Fang Lizhi (February 12, 1936 – April 6, 2012) was a Chinese astrophysicist, vice-president of the University of Science and Technology of China, and activist whose liberal ideas inspired the pro-democracy student movement of 1986-87 and, finally, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.[1] Because of his activism, he was expelled from the Communist Party of China in January 1987.[2]
Fang Lizhi was born on February 12, 1936 in Beijing (Peking), China. Fang's father worked on the railway. In 1948, one year before the PLA took over the city, as a student of the Beijing No.4 High School, he joined an underground youth organization that was associated to CCP [3]. One of his extracurricular activities was assembling radio receivers from used parts.[4]
In 1952, he enrolled in the Physics Department at Peking University. There he met his wife, Li Shuxian {simplified Chinese character 李淑娴| traditional Chinese character 李淑嫻}, and the two fall in love. Both Fang and Li are among the top students in their class. Fang joined CCP upon graduation, worked the Institute of Modern Physics and became involved in the secret atomic bomb program of China[5][6], while Li stayed at Peking University as a junior faculty.
In the spring of 1957, during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, people were strongly encouraged by the CCP to openly express their opinions and criticisms. As party members, Li，Fang and another person in the physics department plan to write a letter to the party to offer their suggestions on education. This letter was still unfinished by the time the Hundred Flowers Campaign abruptly come to an end and the Anti-Rightist Campaign started. The opinions and criticisms solicited during the earlier campaign were then interpreted as "attacks on the party", and those who expressed such opinions are labelled "rightist" and persecuted. Although no one knew about the unfinished letter, out of loyalty to the party, the three naive young people confessed about it, and Li also confessed to the party her doubts on the party [7]. Li was expelled from the party, and she did hard labor at Zhaitang near Beijing. Fang was not immediately expelled from the party, because he played a lesser role in writing the letter, and also because he had left Peking university, where the punishment was particularly severe. Still, he was removed from the nuclear program，and sent to do hard labor in Zanhuang, Hebei province from December 1957 to August 1958 [8]. Out of political pressure, Li and Fang "freezed" their relationship till early 1959, when Fang was also expelled from the party. Fang was reassigned to the faculty of the University of Science and Technology of China(USTC) in August 1958, and married Li (who remained a faculty of the Peking University) in 1961 [9]. In spite of his experience in the anti-Rightist campaign, he also published an article in the newspaper Guangming Daily (China) suggesting to encourage independent thinking of students [10].
Fang published his first research paper on nuclear physics in Acta Physica Sinica 17, p.57 (1961) under the pseudonym Wang Yunran, as he was not entitled to publish research papers as a rightist. Later, with the recommendation of Prof. Qian Linzhao, he became an associated member of a research group lead by Prof. Li Yinyuan in the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, since Prof. Li's group is in a different institute, this arrangement take advantage of a loophole in the management rule to allow him to publish papers under his own name. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fang conducted researches in particle physics, solid state physics and laser physics. By 1965, he had published 13 research papers and was considered one of the most productive physics researchers in China. That year, as part of the effort of cleansing the Beijing city from "undesirable elements", Fang was to be removed from the faculty of USTC and sent to work in an electronics factory in Liaoning province. Learning about this, vice president Prof. Yan Jici intervened on Fang's behalf, he pleaded the case to the party secretary of USTC at the time, Liu Da, who cancelled the cleansing order for Fang and other faculty members of USTC [11].
Academic activities are interrupted when the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966. In 1969, along with other universities and research institutes, the USTC was ordered to be evacuated out of Beijing, ostensibly in anticipation of an impending Soviet Union invasion. USTC moved to Hefei City, the capital of the backward Anhui Province, where it remained to this day. Upon arriving in Hefei in 1969, Fang, along with other "problematic members" of the faculty, are sent to do hard labor for "re-education by the worker class" in a coal mine. Fang secretly brought with him one physics book, the "Classical Theory of Fields" by Lev Landau and learned the theory of general relativity by reading this book in the evening [12]. Later, in 1971, along with a number of other faculty members, he was assigned to do labor work in a brick factory, which produced the bricks for constructing the USTC university buildings [13]. His wife Li was sent to do hard labor in Jiangxi province.
In 1972, the turmoil of the "Culture Revolution" calmed down a bit, and scientific research began to resume. Fang found an opportunity to read some recent astrophysics papers in western journals, and soon wrote his first paper on cosmology, "A Cosmological Solution in Scalar-tensor Theory with Mass and Blackbody Radiation", which was published on the journal Wu Li (Physics), Vol.1, 163(1972). This is also the first modern cosmological research paper in mainland China. Fang also assembled a group of young faculty members of USTC around him to conduct astrophysics research [14]
At this time conducting researches on relativity theory and cosmology in China was very risky politically, because these theories were considered to be "idealistic" theories and in contradiction with the dialectical materialism theory, which is the official philosophy of the communist party. According to the dialectical materialism philosophy, both time and space must be infinite, while the Big Bang theory allows the possibility of the finiteness of space and time. During the Culture Revolution, campaigns were waged against Einstein and the Theory of Relativity in Beijing and Shanghai. Once Fang published his theory, some of the critics of the Theory of Relativity, especially a group based in Shanghai, prepared to attack Fang politically. However, by this time the "leftist" line was declining in the Chinese academia. Prof. Dai Wensai, the most well known Chinese astronomer at the time and chair of the Astronomy Department of Nanjing University , also supported Fang. Many of the members of the "Theory of Relativity criticism group" changed to study the theory and conduct research in it. Fang is regarded as the father of cosmological research in China. Nevertheless, in the 1980s and even as late as the 1990s, articles criticizing the Big Bang theory as "pseudo-science from the west", "in violation of the principles of Marxism philosophy", and "politically incorrect" still appeared frequently in newspapers and magazines in paper.
Fang published a large number of papers on astrophysics and cosmology. In the late 1970s, he and his group used the angular size of radio quasars to measure the Hubble diagram, and with the data available then, suggested that the universe may be closed (Fang et al., Acta Astronomica Sinica 17, 134(1977)). This work was noticed by researchers outside China; a Nature article noted that it obtained similar results but appeared earlier than the paper by Davidsen et al., Nature 269, 203(1977). Fang also carried out research on neutron stars, black holes, inflation, quantum cosmology, etc. He soon gained international fame, and after China began to open up in the late 1970s, he was invited to international conferences outside China. In 1985, together with H. Sato of Kyoto University, Japan, Fang won the first prize of the Gravity Research Foundation essay competition by proposing that the periodic distribution of quasars observed can be explained if the Universe is multiply connected, i.e. has a non-trivial topology [15]. Fang was elected as the youngest member of the Chinese Academy of Science in 1980. His membership was, however, removed after the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989.
Fang helped to promote international academic exchange in China. Together with Remo Ruffini, he organized the first major international scientific conference in China: the 3rd Marcel Grossmann meeting in 1982. During this meeting, Tsvi Piran and T.G. Horowitz became the first two Israeli scientists to enter the People's Republic of China (at the time, there were no diplomatic relations between China and Israel) [16]. Fang invited Stephen Hawking to visit China in 1985[17], and organized the International Astronomical Union conference IAU-124 on "Observational Cosmology" in Beijing in 1986 [18].
Fang also trained many young colleagues and students in the field of astrophysics and cosmology. Fang was an excellent teacher, Fang and Li coauthored "Introduction to Mechanics", an introductory book on Newtonian mechanics and special theory of relativity. Fang is also the first scientist in China to write popular accounts of contemporary developments, such as cosmology and black holes. Fang's book, Creation of the Universe (yuzhou de chuangsheng in Chinese) which was published in 1987, introduced basic cosmological ideas, and influenced a large number of physics and astronomy students growing up in the 1980s in China.
During the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Fang was expelled from the Communist Party of China for his "reactionary activities",[19]:428 viz. publishing an article critical of the government's policies on science education.
He was rehabilitated after the reform of China in late 1970s, and resumed his party membership. During this time, he held many academic positions, including the director of the astrophysics research group of USTC, and director of the science history research group, chief editor of the USTC academic journal, chair of the Chinese society of gravity and relativistic astrophysics. In 1984, Fang was appointed as the vice president of the USTC under president Guan Weiyan. Fang was very active at the management, he helped to set up the telex service for USTC [20]. He was very popular among the students. Fang also begin to write essays for publication in popular magazines, and give lectures on a variety of topics in universities, though usually not in USTC. Many such essays and lectures expressed his liberal view on politics, reflections on history, and criticisms on CCP dogma. He also emphasized social responsibility of intellectuals.
In late 1986, Fang, together with Xu Liangying and Liu Binyan, wrote letters to a number of well-known "Rightists" from the 1957 Anti-Rightist campaign, suggesting to have a meeting in memory of that event. In December 1986, college students demonstrated in over a dozen Chinese cities in demanding for greater economic and political freedoms. Although Fang was against of the student demonstration, believing it would be suppressed by the CCP and tried to persuade the USTC students not to go outside of the campus [21], Deng Xiaoping, after two straight weeks of student demonstrations, believed that the student movement was a result of "bourgeois liberalization"，and named 3 Communist Party members to be expelled, including Fang, Liu Binyan and Wang Ruowang. All three of them died in the United States years later. Deng directed then-CCP General Secretary Hu Yaobang to expel them from the Party, but Hu refused. Because of his refusal, Hu was dismissed from his position as General Secretary in January 1987, effectively ending his period of influence within the Chinese government.[22] Fang was again expelled from Communist Party of China in January 1987, and removed from his position as the vice president of his university. He was moved to Beijing as a research scientist in Beijing Astronomical Observatory, now a part of National Astronomical Observatory of China, and reunited with his wife, Li Shuxian, a professor at Peking University. Fang gained fame and notoriety after his essays were collected and distributed by the Communist Party of China to many of its regional offices, with the directive to its members to criticize the essays. As the story goes, many who read his essays found them to be thought-provoking, and Fang was inadvertently provided a platform for his views.
In February 1989, Fang mobilized a number of well known intellectuals to write an open letter to Deng Xiaoping, requesting an amnesty for the human right activist Wei Jingsheng who was then in prison. Fang's wife Li was elected to become the people's representative of the Haidian District where Peking University is located. Fang and his wife had exchanged ideas about Chinese politics with some students of Peking University, including Wang Dan and Liu Gang. Some of those students became student leaders during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, though Fang and Li did not actively participate in the protest itself. The next day after the government began its repression of the protests, on June 5, 1989, Fang and his wife, Li Shuxian, feeling unsafe, entered the U.S. embassy in Beijing, and were granted asylum. The Chinese government put Fang and Li at the top of the "wanted" list of the people involved in the protest. During his time in the U.S. embassy, Fang wrote an essay titled The Chinese Amnesia,[23] criticizing the Chinese Communist Party's repression of human rights and the outside world's turning a blind eye to it.[24] Fang's continued presence in the US Embassy following the protests became, according to Ambassador James Lilly, "a living symbol of our [US] conflict with China over human rights."[19]:429
Fang and his wife remained in the US Embassy until June 25, 1990 when they were allowed by Chinese authorities to leave the embassy and board a U.S. Air Force C-135 transport plane to Britain.[25] This resolution came about after confidential negotiations between Henry Kissinger (acting on behalf of US President George H.W. Bush) and China's paramount leader Deng Xiaoping [19][24] as well as a "confession" by Fang (boilerplate verbiage common in Communist ideology that in no way admitted wrong[26]), an attempted intervention by US National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and an offer from the Japanese government to resume loans to the PRC in return for the resolution of "the Fang Lizhi problem."[26]
In 1989, he was a recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.
In 1991, he gave a conference on the issue of Tibet in New York, one of the first dialogue between Chinese and Tibetans. He also was an advisor of the International Campaign for Tibet.[27]
After some time at Cambridge University and Princeton, Fang later moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he worked as Professor of Physics at the University of Arizona. In campus speeches Fang spoke on topics such as human rights and democracy as matters of social responsibility. He also served as a board member and co-chair of Human Rights in China.[24]
Fang continued to do research in astrophysics and cosmology. He published research papers even during his stay in the US Embassy in Beijing. His later research include the study of non-Gaussianity in the cosmic microwave background anisotropy, Lyman alpha forest, application of wavelet in cosmology, turbulence in intergalactic medium, and the 21cm radiation during the Reionization. He continue to train students and younger scientists who visited him from China. He has been very active in research to the very end of his life, publishing multiple research papers each year.
He died in his home in Tucson on April 6, 2012.[28][29]
- ^ Yam, P. (1994) Profile: Fang Lizhi – Fundamental Rights, Fundamental Physics, Scientific American 270(5), 39-40.
- ^ Letters from the Other China - The New York Review of Books
- ^ http://fang-lizhi.hxwk.org/2009/10/02
- ^ http://fang-lizhi.hxwk.org/2012/02/27/
- ^ http://fang-lizhi.hxwk.org/2006/02/13
- ^ http://fang-lizhi.hxwk.org/2011/03/18
- ^ http://64memo.org/b5/7698.htm
- ^ http://fang-lizhi.hxwk.org/1992/01/06
- ^ http://fang-lizhi.hxwk.org/2011/11/22
- ^ http://fang-lizhi.hxwk.org/2008/01/08/
- ^ http://fang-lizhi.hxwk.org/2008/01/08
- ^ http://fang-lizhi.hxwk.org/2006/04/09
- ^ http://fang-lizhi.hxwk.org/2006/01/06
- ^ Organized criticism of Einstein and relativity in China, 1949–1989 DANIAN HU Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences Vol. 34, No. 2 (March 2004), pp. 311-338 Published by: University of California Press
- ^ http://www.gravityresearchfoundation.org/winners_year.html
- ^ http://fang-lizhi.hxwk.org/2008/03/31
- ^ http://fang-lizhi.hxwk.org/2008/10/02
- ^ http://fang-lizhi.hxwk.org/2010/01/27
- ^ a b c Kissinger, Henry (2011). Henry Kissinger: On China. United States: Allen Lane. ISBN 978-1-84614-346-5.
- ^ http://fang-lizhi.hxwk.org/2008/03/17/
- ^ http://64memo.org/b5/7698.htm
- ^ Lee, Khoon Choy. Pioneers of Modern China: Understanding the Inscrutable Chinese. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing. 2005. pp.313-314. ISBN 981-256-464-0.
- ^ The Chinese Amnesia, New York Review of Books, 1990.
- ^ a b c Spence, Jonathan D. Kissinger and China, The New York Review of Books, June 2011.
- ^ Lilley, James. China Hands. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. ISBN 1-58648-343-9.
- ^ a b My "Confession", Fang Lizhi, translated by Perry Link. The New York Review of Books, 2011.
- ^ Bhuchung K. Tsering, Fang Lizhi was right about Tibet and China, 9 April 2012
- ^ "Professor Fang Lizhi died in the US at the age of 76". The China Times. http://www.thechinatimes.com/online/2012/04/3011.html. Retrieved 2012-04-07.
- ^ "中国著名天体物理学家方励之去世". BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/simp/rolling_news/2012/04/120407_rolling_fang_lizhi.shtml. Retrieved 2012-04-07.
| Persondata |
| Name |
Fang, Lizhi |
| Alternative names |
方励之 (Chinese) |
| Short description |
Professor of astrophysics |
| Date of birth |
February 12, 1936 |
| Place of birth |
Beijing, China |
| Date of death |
|
| Place of death |
|
