The Most Wanted Man in China
My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The long-awaited memoir by Fang Lizhi, the celebrated physicist whose clashes with the Chinese regime helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests
Fang Lizhi was one of the most prominent scientists of the People's Republic of China; he worked on the country's first nuclear program and later became one of the world's leading astrophysicists. His devotion to science and the pursuit of truth led him to question the authority of the Communist regime. That got him in trouble.
In 1957, after advocating reforms in the Communist Party, Fang -- just twenty-one years old -- was dismissed from his position, stripped of his Party membership, and sent to be a farm laborer in a remote village. Over the next two decades, through the years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, he was alternately denounced and rehabilitated, revealing to him the pettiness, absurdity, and horror of the regime's excesses. He returned to more normal work in academia after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, but the cycle soon began again. This time his struggle became a public cause, and his example helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests.
Immediately after the crackdown in June 1989, Fang and his wife sought refuge in the U.S. embassy, where they hid for more than a year before being allowed to leave the country. During that time Fang wrote this memoir The Most Wanted Man in China, which has never been published, until now. His story, told with vivid detail and disarming humor, is a testament to the importance of remaining true to one's principles in an unprincipled time and place.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this harrowing memoir, Chinese physicist Fang (1936 2012) chronicles his increasingly perilous political status before his exile to America, where he became a professor at the University of Arizona. This meditation on "Mao's whip of power" and story of courtship under duress was composed in 1989, while Fang and his wife were in protective custody at the U.S. embassy in Beijing after being expelled from the Communist Party of China (CPC) by Deng Xiaoping. Fang opens with his upbringing in Beijing and education at Peking University in the 1950s and describes his struggles as the scientific community fell out with Mao's ideology. He was recruited by the CPC for a secret cadre of nuclear physics majors, but his opposition to Mao's Anti-Rightist Movement earned him his first sentence of hard labor and set him on a course of political agitation. Despite his value as a scientist, Fang's subversiveness proved too much for the CPC, particularly during the student protests that led to the bloody events at Tiananmen Square in 1989. China's economic metamorphosis and the CPC's program for "erasing the memory of protest" have blurred recollections of Tiananmen, as Fang predicted, but his book serves as a testimonial to the students killed there.
