THE ODYSSEY OF COMRADE FANG : At Odds With His Government for Three Decades, China’s Leading Dissident Is Free at Last--and Torn Between Politics and Science

On June 24, Fang Lizhi and his wife, Li Shuxian, spent their last night in China and their first night in a year sleeping outside an elaborately concealed hiding place in the clinic of the U. S. Embassy in Beijing. After a farewell dinner with U. S. Ambassador James R. Lilley, they went to bed in a guest room at the ambassadorial residence. The next morning, accompanied by Lilley, they were escorted to Nanyuan Military Airport in a motorcade led by a Chinese police car bearing license plate No. 1.

The last time they had traveled through the streets of Beijing, their car had sped along back routes, trying to avoid military patrols. It was the day after the bloody end of the pro-democracy movement, and they had been on their way to seek counsel at the embassy. Then the streets had been filled with People’s Liberation Army soldiers and milling crowds; now the Fangs’ route through the capital was lined with soldiers standing at attention. “It was just as if we were visiting heads of state,” Fang would later say with a smile. In fact, it looked to Fang as if the Chinese Communist Party, which had so reviled him as the country’s best-known dissident intellectual, was now giving him a grand send-off.

At the airport, the Fangs were met by a battery of grim-faced Chinese Foreign Ministry officials and photographers assigned to record this strange leave-taking. They boarded a U.S. Air Force C-135 jet, which had to be given special dispensation to land in China. Moments later, relieved to be on the verge of freedom but filled with ambivalence about leaving the country they had struggled so hard to serve, they found themselves winging their way out of China.

THIRTEEN MONTHS EARLIER, AS BEIJING plunged into chaos, American Perry Link had hurried through the capital’s dangerous streets to check on his friends Fang and Li. The date was June 4, 1989. Link was a professor of Chinese language and literature, in Beijing to administer scholarly exchanges for the National Academy of Sciences. On his way to the Fangs’ apartment, he passed burning military vehicles at People’s University and saw banners declaring “Mourn the Dead” and “Blood Debts Must Be Paid in Blood,” the first reaction to the previous night, when troops had marched on Tian An Men Square, leaving carnage in their wake.

Link found Fang and Li in a state of great agitation. Li was trembling and whispering hoarsely, he recalls. “They just kept saying, ‘It’s extremely dangerous, extremely dangerous: They’ve gone mad!’ ” Link recalled later. All the friends could do was trade rumors. As Link left to attend to his own family, Li pulled him aside and whispered in his ear: If she phoned and said, “Bring your children over to play,” Link should take it to mean that she and Fang needed help--and he should come at once.

The call came about 5 p.m., and Link immediately took a taxi back to the Fangs’ apartment. Friends had been telephoning, warning them that the Communist Party had issued a classified order announcing an imminent wave of arrests. “Some of those who called were rather important personages, and they all warned us that we were in great danger,” Fang remembers. “They stressed that if we did not leave our home and seek refuge elsewhere, we would be arrested.”

After a quick discussion, Fang, Li and their 21-year-old son, Fang Zhe, decided to go to the Shangri-La Hotel, a large, nearby tourist establishment. Link knew that CBS News had rented an entire floor there. If Fang and Li were in a Western hotel, with members of the American press, Link reasoned, the Chinese government would be less inclined to try to arrest them. He extracted a promise of strict confidentiality from the CBS News staffers, as well as a pledge that they would keep a careful eye on the Fangs, and again hastened home.

The next morning, Link found the Fangs even more shaken than the day before. Students at Beijing University, where Li taught physics, had reported that they expected the army to occupy their campus at any moment. Their options narrowing, Fang, Li and Fang Zhe decided to risk the nerve-racking six-mile ride across the city to inquire about temporary refuge at the U. S. Embassy.

After skirting the combat zones by taking back streets, the Fangs had to find a way to get past the People’s Liberation Army guards at the embassy gate. Link got out of the car, flashed his American passport and succeeded in getting the guards to open the gate. Then, while he distracted the sentries with explanations in his excellent Chinese, the Fangs hurried inside, where they raised McKinney Russell of the embassy’s press and cultural section and Ray Burghardt, the acting deputy chief of the mission.

“We told them that we thought the Chinese government was in a state of irrationality and that they might shoot anyone,” Fang says. “We asked if we could stay until things quieted down, hoping that in one or two days, when the government had regained a semblance of rationality, and order had been restored, we could come out again. Above all, we told them, we did not want our presence in the embassy to be made known to the Chinese government.”

Russell and Burghardt pointed out that while “temporary refuge” was possible if the Fangs were willing to officially request it, listening devices presumably hidden throughout the embassy were doubtless already reporting their conversation to Chinese authorities. Moreover, they said, with so many Chinese staff members working in the mission, it was likely that their presence had been noticed. The response of the Chinese government, they all agreed, would be explosive: The United States would be denounced, the Fangs pilloried and the whole pro-democracy movement attacked as the work of foreign forces. The dangers of the situation were underlined when Chinese troops suddenly began firing automatic weapons in the street outside.

“When all the talk was over,” Link recalls, “Professor Fang turned to me and said that he felt they should not ask for refuge even if their lives were in danger. He said he wanted to do what was best for the movement.”

Fang, Li and their son spent the night at the nearby Jianguo Hotel, where a former classmate of Link offered the family the use of his room. About 11 p.m., their phone rang. “We are the two people you met this afternoon,” a voice told Fang. “We would like to come and talk to you again in person.”

A short while later, there was a knock on the door, and two U. S. diplomats offered to escort the family in a bulletproof car back to the U.S. Embassy as the “personal” guests of President George Bush. Not knowing where else to find refuge for the next few obviously dangerous days, the Fangs reluctantly accepted the invitation.

On June 7, despite the Fangs’ hope for discretion, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater announced to the world that Fang and Li had requested temporary refuge. And on June 8, at a press conference of his own, President Bush justified the U.S. action by saying that his Administration “had acted in compliance with international law, as an extraordinary measure for humanitarian reasons.”

Fang immediately wanted to leave the embassy. Hoping to get back to his family’s apartment before the Chinese Foreign Ministry lodged an official protest, he asked for a car. Li urged him to stay, and so did embassy officials, who were afraid for the Fangs’ safety and concerned that if they were arrested it would look as though the United States had left them out in the cold. Fang finally relented.

It was a difficult decision, he confesses. Fang was all too aware of the stigma that Chinese have traditionally attached to anyone seeking foreign protection. “I may have a reputation for viewing things from a modern perspective,” he says, “but it is very difficult to say goodby to such traditional Chinese views. And I must admit that I am very Chinese.”

There was a quick and angry protest from the Chinese Foreign Ministry. In language that pointedly mirrored Article 41 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, it charged the United States with “wanton interference in China’s internal affairs” and “violation of both international law and the relevant laws of China.” On June 12, a week after the Fangs entered the embassy, the Ministry of Public Security issued warrants for the arrest of Fang and Li, charging that they had engaged in “counterrevolutionary propaganda and instigation.” Fang Zhe, unnamed in the charges, left the embassy for home.

The Chinese media called Fang a “traitor” and denounced him as “scum”; Chinese television newscasters read letters, purportedly from angry citizens, accusing him of treachery. “His statements and actions have brought great suffering to the nation,” claimed one. “If he is not sentenced, it will be difficult to calm popular indignation.”

Trapped inside the embassy, Fang and Li could do nothing but wait.

GIVEN TO WEARING ZIP-UP jackets and nondescript trousers, Fang Lizhi is not the sort of person one would notice in a crowd. He is a short man with a shock of dark hair that falls over his brow toward owlish horn-rimmed glasses. He does have one flamboyant feature, however: a disarmingly whinnying laugh that immediately puts people at ease. At our first meeting, in 1987, he impressed me as an unpretentious, almost ordinary person. Indeed, until a year before, Fang was all but unknown outside China, except perhaps within the international world of astrophysics. But after losing his job and being expelled from the party following a round of 1986 democracy demonstrations, Fang quickly became famous among liberal students--and infamous among party hard-liners--for his outspokenness on the subjects of freedom and human rights.

When we first talked, Fang was living in a Beijing apartment, provided by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with Li and Fang Zhe, then 19. His eldest son, Fang Ke, was in the United States, studying at Wayne State University in Detroit. Although Fang was allowed to go to and from the Beijing Astronomical Observatory, where he had been given a research position, he was forbidden to have contact with students or journalists or to travel without special permission.

Fang Lizhi (pronounced Fong Lee - jir ) was born in 1936, the son of a postal clerk, and he graduated from Beijing University at age 20 with straight A’s and a degree in physics. His future wife was in the same department. After college, he went to work at China’s Institute for Modern Research, but his career, like that of so many intellectuals, was interrupted when, in 1957, Mao Tse-tung launched his tectonic Anti-Rightist Campaign. Because Fang advocated academic freedom and refused to confess to ideological error, he was expelled from the party. But even after this rebuke, he remained a believer in China’s socialist revolution. He told me during our first meeting, “I continued to have faith in Chairman Mao and to believe that it must have been I who was wrong.”

During the Cultural Revolution of the late ‘60s, Fang again ran afoul of party politics. By this time he was married and teaching in Beijing at the newly organized University of Science and Technology, China’s MIT. After being incarcerated for a year, he was “sent down” to the countryside where, among other jobs, he was forced to work in a mine and on the railroad. During this rural exile, he had access to only one scientific book: Lev Landau’s “Classical Theory of Fields.” “For six months I did nothing but read this book over and over again,” he told me. “It was this curious happenstance that caused me to switch from solid-state physics to cosmology.”

The treatment he received then finally began to unravel his belief in the Chinese Communist Party system. Witnessing the hardship and inhumanity around him, he says, convinced him that “the party was not telling the truth” and that he “should not believe them anymore.” When the high tide of the Cultural Revolution began to ebb in the early ‘70s, the government, desperately in need of anyone with technical training, sent Fang to Anhui Province, where the University of Science and Technology had been moved. There, Fang was assailed anew, this time for espousing the big-bang theory of cosmology, which provoked attacks from hard-liners clinging religiously to Friedrich Engels’ belief that the universe was infinite. Just as the Roman Catholic church had once vilified Galileo as a heretic, the party now began to look at Fang as a dangerous dissident.

To Fang, the party’s intrusions into science were witless and served to defeat China’s modernization. His investigations into the origins of the universe required freedom of inquiry and expression, and he believed that the same conditions were fundamental to any kind of creative thinking or imaginative work. Through such party intercessions, Fang’s strong disposition against any and all constraining orthodoxies began to take firm root.

It was not until after 1977, when Deng Xiaoping was restored to power for the third time, that Fang was given back his party membership and a tenured teaching position at the University of Science and Technology. The next few years were scientifically fruitful ones for Fang. He wrote scores of scholarly papers, attended numerous international scientific conferences and had residencies at both the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in the United States and the Institute for Astronomy at Cambridge University in England. By the mid-1980s, Fang had also been appointed vice president of his university, where he rapidly acquired a reputation as an advocate of academic freedom and educational reform. He soon was much in demand as a speaker at other universities. In 1985, he told a gathering at Beijing University: “We Communist Party members should be open to different ways of thinking . . . for, if all thought is narrow and simplistic, creativity will die. . . . We must not be afraid to speak openly about these things. In fact, it is our duty to speak out.”

His call to intellectuals to throw off party domination by straightening out their “bent backs” stunned students with its boldness even in the relatively open political environment of 1986. What made Fang such a compelling speaker was not just his message but that he dared to speak so freely. In a society long accustomed to self-censorship and public silence, his speeches shocked party leaders as much as they electrified students. Party cadres in charge of “ideological work,” who had become accustomed to controlling dissenters by threatening, firing, detaining and even imprisoning them, were nonplussed by the spectacle of Fang traipsing around the country like a circuit preacher, speaking his mind.

That fall, he told a Tongji University gathering in Shanghai: “Speaking quite dispassionately, I have to judge this period (of socialist revolution) a failure . . . in essentially every aspect of economic and political life.” He went on to deride the notion of waiting for democracy to be delivered from on high, telling his rapt audience that the concept of “loosening up”--then fashionable among reformist circles--really implied nothing more than the humiliating presumption that they were already “tied up tightly.” He reminded students that democracy is “first and foremost a question of the rights of individuals and that individuals are the ones who must struggle for them.”

Students hand-copied transcripts of his talks and passed them from campus to campus. At one university after another, they flocked to hear him, laughing and cheering as he criticized high-ranking leaders by name.

Late in 1986, when student demonstrations erupted at the University of Science and Technology and then spread across China, a furious Deng Xiaoping finally acted. Fang was fired and, along with well-known writers Liu Binyan and Wang Ruowang, was again expelled from the party. The authorities then transferred Fang to Beijing and put him under quasi-house arrest--a move that backfired, for it not only gained him enormous publicity in China but also improved his access to the Beijing-based foreign press.

Even though his activities were limited in Beijing, in January, 1989, he boldly sent Deng a handwritten letter calling on him to release Wei Jingsheng, a dissident who had been imprisoned since 1979, and to declare a general amnesty for all other political detainees and prisoners. Fang’s letter provoked several petitions of support from other intellectuals in what became a prelude to the spring’s historic Tien An Men Square demonstrations.

Again and again, even though he still regarded science as the real measure of his success or failure, Fang was drawn into the political arena. Science, it seemed, compelled honesty, and honesty compelled political involvement. “I have, in fact, often just felt swirled into the middle of politics,” Fang says now. “At the moment of each political involvement, I have been aware that I could have avoided it. But each time I did not want to go against what was in my heart--what was right. And, as a result, each time I have ended up getting more deeply involved.”

In February, 1989, Fang became embroiled in his biggest political brouhaha yet. Although the Fangs had been invited to the farewell banquet at the end of President Bush’s official visit to Beijing, Chinese authorities prevented them from attending. Forced out of their car on the way to the party, Fang and Li were then hounded on foot by Chinese police through the streets of Beijing. Picked up several hours later by a friendly Canadian diplomat, Fang was taken to the White House press center, where he gave a tumultuous press conference. Soon his face was in newspapers and magazines and on television sets around the world. In several interviews, he suggested that the United States and President Bush applied a “double standard” in judging human-rights violations, treating the Soviet Union and China differently.

Precisely because of his increasing notoriety, Fang shied away from direct involvement when the democracy movement erupted in Tian An Men Square that April. “From the beginning, authorities claimed that the movement had been started and was being controlled by a ‘handful of rotten eggs,’ and they hinted at the involvement of Fang Lizhi,” he says now. “I was, of course, very much in favor of the movement, but in order not to give the government any pretext, and so that the movement could demonstrate that it was actually a mass spontaneous upwelling of intellectuals and students, I did not even go to the square.”

His absence from the square has been criticized as a failure to assume responsibilities he tacitly incurred. “I did not stay away from the square out of consideration for my own safe ty,” Fang explains. “In fact, during that time I spoke every day with foreign journalists. If I had wanted to protect myself, I would certainly not have spoken out in this way.”

In the aftermath of the protest, the party began a nationwide campaign to blame the democracy movement on a “very small group” of “plotters against socialism.” After Fang and Li found sanctuary in the U. S. Embassy, they were accused of almost single-handedly starting a “rebellion in which numerous people died.”

But if the party overrated Fang’s influence, so did many of the protest movement’s supporters. Fang recalls how, on May 18, at the height of the demonstrations, a friend urged him to go immediately to the square, since he was “the only person who could control the movement.”

“Of course, I recognized that this was absurd,” says Fang with a smile.

IN OCTOBER, FOUR MONTHS AFTER the violent end of the Chinese democracy movement, I went to China in hopes of seeing Fang Lizhi. He was to receive the annual Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. The State Department, however, had warned the Kennedy family, donors of the award, that a public announcement and presentation could jeopardize delicate negotiations then in progress for the Fangs’ release. The Kennedys wanted me to ascertain Fang’s feelings about becoming the recipient.

The night I arrived in Beijing, the phone rang in my room at the Palace Hotel, where I had been told to expect a call. An American voice, offering no salutation and giving no name, said: “I am waiting for you downstairs by the marble column just inside the front entrance of the hotel.”

In the lobby, I spotted a figure in a dark suit standing alone near the designated column. As I approached, he reached out to shake my hand and then hastily turned and squired me through the revolving door into the chilly evening. Only when we were in a hutong , one of the dark alleys that surround the hotel, did he introduce himself as a Foreign Service officer assigned to look after the Fangs.

He explained in great detail the concern embassy officials felt for the Fangs’ safety, especially given the recent bloodshed. If the couple’s whereabouts within the embassy--three separate compounds several blocks apart--became known, U. S. diplomats feared that the Chinese government might be tempted to seize them. The embassy, my interlocutor hastily added, would not be able to defend itself or to protect Fang under such circumstances. “Whether you will be able to actually see Fang, I cannot say,” he concluded. “But please come to the embassy tomorrow morning at 10.”

The next morning, I got up early to bicycle around the city. As I rode toward the Avenue of Eternal Peace, it was difficult to evoke those tumultuous days of spring, much less to imagine the atmosphere of terror that had led Fang and Li to the U. S. Embassy.

Just as in the past, clouds of bituminous morning smoke billowed up from behind the walls of old courtyard houses as people began to light fires for breakfast. The hutong were filled with the soft tinkling sound of bicycle bells and the familiar whirring of spinning wheels as people pedaled off to work. On the larger streets, the smell of frying youtiao wafted out from the stands of pastry vendors, suffusing the air with fleeting zones of special pungency. Children with backpacks made their way to school. And out on the large thoroughfares, those public buses that had not been overturned and burned as barricades during the demonstrations belched clouds of choking blue exhaust as they labored away, jampacked, from their stops.

As I turned out into the heavy traffic of the Avenue of Eternal Peace, I felt as if a dynamo somewhere in Tian An Men Square had suddenly revved up, generating a powerful magnetic force that pulled me along. It was a feeling that I imagined countless thou sands of Chinese throughout the past century had also felt as they brought their protests toward this symbolic center of the capital and the nation.

Then, suddenly, I found myself gliding past the Gate of Heavenly Peace, under the implacable gaze of Chairman Mao as he looked out from his renowned portrait. Around me spread nothing but a vast silence and emptiness. I had last been here in May when the square boiled with onlookers and demonstrators, all noisily debating politics, waving banners and roaring with a collective voice that was as loud as a cataract. Now, like a stage with a struck set, the square had been swept absolutely clean. It was so vacant, cold and quiet that it seemed the perfect extension of the ponderous Mao Tse-tung Memorial Mausoleum that had been erected at its south end to enshrine Chairman Mao’s unnaturally waxy and rouged remains.

The only pedestrians visible were armed martial-law troops wearing fatigues and steel helmets that looked like mixing bowls. They stood in rigid rows along the periphery of the square and guarded the enormous Monument to the People’s Heroes, which had served as the command post of student protest. Out in front of the Great Hall of the People and the Revolutionary History Museum, I watched as phalanxes of soldiers practiced goose-stepping drills.

In the middle of this sanitized public square, on the exact spot where the Goddess of Democracy had stood before it was crushed by a People’s Liberation Army tank, there was now another sculpture. A party-ordered white plaster-of-Paris surrogate featuring a worker, a peasant, a soldier and an intellectual standing together in lifeless fraternal solidarity--as if this soulless socialist icon could exorcise the square of all heretical influences.

The reimposition of order in the square may have impressed China’s hard-line leaders as a great triumph. But despite their efforts, a few telltale signs of what had happened still remained. In the middle of the Avenue of Eternal Peace, looking almost as if children had made angel-wing patterns in the snow, fan-shaped scars gouged by armored vehicles as they spun around that night to fire on China’s citizenry were still etched in the asphalt. There were bullet holes in trees, buildings and walls. And the marble stairs leading up to the Monument to the People’s Heroes, where tanks had tried to climb, were cracked and broken.

And these were only surface scars. “Don’t be fooled,” a taxi driver had told me on the way in from the airport. “What has changed is not always easy to see when you just look around. What is different now is something inside people’s hearts.”

THE U. S. EMBASSY COMPOUNDS, like Tian An Men Square, were also surrounded by cordons of People’s Liberation Army soldiers armed with automatic weapons. As I walked through one gate, a soldier cocked his gun menacingly. These troops were a poignant reminder that the Chinese had not always scrupulously regarded the sacrosanct nature of diplomatic missions. In 1900, government-supported Boxers had laid a 100-day siege to foreign legations in Beijing. In 1927, a government under warlord Zhang Zuolin raided the Soviet Embassy, arrested the founder of the Chinese Communist Party, Li Dazhao, who had sought asylum inside, and summarily executed him. Again in 1967, Red Guards invaded the British Mission and set it on fire.

In the embassy, officials again stressed that they feared that visits would put the Fangs at risk. All they really wanted to do was keep the Fangs physically safe and out of the press. Nothing, they stressed, was promised, but I was told to meet my original contact that night in front of the China International Trade and Investment Corp. building. At the appointed hour, I was picked up and taken to the American ambassador’s residence a few blocks away. At the front gate, we succeeded in breezing past the soldiers and security guards. As we walked into the compound, I felt pulled by the same kind of powerful force I’d experienced near Tian An Men Square. It seemed to draw me through the dark. Soon, we were standing in a courtyard facing a single-story building that turned out to be the embassy clinic. As we entered a lightless room, my guide put a hand on my shoulder and led me to a closed door where he knocked out what seemed to be some kind of code.

A moment later, the door opened. There before me, like apparitions, were Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian. Now in the half-light of their hiding place, Fang looked much smaller than I remembered him. His hair was long, and his clothes were baggy and rumpled; he had the air of a hibernating animal just awakened from a brumal slumber. However, in his utterly characteristic way, he was smiling broadly. Li, looking somewhat grayer, stood beside him, grinning like the Cheshire cat. I was their first outside visitor in almost five months.

Both seemed in amazingly good spirits considering their circumstances. The mock-apartment--a few small rooms--had been wired with an alarm system complete with emergency buttons beside each place where Fang and Li worked and slept. The windows had been covered so that no one could see in or out, and special doors had been hung to deaden sound.

“It is a bit disconcerting to know that only a few yards away, there are PLA soldiers with automatic weapons,” Fang confessed at one point, gesturing toward the outer wall. But then he laughed. “Nonetheless, we feel well and have been working hard.”

The first weeks of their hegira, especially the first few days, were the most tense and frightening, they told me. They had heard about Cardinal Joseph Midszenty, who had spent 15 years in the U. S. Embassy in Budapest, and about the group of Pentecostals confined for five years in Moscow. “We did not imagine that our time would be very short,” Fang said. “But at the most, we thought we would have to stay until the older generation (of leaders) died. It couldn’t be longer than that!”

As we talked, I could not help thinking that there were few people better equipped for the rigors of such a monastic life than Fang Lizhi. As a theoretical astrophysicist and someone interested in history, culture and politics, he was possessed of precisely those intellectual resources that enable a person to put so much slack time to good use.

It quickly became obvious that Fang had kept up-to-date on world events. We talked about the Chinese democracy movement in exile and the events that had been shaking Eastern Europe. He received foreign books, newspapers and magazines almost daily through the diplomatic mail from San Francisco. We also talked about the works of Hu Shi, a towering figure in non-communist Chinese intellectual history, who ultimately became China’s ambassador to Washington. Hu had been a driving force behind China’s first democracy movement, which started May 4, 1919, and had traveled to the United States to study philosophy and politics. There, he began to think and write about the ways in which he hoped democracy, human rights and scientific rationalism could merge with traditional culture to provide China with a future free from its old conservatism and the new dogmatism of Marxist orthodoxy.

“It is a revelation to find that intelligent Chinese have written about all these subjects that I am now thinking about,” Fang said with a self-deprecating laugh. “It was just our generation’s misfortune not to have been able to read them earlier.”

And time and again, Fang talked about his own work. He lamented his lack of a computer and technical books that would enable him to perform certain complex computations more quickly. Still, he had finished three papers on astrophysics. They had little meaning for me as a layman, but they were clearly of great significance to him. They seemed to reassure him that his scientific persona would not be eclipsed by his reputation as a “dissident,” a moniker that has not yet acquired the cachet in China that it now claims in Western societies.

Since Fang had arrived at the embassy, he had been very reluctant to make public statements. But, from all he said that night, I gathered that he had not been overtly pressured by the U. S. government to remain silent. What seemed to constrain him was a desire not to impede negotiations with the Chinese government. But I also sensed a more subtle inhibiting factor at work. Like a typical Confucian gentleman, a junzi , he did not wish to be an improper guest or to give the appearance of abusing American hospitality. Nonetheless, when I mentioned the Kennedy award, Fang seemed pleased and immediately agreed to write an acceptance speech.

What seemed truly to delight Fang was his growing collection of books, which he kept on a set of shelves beside his desk. He referred to them grandly as his “library.” “So many people have been sending me books and periodicals,” he said with obvious pleasure.

The Fangs’ most important possession, however, was a Chinese /English word processor, a machine that enabled Fang to write scientific articles, to work on his memoirs, to correspond with friends and colleagues. It allowed Li to compile a kind of alphabetical “Summa Theologica” of the names and addresses of the many people in China and around the world who were important to them. It was hardly accidental that their address books were among the few things they had grabbed as they left home.

Myriad behind-the-scene details had to be taken care of in the embassy. Somehow the Fangs had to be outfitted with new clothing. This matter was solved with old-fashioned American ingenuity: namely, a Sears catalogue, a mail-order marvel that even produced the dark pin-striped suit Fang wore and the red-and-white polka-dot dress Li wore when they finally surfaced in London. What about vitamin deficiencies from lack of sunlight? A sunlamp would have to be flown in from Hong Kong. What about meals? A microwave oven was installed, allowing Li to cook dinner and Fang to cook lunch in what he called their “high-tech Chinese restaurant.”

Everything that was brought in to them, including food, had to be apportioned into small amounts so that guards and staff members would notice nothing unusual. All garbage and waste paper had to be secretly removed from the clinic and disposed of elsewhere, no small feat considering the effluvia of a man given to reading as many newspapers as Fang.

In this “black hole,” as they humorously referred to their living quarters, Fang and Li existed in a world devoid of day and night. “I am,” Fang remarked, “an astrophysicist who cannot see the stars.” The Fangs attempted to keep their circadian rhythms in cycle by adopting a daily regimen. They arose each morning about 7:30, no matter what time they retired, and they ate at regular hours. Their main contact with the outside world was the arrival each day of the young diplomat assigned to them.

Suddenly it was 11:30 p.m., long past the time I was expected to leave. We disarmed the alarm system and whispered goodby. Then I walked out the doorway that they would not pass through for eight more months.

The next day, drawn more than ever toward Fang and Li’s place of refuge, I rode my bicycle to the embassy once again. Some writer’s impulse made me want to see it from the outside as well. As I pedaled past the gate on Guanghua Road and turned left onto Ritan Road, the compound seemed as vulnerable as a lifeboat in the middle of a vast ocean. Soldiers in battle gear were everywhere. And just as Fang had said, several of them stood no more than a wall away from the very place where he was doubtless sitting.

ON NOV. 15, FANG LIZHI “received” the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. “What Andrei Sakharov was in Moscow,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy during the telecast ceremony, “Fang Lizhi became in Beijing.” Lech Walesa memorialized Fang and the previous winners, saying, “They did not shrug their shoulders, they did not turn away, they did not cross the street when they saw another human being harmed.”

Fang’s acceptance speech, which was read to the audience, was characteristically understated. “In this land of my birth,” he wrote, “human dignity has once again been trampled upon.” He admitted to feeling pessimistic about China’s current situation. But, he said, even within such a “climate of terror . . . those who are most terrified are those who have just finished killing their fellow human beings.” Urging students and other Chinese in exile not to discontinue their educations, he declared his undying belief in the “force of knowledge” as the best ally of nonviolence.

“In my field of modern cosmology, the first principle is called the Cosmological Principle,” he concluded. “It states that the universe has no center, that it has the same properties throughout. Every place in the universe has, in this sense, equal rights. How, then, can the human race that has evolved in a universe of such fundamental equality fail to strive toward a society without violence and terror? And how then can we fail to try and build a world in which the rights due every human being from birth are respected?”

By late fall, after Richard Nixon’s October visit, the Chinese government had softened its position to the point where it became willing to consider releasing Fang and Li if they made public admissions of guilt. “Of course, we refused,” Fang says.

Then came the fall of Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, one of China’s most stalwart socialist allies. The Chinese balked again. It was not until the anniversary of the June 4 massacre passed without incident that the Chinese position again relaxed. More and more party hard-liners, it seemed, had concluded that it was now in the interest of their country to resolve the bedeviling matter of Fang and Li so that important economic relations with the outside could be normalized again. Crucial, now, was finding a solution that gave them a way out without losing face.

The second week in June, after President Bush recertified China’s “most-favored-nation” trade status, officials at the Chinese Foreign Ministry unexpectedly invited Ambassador Lilley to dinner. The dinner presaged several more phone calls requesting additional meetings. When both sides got together, the Chinese asked to be reassured that President Bush had not written China off and that Washington would look favorably on concessions from Beijing. Once these assurances were given, negotiations took a businesslike turn.

A month earlier, Fang had reported experiencing minor heart palpitations. Although there was no serious medical problem--Fang himself later blamed his chest pains on “too much coffee”--Lilley astutely raised the matter of Fang’s “heart attack” in the negotiations. It gave the Chinese exactly the kind of face-saving excuse that they needed to reverse themselves and let Fang and Li go.

Asked what he thinks made the Chinese authorities finally relent, Fang had a somewhat broader view: “I think it was all the pressure that they were feeling from the outside world.”

The negotiated deal required a public statement by Fang and Li. The complete text, however, was never published in China. It read in part: “I am opposed to the Four Cardinal Principles (i.e., adherence to the socialist road, to the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat, to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and to Marxism- Leninism-Mao Tse-tung thought) that are contained in the preamble to the Chinese constitution, because their purpose is to uphold a political system of class struggle. I take note that the above political view violates this preamble of the constitution.”

Highly selective editing allowed the Chinese government to claim that the Fangs’ statement showed their “signs of repentance.” It also used another part of the statement--”we will appreciate and welcome all activities which accord with the progressive interests of Chinese society and moreover refuse to participate in all contrary activities whose motive lies in opposing China”--to insinuate that Fang and Li had promised not to speak out against the government after they arrived abroad. In reality, the wording left them free to say or do anything they deemed to be in their country’s interest.

Asked if he has any qualms, in retrospect, about the statement, Fang is curt. “We would not and did not accept conditions demanded by the Chinese government that we confess, repent and guarantee not to oppose them,” he says.

If Fang is sensitive about appearances, so is the Chinese government. Lest anyone at home interpret the release of these two arch-criminals as a sign of Chinese weakness, Premier Li Peng was reported, in a paraphrase released by the New China News Agency, to have declared: “Due to growing political and economic stability in China, the Chinese government has taken a more lenient policy toward people who participated in the turmoil last year. These moves did not, however, result from pressure from the West.”

For its part, the White House declared through spokesman Marlin Fitzwater that the Administration had made “no commitments, no promises and no quid pro quo of any kind” in gaining the Fangs’ release. But Fang and Li were urged to yield on one important point. Counseled that choosing the United States as their first destination might inflame the Chinese government, they agreed to go to England, where Fang had been offered a position as a Royal Society Guest Professor at Cambridge University.

While the Bush Administration may not have made any direct promises, it was obvious that the Chinese did expect specific returns. The Chinese were now looking ahead to the Group of Seven summit scheduled for July in Houston and the fall congressional vote on “most-favored-nation” status. When Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu announced shortly thereafter that his country would resume its multibillion-dollar aid and trade program with China, the United States did not protest. Indeed, from the perspective of China’s real interest, yielding on Fang and Li proved to be a cost-effective way for the leadership to remove one large symbolic obstacle between it and the rest of the world.

FROM BEIJING, FANG AND LI flew to Alaska, where they were picked up by Air Force II and flown to a U. S. air base just outside Oxford. One journey had ended, but another was about to begin.

Almost immediately, the phones began ringing so frequently at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge that the normally polite receptionist became distinctly surly. The fax machine burped forth reams of urgent requests for interviews from news organizations around the world. And camera crews staked out Fang’s new office, hoping to get a glimpse of him if he dared to come to work, which he did not.

In fact, Fang spent the next 12 days avoiding the press. Although his son Fang Ke had flown in from Detroit to be reunited with his parents for the first time in 3 1/2 years, Fang Zhe was still back in Beijing. Twelve hours before the release of his parents, he had been detained by the Public Security Bureau “for his own protection.” By delaying Fang Zhe’s departure, the Chinese government cleverly succeeded in restraining his father from speaking out at precisely the time when world attention was most focused on what he had to say.

By the time I saw the Fangs in England, they had begun to settle into a housekeeping apartment provided by the university, where they waited for news of Fang Zhe. They were once again living in a kind of seclusion. Fang’s laugh, however, was as infectious as ever. Not once in the days that followed did I hear him complain about his situation or show any hint of bitterness.

Still, he faced a new environment, a new job and a host of unresolved questions. And I couldn’t help but notice in him an uncharacteristic tentativeness. One of his most immediate burdens was figuring out what posture to take toward the overseas Chinese community. Many hoped that Fang would succeed where others had failed, that “China’s Sakharov” could galvanize the disparate factions of the exile democracy movement.

As soon as Fang Zhe arrived in England, Fang Lizhi agreed to sit down for his first formal print interview. About some matters he was perfectly clear. When I asked him if he now viewed Deng Xiaoping as a criminal, he replied without hesitation, “Yes, sure. Those who gave the order to kill bear the responsibility and should be brought to trial.” And, although he expressed gratitude for all that the United States had done for him, he nonetheless criticized Bush’s conciliatory China policy. “The stronger the pressure from without, the stronger the opposition from within,” he said. “What I can tell you is that Deng Xiaoping is not a superman. When he meets someone who is stronger, he will give in. If you Americans will be strong, he will be afraid.

“Take my own case as an example,” he suggested. “Ten years ago, it could not have been solved this way. But finally the pressure exerted by international scientific circles had a real impact on the Chinese government’s decision to make concessions.”

Discounting fears that China could be forced back into Maoist isolation, he pointed out that the country was now “much more integrated into the world than during the time of Mao.” Consequently, he felt that the American response after June 4 could have been stronger. “At the very least, the U.S. could have criticized the massacre and China’s policy of suppressing dissidents more publicly,” he said. “The most important thing was to get the release of political prisoners. We have many lists, and Bush could have used partial sanctions coupled with conditions for lifting them to try to gain their release.”

“Your bodies may be big,” he added, smiling, “but you also can be quite timid.”

After we talked all morning, we picnicked under a tree along the Cam as laughing students punted past on the river. Under a cloudless sky, with the orderly lawns of St. John’s College stretching away before us, it was almost impossible to conjure up the bleakness of Beijing, much less Fang’s dark hiding place in the U. S. Embassy clinic. These two contradictory worlds, which Fang had spanned in the space of a few days, seemed more like parts of a dream than a coherent life.

After lunch, when Fang talked about his situation and his new life, I could detect some indecisiveness. “I want to do something to affect the course of events in China,” he told me. “I know that young people abroad are trying to figure out what to do next, and I too am puzzled by this question.”

Fang Lizhi in exile, he said, would be a scientist first, as he had been in China. “My major interest lies in science, and I think science is the best way for me to make the maximum contribution,” he said. But then he added: “I’m not saying that this is the only way or that things won’t change. Only that this is the best way for now.”

It was his desire, he said, to play a more spiritual than organizational role in the exile democracy movement. And he was obviously reluctant to allow himself to be seen as a savior. “I am not God, and I cannot pretend to be a person who knows everything and is able to do everything,” he said emphatically. “If the Chinese are waiting for the appearance of a super-hero, I am not that man. Moreover, I think that this expectation is in itself an unhealthy one. . . . Chinese too easily tend to put all their hopes on the next leader, only to become disillusioned.”

When I asked him if he thought his departure from China was a victory or a failure, his attraction to politics became apparent. “It is a victory in the sense that the Chinese authorities finally had to let me go because they were under pressure,” he said. “But it can also be seen as a failure because I have left my own country, and naturally my effectiveness will now be marked by this.” And then, as if he did not wish to appear too gloomy, he recounted the successes of other exiled Chinese leaders, including Kang You-wei, Liang Chi-chao and Sun Yat-sen, all of whom had played a part from abroad in overthrowing China’s last dynasty.

“In leaving China, the thing I am most concerned about is that there are so many people in prison,” he continued, raising one area of concern in which he clearly hoped he could still have a positive impact. “This is the most urgent matter, one that I regard as my moral responsibility. . . . As to human rights activities, in these I will directly participate.”

Fang has never been the sort of man to take to the barricades. What China really needed, he told me, was to start absorbing modern ideas. “As Einstein put it, the pursuit of truth is more valuable than the possession of truth.”

But isn’t such a strategy too passive to create change? I asked.

“To fill yourself actively with knowledge,” he insisted, “is not a form of passive waiting.”

The pity of it is that because he is in exile, any role that Fang takes on now will have only a limited impact on the future of his country. He poignantly admitted as much. “Because I realize I can only really function in China,” he told me, “if circumstances allow, I will immediately go back and make whatever contribution I can.”

IN THE FUTURE, ONE CAN imagine Fang Lizhi’s being called to serve his country as Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel is serving his. But whether Fang would ever consent to be taken for public service from science, like Cincinnatus from the plow, is hard to say. He is both China’s most eloquent dissident intellectual, deeply involved in the political dialogue of his country, and a dedicated astrophysicist, preoccupied with the misty reaches of cosmic time.

Science is his foundation, and Fang seems wary of letting himself drift away from it. Some may find a certain ingenuousness in the tenacity with which he clings to academia and theoretical astrophysics when his country has so much at stake in the here and now. How can he shrink from the role of leader when suddenly he is set free and so many turn to him? they may well ask.

But whatever people’s expectations, Fang has never viewed, much less proclaimed, himself as the leader of an organized Chinese opposition. Each time he has come into prominence, he has appeared to be thrust into it more by circumstance than by any eagerness to capitalize on it for himself. Although he clearly is fascinated with politics, in a way that strikes one as almost Daoist, political attention has more often gravitated to Fang than he to it. In this era of megalomaniacs and publicity seekers, any such reserve in political figures is, in its cryptic way, both rare and reassuring.

While some may see weakness and lack of political commitment in Fang’s reticence, others will be heartened to discover a man who does not predictably lunge for political power; a man who, given the opportunity to write himself ever larger, cautiously continues to struggle not to lose himself, his intellectual foundation or his principles.

There is no guarantee that Fang Lizhi will not be extinguished and forgotten like so many other Chinese rebels who have momentarily streaked across the political sky. Still, restrained political ambition can emit its own special magnetic power, one that often ends up being far more persuasive than clamoring egos, reams of official propaganda and even the firepower of a People’s Liberation Army.