A Dissident Scientist Tests the Limits of China’s Ambivalence Toward Change

In the fall of 1986 an audience of young students at Shanghai’s Tongji University burst into ecstatic applause when a middle-aged professor stood up before them and publicly proclaimed, “Socialism is at a low ebb. It is an incontrovertible fact that no socialist state in the post-World War II era has been successful, our own 30-odd-year-long socialist experiment notwithstanding . . . . I am here to tell you that the socialist movement, from Marx and Lenin to Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, has been a failure.”

What electrified these students was not only the speaker’s fearless criticism of the shibboleth of Chinese communism, but his prescription for its replacement. “The most critical component of any democratic regimen is human rights,” he told them, before going on to lament that the Chinese and their governments had a long tradition of treating these rights as “nothing more than abstract ideas.”

The man who dared utter these hitherto unspeakable thoughts was Fang Lizhi, a renowned astrophysicist and vice president of China’s prestigious University of Science and Technology. Having just returned from a research trip to the United States, impressed with what he had seen abroad, Fang had decided to take Deng Xiaoping’s new rhetoric about the need for political reform at face value. He began traveling around China, giving talks at universities on democracy and human rights.

“Democratization (in China) has come to mean something conferred by superiors on inferiors,” he told the students at Shanghai. “But this is a serious misunderstanding of democracy. Our government cannot grant us democracy by loosening our bonds a little. This only gives us enough freedom to writhe. Freedom by decree is not fit to be called democracy.”

Students who heard Fang could hardly believe their ears. It was the first time in 35 years they had heard any senior Establishment Chinese intellectual speak out so honestly and audaciously on such sensitive political questions. When student demonstrations demanding more democracy and freedom broke out in more than 20 of China’s major cities that winter, the party quite logically viewed Fang as their main instigator.

By the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the suppression of free thought among Chinese intellectuals was so total that most people within China had long since despaired of democracy. Observers outside China had come to wonder if, beneath the carefully polished surface of ideological unity affected by the party, there was any dissent at all. While the Soviet Union’s efforts to create the illusion of socialist unity had repeatedly been pierced by the activities and protests of disobedient refuseniks, maverick intellectuals, human-rights activists and defectors, China’s intelligentsia appeared to march lock-step behind the “correct line” of the party.

However, when Deng came to power in 1977 and began to implement his extraordinary reforms, China’s intelligentsia slowly came alive again, and some of its bolder members cautiously started to speak out. But traumatized and scarred by all the political campaigns that had raged across China for so long, many remained as cautious as prisoners on parole, afraid to appear as trouble-makers. The truth was that although Deng’s reforms had brought an undeniable new openness into economic life, in politics the controlling hand of the party kept its grip.

But Fang, a man steeped in the empiricism of science rather than the shifting sands of Central Committee dogma, managed to escape the intellectually stultifying control of the party better than most. Through his travels abroad, he came to believe that China’s modernization without democratization would be folly, not to say impossible. Firmly believing not only that rights such as freedom of speech, assembly and press were natural and inalienable, but that it was the responsibility of intellectuals to speak out on political as well as professional issues, Fang set off on a philosophical pilgrimage putting him in direct opposition to the party.

In a way both shocking because of his absolute lack of self-censorship and refreshing because of his guilelessness, Fang quickly won the attention and devotion of a whole new generation of students who had become deeply cynical about communism as an ideology and one-party gerontocracy as a system of government.

“What is the real reason why we have lost our ideals and discipline?” he brazenly asked students at Beijing University. “The real reason is that many of our important leaders have failed to discipline themselves.”

In the winter of 1987, during the hard-line crackdown that followed student demonstrations, Fang was fired from his university vice presidency, expelled from the party and savagely attacked in the official press for having “negated the socialist system,” for having wantonly spread “bourgeois liberalism” and “wholesale Westernization.” China appeared on the precipice of another neo-Maoist political campaign.

But in the following year, the reform-minded liberal faction of the party led by General Secretary Zhao Ziyang regained ascendancy in its continuing struggle with aging Maoists in the hierarchy. While Deng’s program of reforms reemerged intact, this latest spasm over the party’s line and leadership reminded everyone how schizophrenic the official posture toward intellectuals and political dissent still was. The party was feared not only because of its powers of suppression, but because of its unpredictability. This time, however, the party provoked a liberal quotient of disdain as well.

The official roller coaster on which Fang found himself was all too typical of the party’s confusing historical posture toward China’s intelligentsia. Last June, for instance, less than six months after Fang’s defrocking and vilification and while he was still under official censure, he won approval from Zhao Ziyang himself for a short trip to Italy in order to attend a scientific gathering. There Fang promptly gave several interviews to foreign journalists, unflattering commentaries on the subject of China’s political reforms. This spring his professorial rank was elevated by the same authorities who had just fired him.

Although such contradictory official treatment may at first glance appear enigmatic in the extreme, a deeper look reveals it to be not only a reflection of the factional divisions that lie hidden within the party, but emblematic of the way many individual leaders are themselves divided and indecisive. Having fought all their lives for a Marxist-Leninist revolution based on the centralization of political power in the hands of the Communist Party, economic imperatives now have them advocating reformist policies that, ironically, call for a decentralization of power--the ultimate logic of which is the atomization of party control.

On the one hand, reform-minded leaders like Zhao recognize the urgency of granting more freedom to China’s intelligentsia, in order to apply their creative energies to the monumental task of modernization; on the other hand, they deeply fear the consequences of giving up absolute power and one-party control. So men like Fang Lizhi, who stand firmly on the side of both political and economic reform, end up being alternately praised and denounced by a divided party led by ambivalent leaders.

But if the party has evinced conflicting attitudes toward people like Fang, Fang himself has remained constant, setting a new model for intellectual discourse and integrity in China.

On May 5--the 90th anniversary of the founding of his alma mater, Beijing University, and the 69th anniversary of the May 4th Movement (begun by student demonstrators proclaiming the need for science and democracy in China)--Fang arrived by bicycle on the university campus. In a grove of locust trees, not far from the place where official anniversary ceremonies were being held, he gave an impromptu talk to hundreds of students.

Proclaiming again that Marxism was “obsolete,” and dismissing a central thesis of the party that modernization with “Chinese characteristics” (meaning continued party control) was workable, he was repeatedly interrupted by applause. “There can be no economic modernization without the development of democracy,” he declared. “Above all, we must first recognize the concept of human rights . . . . For human rights, all the people must have freedom of thought and speech.”

To date there have been no repercussions. For the time being, at least, Fang appears shielded from immediate persecution by the strong showing of liberal reformers, led by Zhao, at the 13th Party Congress last fall and at the Seventh National People’s Congress this spring. But hard-line leaders, nostalgic for some form of Maoist socialism, continue to exercise considerable political power within the party. And neither of the contending factions comes anywhere close to supporting true democracy with a multiparty system. Since it is unlikely that the Chinese Communist Party will become the world’s first to render itself extinct by implementing true democracy, it is hard to imagine how the party can continue to allow Fang to speak out so provocatively.

Nonetheless, Fang recently received permission to attend a scientific conference this August in Australia, suggesting that at least for now China is back on the course of political liberalization. But Fang the idealist, rather than allowing himself to become beholden to party concessions, has always raised the ante and pushed forward each time a concession has been made. It is this quality that has made him such a threat to the status quo.

Last month, for example, he was invited by the departments of astronomy and physics at the University of California to spend a few months this winter as a visiting scholar at Berkeley. While some in the Beijing hierarchy may be understandably relieved at the thought of being rid of Fang for a while, others are keenly aware of the enormous risk--allowing him to live in the United States, where he could proselytize freely among the more than 25,000 elite Chinese students now studying in the States, and who have become China’s most ardent advocates of democracy.

Whether Fang will be allowed to accept the Berkeley invitation is still uncertain. But the party’s decision will be telling, not only because it will indicate how China’s new leadership intends to treat such human-rights advocates, but also because it will serve as a weather vane for the West, to gauge the ambivalent and fluctuating commitment to openness and democracy of the Chinese Communist Party.