communist world. Chinese scientists could not embrace 20th-century research showing that the universe was once nothing but a tiny point. When Fang was finally allowed to give lectures on the Big Bang (the theory, not the TV show), he encountered scepticism. A physics student in Sichuan province stood up and announced, in what Fang remembered as placid confidence, “This stuff is all counterrevolutionary.”
Fang’s book was translated by leading China scholar Perry Link. Link escorted Fang and Li to safety in the US Embassy in Beijing shortly after the Chinese leadership crushed the Tiananmen demonstrations. They were allowed to leave the country a year later.
China’s education system is still hurt by limits on independent inquiry and poor schooling outside big cities. But it has millions of young people as clever and adventurous as Fang was. Many are coming here, then going back to China. That is good for both countries.