China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom

5. Democracy Deferred

82 5 Democracy Deferred While Hua Guofeng struggled for his political survival, others in China were struggling for the return of human decency and dignity. In the fall of 1978 I visited China’s University of Science and Technology, once the crown jewel of the Chinese Academy of Science. During the Cultural Revolution the university had fallen on hard times. Convinced that its eminent faculty—many of whom were Western educated—constituted a dangerous hotbed of “revisionist” thinking, Jiang Qing and her leftist allies banished the entire university from Beijing to a primitive site on the outskirts of Hefei, capital of poverty-ridden Anhui. Touring the Hefei campus, I was shocked by its run-down appearance—dilapidated buildings , peeling paint, broken laboratory equipment, poor classroom lighting , and a near total absence of temperature and humidity controls. Most depressing of all was the visibly poor health and low morale of the faculty, who had been cut off from outside contact for almost a decade. My visit to Hefei, with a small group of American computer scientists , had been arranged by the CSCPRC. We were the first Westerners to visit the transplanted campus, and our arrival produced strong emotions among the older Chinese scientists, several of whom were visibly moved to see us. Some fought back tears; a few wept openly. The senior scientists we met were shabbily dressed and frail looking; most appeared older than they actually were. Several suffered from respiratory diseases, and the flow of our conversation was frequently punctuated by staccato coughing and wheezing. Their decade of banishment had clearly taken its toll. At a reception that evening I met Professor Fang Lizhi, a distinguished, democracy deferred 83 soft-spoken forty-two-year-old astrophysicist who had first run afoul of the Maoists in 1957 and then, during the Cultural Revolution, suffered harsh personal attacks for his efforts to popularize modern cosmological theory, including the theories of relativity and the Big Bang. Professor Fang was very gracious and said he hoped he would soon be able to resume his career in scientific research and teaching. One of his senior colleagues at the reception—an elderly professor of engineering who held a pre-1949 graduate degree from Brooklyn College—told us that he had not dared to speak English in public since 1957, when he was labeled a “rightist” in the crackdown that followed Mao’s short-lived Hundred Flowers experiment. In February of that year Mao had invited China’s intellectuals to speak their minds freely (“Let a hundred flowers blossom; let a hundred schools of thought contend,” said the Chairman), only to turn angrily against them a few months later when their criticism of the Party’s policies and practices became bitter and intense. Ironically, Mao had placed Deng Xiaoping in charge of implementing the anti-rightist campaign, in the course of which tens of thousands of intellectuals were cruelly struggled against and sent down for reeducation through labor. The elderly engineering professor’s voice quivered with emotion as he gave an impromptu recital of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—in English, from memory. By the time he finished his slow, soft-spoken recitation , several of the Americans present, including me, were fighting back tears. Shortly after our visit to Hefei, I learned from a friend in Beijing that the Chinese Academy of Science had allocated substantial funds to build a new, modern campus for the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, and that its faculty members would soon enjoy greatly improved living and working conditions. According to my friend, China’s new leaders had decided that Chinese science (and scientists) were long overdue for a substantial boost in funding and respect after two decades of politically induced repression and maltreatment. This came as very good news. Other signs of welcome change were in the air. After returning to Beijing from Hefei, I took a Sunday afternoon excursion to the Old Summer Palace, Yuanmingyuan, the fabled Garden of Perfect Brightness. Located in a northwestern suburb of Beijing, near the university district, Yuanmingyuan had been the summer home of the ruling Manchu emperors from the early eighteenth century until it was sacked and burned as an object lesson by a joint British-French expeditionary force during the sec- 84 democracy deferred ond Opium War, in 1860. With its exquisite, man-made network of scenic lakes, mountain vistas, and meandering, tree-lined garden paths interspersed with...