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The Chinese Amnesia (1989)

There seems to be no accurate count of all the books that have appeared about the Tiananmen events of the spring of 1989. But certainly they have been many. A friend at Columbia University recently wrote me that she and one of her Chinese colleagues, both of whom were eyewitnesses at Tiananmen, had originally planned to write a book about it. But publishers told them that so many Tiananmen books were already available that the market had become "saturated." The two reluctantly dropped their plan. It seems that a new Tiananmen book, for now, can have only a modest circulation.

In my view, a large but "saturated" market is itself one of the most important consequences to emerge from the events at Tiananmen. It signals the failure of the "Technique of Forgetting History," which has been an important device of rule by the Chinese Communists. I have lived under the Chinese Communist regime for four decades, and have had many opportunities to observe this technique at work. Its aim is to force the whole of society to forget its history, and especially the true history of the Chinese Communist party itself.

In 1957 Mao Zedong launched an "Anti-Rightist Movement" to purge intellectuals, and 500,000 people were persecuted. Some were killed, some killed themselves, and some were imprisoned or sent for "labor reform." The lightest punishment was to be labeled a "Rightist." This was called "wearing a cap" and meant that one had to bear a powerful stigma. I had just graduated from college that year, and also in that year was purged for the first time.

After the 1957 Anti-Rightist purge, what worried me most was not that I had been punished, or that free thought had been curtailed. At that time, I was still a believer, or semibeliever, in Marxism, and felt that the criticism of free thought, including my own free thought, was not entirely unreasonable. But what worried me, what I just couldn't figure out, was why the Communist party in China would want to use such cruel methods against intellectuals who showed just a tiny bit (and some not even that) of independent thought. I had always assumed that the relationship between the Communist party and intellectuals, including intellectuals who had some independent views, was one of friendship--or at least not one of enmity.

Later I discovered that this worry of mine seemed ridiculous to teachers and friends who were ten or twenty years older than I. They laughed at my ignorance of history. They told me how, as early as 1942, before the Party had wrested control of the whole country, the same cruel methods against intellectuals were already being used at the Communist base in Yan'an. In college I had taken courses in Communist party history, and of course knew that in 1942 at Yan'an there had been a "rectification" movement aimed at "liberalism," "individualism," and other non-Marxist thought. But it was indeed true that I had had no idea that the methods of that "rectification" included "criticism and struggle"--which meant in practice forcing people to commit suicide, and even execution by beheading. People who had experienced the Yan'an "rectification" paled at the very mention of it. But fifteen years later my generation was completely ignorant of it. We deserved the ridicule we received.

After another thirteen years, in 1970, it became our turn to laugh at a younger generation. This was in the middle stage of the Cultural Revolution that took place between 1966 and 1976. In the early stage of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong had used university students, many of whom supported him fanatically, to bring down his political opponents. But in the early 1970s these same students became the targets of attack. In 1970 all the students and teachers in the physics department of the Chinese University of Science and Technology were sent to a coal mine in Huainan, Anhui Province, for "re-education." I was a lecturer in physics at the time. The movement to "criticize and struggle" against the students' "counterrevolutionary words and deeds" reached its most intense point during the summer. Some students were "struggled"; others were locked up "for investigation"; a good number could not endure the torment of the vile political atmostphere and fell ill. One of my assignments was to pull a plank-cart (like a horse cart, but pulled by a human being) to transport the ill students. Of the group of forty-some students working in the same mine as I did, two were driven to suicide--one by jumping off a building, the other by lying in front of a train.

Most of these students, as innocent as I had been in 1957, never imagined that the Communist government could be so cruel in its treatment of students who had followed them so loyally. Later one of the students, who became my co-worker in astrophysical research (and who is now in the US), confided to me that he had had no knowledge whatever of the true history of the Anti-Rightist Movement. It was not until he was himself detained and interrogated that he slowly began to appreciate why some of the older people he knew lived in such fear of the phrase Anti-Rightist. The whole story of the main actors and issues had, for this generation, become a huge blank.

Credit: Excerpted from the article "The Chinese Amnesia" by Fang Li Zhi, published in The New York Review of Books (September 27, 1990). Translated by Perry Link. Reprint courtesy of Fang Li Zhi and Perry Link.

Biography:

Dr. Li-Zhi Fang was born in Beijing in 1936. Upon receiving a degree in physics from Beijing University (1956), he began working there as a researcher and lecturer. In addition to teaching students about theoretical physics, Fang also lectured about the need for democracy in China. He was subsequently transferred to a teaching post at the University of Science and Technology (USTC) because of his outspoken political views and during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), was sentenced to work in a coal mine. Fang eventually returned to USTC as a full professor in 1978, became an elected member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1981, and vice-president of the university in 1984. In 1986, Dr. Fang was again dismissed from his job for supporting pro-democracy student movements. He left the UTSC and began working at the Beijing Astronomical Observatory. Fang was labeled as a counter-revolutionary by the Chinese government, following the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, and was forced to seek asylum in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He and his wife remained in the embassy for a year, until their exit from the country could be arranged. Fang left China for England, where he was a guest professor at Cambridge University for a year, and then moved on to Princeton University, before taking a position at the University of Arizona in 1992. In addition to being a highly respected member of the scientific community, Fang has remained an active leader in the human rights activities in China. His numerous awards include the Chinese National Award for Science and Technology (1978), the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award (1989), and the International Rescue Committee Freedom Award (1991). He is currently a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Arizona.

Bibliography:

An Appeal to the 'Fortune' Conference in Shanghai, New York Review of Books, September 23, 1999.

The Hope for China, New York Review of Books, October 17, 1996.

Bringing down the Great Wall: writings on science, culture and democracy in China, New York: Knopf, 1990.

Keeping the Faith, New York Review of Books, December 21, 1989.

Letters from the Other China, New York Review of Books, July 20, 1989.

China's Despair and China's Hope, February 2, 1989.

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