A Coffee Break Is Better Than Confucius -- My 1985 Interview With Professor Guo Kexin

The other day I read an interview with Ren Zhengfei, the founder of the telecom and electronics giant Huawei. What this great entrepreneur said about creating good conditions for science and research brought me back to 1985, when I interviewed Professor Guo Kexin (1923-2006), a member of the Chinese Academy of Science in Shenyang, a city in northeastern China. The interview with Ren Zhengfei ran on the front page of People’s Daily (June 10, 2025), the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party.

Click here to continue to read on my Nordic Link substack!

When Premier Zhou Enlai Sacrificed His Adopted Daughter Yomei

The New York Review of Books (December 7, 2023) has a very interesting article by Professor Perry Link where he discusses Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow. The novel tells the tragic story of Premier Zhou Enlai’s adopted daughter Sun Weishi, who called herself Yomei. The book provides insights into the lives of what Link calls “the Communist superelite” under Mao Zedong, who despite professing to serve the people, never forgot about themselves.

“From the dusty caves of Yan’an in the late 1930s to the red-hot ‘class struggle’ of the late 1960s in Beijing, there are always maids to peel pears, orderlies to deliver lunch boxes, and guards to watch doorways, and when a child arrives the family goes out and hires a nanny.”

Life in China under Mao could be extremely brutal and full of hardship, but the elite enjoyed a protected life as long as they were completely loyal to the prevailing power. Link writes:

“They live in a cocoon, but the culture inside is hardly protective. It is tense and bereft of trust. Familial affection is present, but it gives way to politics whenever necessary. President Liu Shaoqi is willing to derail the marriages of two of his children, who have non-Chinese partners, because of ‘revolutionary needs.’ Zhou Enlai clearly cares for his adopted daughter. He coaches her in how to survive: ‘Just be careful about what you say in your letters. Always assume that some other eyes will read your letters before they reach me.’ But during the Cultural Revolution, when Zhou is faced with the dilemma of whether to sacrifice Yomei in order to protect himself from Jiang Qing, he signs a warrant for her detention that leads to her torture and death in prison. An aunt of Yomei’s, observing Zhou’s maintenance of a suave exterior, calls him a ‘smiling snake.’

Zhou is no anomaly. He lives in an environment where, in the end, people can trust only themselves. The distinguished Australian Sinologist Simon Leys once observed that comparisons of the CCP elite to the mafia are in a sense unfair to the mafia, in which a certain loyalty to ‘brothers’ does play a part. Losers of political battles at the top of the CCP generally are not relegated to comfortable retirements—they go to prison or worse. Zhou did not wish to seal Yomei’s fate; he was forced to when it became clear that it was either him or her.”

Living under an authoritarian system leaves little room for moral considerations, and people respond by developing a ‘split consciousness.’

“This distinction between unofficial and official life holds from the bottom of society to the top. The actual life of the red elite that Ha Jin depicts could hardly differ more from its officially projected images of giving speeches, doing inspection tours, and in other ways focusing on ‘service to the people.’ The questions ‘What best fits the system?’ and ‘What best serves my interests?’ are asked in parallel by people at all levels, and they seldom have the same answers. In his memoirs the dissident physicist Fang Lizhi recalls how Teng Teng, vice-chair of China’s State Education Commission in July 1989, summoned American ambassador James Lilley to berate him about how the US was allowing Chinese students who had spoken out against the Tiananmen massacre to remain in the US indefinitely. An hour after returning to the embassy, Lilley got a telephone call from Teng Teng’s secretary asking him to give special attention to Teng’s wife and children, who were seeking that same ‘indefinite residence’ status in the US. There are plenty of other examples like this. The ‘split consciousness’ of Chinese people in recent times has been widely noted.”

Although common in authoritarian systems, the roots of this phenomenon do in China's case go back two thousand years to the era when Shi Huangdi conquered the “warring states” and formed the Qin Dynasty. The French Catholic missionary Abbe Huc who lived and traveled in China and spoke Chinese discussed the impact on the citizens and rulers of this system in his 1855 book, The Chinese Empire.

“The inhabitants of the Celestial Empire, being wanting in religious faith, and living from day to day, without troubling themselves either about the past or the future, profoundly skeptical, and totally indifferent to what touches only the moral nature of man, having no energy for anything but the amassing of sapecks (money), cannot, as may easily be supposed, be well induced to obey the laws from a sentiment of duty. The official worship of China does not in fact possess any of the characteristics of what can properly be called a religion, and is, consequently, unable to communicate to the people those moral ideas that do more for the observance of the laws, than the most terrible penal sanctions. It is, therefore, quite natural that the bamboo should be the necessary and indispensable accessory of every legal prescription, and the Chinese law will consequently always assume a penal character, even when it has in view objects purely civil.

Whenever a legislature is compelled to be lavish of punishments, it may certainly be affirmed that the social system in which it is in force is vicious, and the Penal Code of China is an illustration of the truth. The punishments awarded by it are not graduated according to the moral gravity of the crime, considered in itself, but merely on the amount of damage that may be occasioned by it. Thus the punishment of theft is proportional to the value of the object stolen, according to a scale drawn up expressly to that effect, unless the theft be accompanied by circumstances that bring it under some other head. The penal legislation of China is based on the utilitarian principle, and this need not excite any surprise, for Chinese materialism does not consider the act so much in a moral point of view, as with respect to its consequences.”

Perry Link: A Fallen Artist in Mao’s China (NYRB, December 7, 2023)

China: The logic - and danger - of centralized political power

Andrew J. Nathan, the eminent China expert and professor of political science at Columbia, reviews several books about Xi Jinping in the May 12 issue of the New York Review of Books. He points out the great paradox that the man who many hoped would be a liberal reformer turned out to be a power hungry dictator reaching back on the methods and style of Mao Zedong rather than Deng Xiaoping, who designed a system of bureaucratic competition in the party and state apparatus. Xi's father had been purged by Mao and persecuted both before, during and after the cultural revolution.

Under Deng Xiaoping, the elder Xi pioneered the open-door reforms in the southern province of Guangdong and played an important part in founding the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen. In 1987 he stood alone among Politburo members in refusing to vote for the purge of the liberal Party leader Hu Yaobang. 

But like many princelings, the younger Xi feels a deep loyalty to Mao and the world he created:

the children of the founding elite see themselves as the inheritors of an “all-under-heaven,” a vast world that their fathers conquered under Mao’s leadership. Their parents came from poor rural villages and rose to rule an empire. The second generation is privileged to live in a country that has “stood up” and is globally respected and feared. They do not propose to be the generation that “loses the empire.”

But more importantly, China's economic and political system is facing a serious of fundamental challenges, both domestically and internationally, slowing growth, unemployment, financial instability, corruption, political unrest, and enormous environmental problems. The international problems China is facing can partially be seen as a way for the Communist Party leaders to redirect the anger fuming at home, but is also a result of China's growing economic and military power, which will lead to an adjustment of the global balance of power.

Any leader who confronts so many big problems needs a lot of power, and Mao provides a model of how such power can be wielded. Xi Jinping leads the Party, state, and military hierarchies by virtue of his chairmanship of each. But his two immediate predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, exercised these roles within a system of collective leadership, in which each member of the Politburo Standing Committee took charge of a particular policy or institution and guided it without much interference from other senior officials. 

This model does not produce leadership sufficiently decisive to satisfy Xi and his supporters.  

This paradox of the reformers is not new and not specific to China. When the old feudal economic-political system was undermined by trade and emerging capitalist forces in medieval Europe, they ran into roadblocks setup by the old system, and it often took the centralized power of the nation states and their kings to open up the lines of communication and trade. And then came Napoleon who spread capitalism and his Code Napoleon that replaced the feudal rule by man with rule by law.

China has historically oscillated between periods of strong central power and periods where the provinces and sometimes warlords grabbed power from the center. Similar cycles continued during and after Mao's rule. Huge challenges domestic or from abroad was followed by centralization of power, which over time led to stagnation or disasters such as the "Great Leap Forward," which in turn was followed by attempts to decentralize the system. Deng's reforms aimed at decentralizing China's economy, while preserving the core political system. It was terribly successful, but it changed China to a degree that made the old communist-confucian bureaucracy ever more obsolete. 

China so needs the Fifth Modernization Wei Jingsheng and other democratic reformers called for back in 1979 and then again in 1989, but the paradox is that an opening could lead to chaos and political fragmentation, which is something the Chinese leaders fear more than anything.

One would like to think that the son of a reformer, whose family suffered under the dictatorship, would be prone to accumulate power in order to break down the old and corrupt political system, but it seems unlikely. Nathan concludes his essay with a warning.

As the members of the red aristocracy around Xi circle their wagons to protect the regime, some citizens retreat into religious observance or private consumption, others send their money and children abroad, and a sense of impending crisis pervades society. No wonder Xi’s regime behaves as if it faces an existential threat. Given the power and resources that he commands, it would be reckless to predict that his attempt to consolidate authoritarian rule will fail. But the attempt risks creating the very political crisis that it seeks to prevent.

Markets Fill Vacuum Left by Hollow Power in North Korea

Like in China after Mao, economic and political reforms will come to North Korea not because of external pressure or political insights among the elites, but because once the political legitimacy of the regime has evaporated, there are only two alternatives to reintegrate the society: War or markets. The former solutions is still possible, but looks rather suicidal. The other solution offers a way forward, but the risk to the elite is immense.

Deng Xiaoping realized that only by decentralizing economic power could the party preserve enough centralized political power to control the country's political future. Young Kim Jong-un probably knows that, but he lacks real stature in the political elite, which is why he is fighting so desperately and erratically to raise his military profile. If he fails, I would expect a military intervention led by a general that can muster enough charisma to control the situation while beginning to adapt the political and economic system to the reality on the ground, which seems to be a more or less market driven society.

Jang Jin-sung, a former North Korean state official and poet laureate, gives a very interesting analysis of the current state of the North Korean society in today's New York Times.

The Market Shall Set North Korea Free

"All North Koreans depended for their very survival on a state rationing system until it collapsed in the mid-1990s. Its demise was due in part to the regime’s concentrated investment of funds in a “party economy” that maintained the cult of the Kims and lavished luxuries on an elite instead of developing a normal economy based on domestic production and trade. Desperate people began to barter household goods for rice on the streets — and the underground economy was born. With thousands of people starving to death, the authorities had no option but to turn a blind eye to all the illegal markets that began to pop up.

Around this time, the nation’s workplaces were made responsible for feeding their employees. The only way they could do so was by setting up “trading companies,” which sold raw materials to China in exchange for rice. These businesses became part of the foundation of the underground economy, acting as import-export hubs that in time began to import from China consumer goods like refrigerators and radios."

Ex-Dissients Addresses Chen Guangcheng

Wei Jingsheng: Don’t Believe China’s Promises
Wang Dan: Mr. Chen, Welcome to America

A Chinese professor and friend told me during my first trip to China back in 1985 that China's leaders don't believe in any "higher being," so they have no one to answer to. I'm not religious, and I don't think my friend was either, but I think he was right about the potential of a religious belief to restrain power. It doesn't have to be that way - much evil has been done in the name of one god or another - but it often is. My friend was thinking of Mao Zedong, but his successors were as committed to their cause - economic modernization and national power - as Mao was his revolutionary zeal.

Wei Jingsheng raised the question of political freedom to Deng Xiaoping, and that was enough for him to be locked up for 15 years. China has changed a lot since I met the professor on that rooftop bar in Chengdu (I am not mentioning his name even though he has passed away, since family members can be targeted too), but no fundamental political has happened since then. Wei and was right in 1979, and he is right now.

Nicholas D. Kristof on Chen Guangcheng

Why China’s Rulers Hates Fang Lizhi (1991)

Fang Lizhi during his time at
Princeton's Institute of Advanced Studies.

Photo: Hans Sandberg

Fang Lizhi died suddenly on April 6, 2012 at the age of 76. He was one of China's most famous scientist, and equally famous for his bold and unflinching defense of democracy and human rights in China, something that after the bloody suppression of the democratic revolt of 1989 forced him to leave for the United States. What follows is an English translation of an article I wrote about Fang based on my interview with him at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey.

The Emperor of China once let his ministers know that there was a deer in a hall where there actually was a horse. They all had to go into the hall and was then asked one by one about what they had seen. Those who gave the "wrong" answer were decapitated. The truth always carried a high price in China; a country that by the way has still not signed the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights. You could therefore say that Fang was lucky, because although he was forced to seek refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, and later go into exile a year later -- he did escape with his life intact.

Today we find him at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies – a peaceful oasis for brilliant minds. This is where his idol Albert Einstein once worked, and this is where Professor Fang now ponders the structure of the universe, as well as China's future.

Many of his former students and colleagues are also in the U.S., and he participates in their discussions around the path to a democratic and enlightened China. (There are about 20.000 Chinese guest students and visiting scientists in the U.S.).

However, the debate back home is closed to him, at least for now.

-I do not have much contact with China today. Sometimes I manage to send a letter with someone who travels to China.

The normal channels of communications are too risky. Letters are opened, phone calls intercepted, faxes monitored and electronic mail systems are still rare in China.

In the eyes of the Chinese government, he is still a criminal on the run. He has personally had to bear much of the blame for the 1989 mass protests, even though he never directly took part in the movement. But in all fairness, you have to give them credit, at least in part.

-Ha, ha, ha! I believe that I had a strong influence on the students. They respected me, sometimes! Ha, ha, ha, .... but the authorities were not happy. In China you are supposed to play follow the leader. They don’t like independent minded people!

Fang played a role in China fully comparable with that of Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union, and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia. There are even those who sees him as a future president, something he himself rejects as a sign of Chinese authoritarianism. If there is anything he has preached over the years, it is that the Chinese must stop looking for relief from above:

-Democracy is not a gift bestowed upon us from the higher ups. It is up to us to fight for it, he said on December 4, 1986 in a speech to the students of one of China's top engineering universities – the University of Science and Technology of China (also called Keda using an abbreviation if its Chinese name), located in the city of Hefei in Anhui Province.

At the time the political climate in China was more free than ever before or after (except for a few weeks in May 1989).

-People talked about the "open policy" even though there were still many limitations. We took advantage of this, but we exceeded the limits! In my first speech, I criticized Marxism solely from a scientific perspective. Later on, I broadened my criticism, he says.

During 1985-86 he travelled around the country and gave speeches peppered with democratic ideas. In addition, he gave candid interviews to Chinese and foreign press.

-It was risky, because the authorities' could come down hard. I believed that you had to take small steps, push the limits a little at a time, he says.

It may have been small steps to Fang, but for the Chinese gerontocracy it was a seven-league stride.

-The most important thing if you want reforms is that you have a democratic mindset, he told Shanghai's students in November and went on:

-Nobody says so, at least not straight out, but if you look at the actual results, orthodox socialism, from Marx and Lenin to Stalin and Mao Zedong, was a failure.

This was blasphemy in Deng Xiaoping's China, where the government requires citizens to "maintain" the "four cardinal principles."

1. The socialist road
2. The dictatorship of the proletariat
3. The party's leadership
4. The leading role of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought

Fang said publicly that this was an expression of superstition, dictatorship, conservatism and a lack of independence. And he did not hesitate to criticize Deng Xiaoping, and other leaders by name, which in China is a double sin.

Despite his razor-sharp criticism, he did not deny that China has advanced since Mao's time.

-They would have made mincemeat out of me If I had said what I now say under "the seventeen years" (1949-1966), he told the Shanghai students in November 1986.

Unlike many of his intellectual colleagues, he was not content because things had improved, but attacked the key weakness in Deng's reforms -- China's fundamental lack of democracy and human rights.

-Democracy is not the same as easing up on the oppression a bit, he said in Shanghai.

How could he say this in a country that, when it came down to it, was a one-party state where thousands of dissidents were rotting away in penal labor camps? The answer lies in that he was first and foremost, an physicist. Scientists and engineers play a key role in Deng's modernization program why the regime has had more patience with them. Otherwise, he would have shared the fate of the young worker Wei Jingsheng, who in 1979 was sentenced to 15 years in China's Gulag for having called for a "Fifth Modernization", i.e. political freedom. Besides, there are those who suspect that he had a patron in the Communist Party Politburo member Hu Qili. But Fang denies this.

-We had met in the 1950s, but we didn’t have any contact until the 1985. By then he was a Politburo member, and the reason that we met was that he wanted to advise me not to say too much.

Hu Qili sent for Fang and they met on the way out from the former's office. There Fang was warned in a straightforward manner to not stir up trouble. But he refused to bend.

-It was a very short meeting, he says.

Did you feel at a disadvantage during this meeting with a high level policymaker?

-It annoyed me that we were on an equal level psychologically, because I was above him in terms of knowledge, ha, ha, ha ... He, on the other hand stuck to his position of power and felt he was above me, he answers.

They had first met in February 1955 when Fang was a talented 19 year old student and a party member. It was during a training conference where he rushed up to the podium and grabbed the microphone, crying out with a loud voice that he felt that it was a boring meeting and that it was time for the students to think more independently.

Fang Lizhi at the Institute of Advanced Studies. Photo: Hans Sandberg

Hu Qili was presiding at the meeting. His first comment was: "Fang, that was well said!"

However, on the next day, Hu Qili received signals from the Party that what had happened was not good at all. The Party secretary of the university spent the second day reading a long speech that criticized Fang's outburst.

-I was very confused, because I was still a Marxist at the time. I thought that it must have been I that was wrong.

Two years later, Fang would be expelled from the Communist Party for his youthful digression. That was under Mao Zedong's mass persecution of "bourgeois rightist."

It was only after Mao's "great leap forward" (1958-60), which cost tens of millions of lives, that Fang stopped blaming himself for his political problems.

-People were starving and I realized that something must be wrong. I lost confidence in Mao and became more independent, he says.

Unlike many other Chinese communists who disliked Mao's extremism, Fang was never attracted by Mao's rival Liu Shaoqi, or the Soviet Communist Party, which experimented with limited economic and political reforms under Nikita Khrushchev.

-I already had acquired a taste for freedom, which was the tradition among physicists like for example Einstein. He was very open-minded in his thinking, and I liked his ideas. I was already influenced by ideas from the West. The Soviets had incidentally also criticized Einstein and quantum mechanics, something I did not like.

Science provided Fang with the fixed point he needed to move the political universe of China’s Communists. He often thought of how Galileo had to fight for truth against the Medieval church's ideological oppression. During the Cultural Revolution, Fang and most intellectuals were sent to the countryside to be "re-educated by the masses" – as Mao's anti-intellectual campaign was called euphemistically.

At that time, it wasn’t possible to take even the smallest step towards freedom.

-We were finished. We were completely isolated! You couldn’t do anything, he says.

Eventually he was allowed to return to Beijing, but in 1969 he was transferred to Hefei, where China’s National Academy of Sciences had set up a new technical college. It would take until 1978 before Fang regained his "political rights," and the 21-year old expulsion from the Party was lifted.

He began a very active scientific life and he became China's youngest professor in 1981 at the age of 45. The reforms and his new status allowed him to take a series of trips abroad as a visiting professor and to participate in scientific seminars. This opened up new worlds and new perspectives, which only strengthened his conviction that China must open up completely to the outside world.

Beijing's Ancient Astronomical Observatory.
Photo: Hans Sandberg, 2001.

However, the Party saw this as a capitulation for Western influence, but Fang saw a free cultural exchange as a prerequisite for a real modernization of China. It didn't take long before he became a household name in scientific circles, both in China and internationally. In 1984, he was elected vice-president of Keda in a democratic election, despite opposition from the Party. He initiated a series of educational reforms, which in the fall of 1986 was hailed in the Party's main newspaper, the People's Daily. His reforms replaced the Communist Party's dominance of the education with academic freedom, creativity, and a wide-ranging international exchange.

On December 5, the day after Fang told Keda’s students that democracy is something you have to fight for, 3,000 of them took to the streets in Hefei carrying banners saying "No Democratization, No Modernization!" and "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!" Later in December, 5,000 students marched in Wuhan, and 30,000 in Shanghai. The protest soon spread to Kunming, Chongqing, Shenzhen and by January, students marched to the Tiananmen Square in Beijing. This was the development that the party's reform friendly wing had feared, or rather, they feared the counter reaction that it could trigger.

That was probably why Fang was followed by a member of the government during his "tour" of 1985-1986. In the city of Ningpo, he learned that Wan Li, the deputy prime minister, and member of the Politburo, had requested to have his speeches recorded.

Wan Li followed him back to his university and soon called a meeting for about one hundred provincial education directors, party secretaries and governors. It was formally a meeting about education policy, but the real purpose was to make Fang shut up and to quell the growing student protest movement.

-He criticized my belief that education should be independent of the party, says Fang, who at first did not answer the attack, something that irritated Wan Li.

-Fang Lizhi! Come up here and report to me, he shouted.

-Then I stood up and gave him a straightforward answer, says Fang. I am the vice-president of a university, and I know how to organize teaching and research. I know how to do this better than you, and I need no interference from the party!

Such recklessness both enticed and frightened Fang’s colleagues, who came up , after the meeting and said "you did well," and that they liked his views, but also told him to keep quiet about them! This was, as Orville Schell points out in his brilliant book about this time "Discos and Democracy," one of the few occasions in Communist China's history that anybody had publicly challenged a top leader on the issue of democracy.

The demonstrations in the winter of 1986-87 led to a reaction and it was strong. The conservative forces in the party pressed on, and Deng Xiaoping responded by sacrificing his proposed successor, the Party Chairman Hu Yaobang. He also sharpened the rhetoric against "bourgeois liberalism", while cleverly appointing the liberal reformer Zhao Ziyang to take over after Hu. The idea was to silence the opposition both to the right and the left, and let the economic reforms continue. Fang and two other free-thinkers, Liu Binyan and Wang Ruoshi, were expelled from the party. Fang and his boss at Keda, Guan Weiyan, were both fired from their jobs. What was strange for Chinese conditions was that Hu Yaobang retained his position in the Politburo, and Fang was given a new job as a researcher at the Beijing Astronomical Observatory. It was a signal to the intellectuals that the government would not go back to Mao's policies after all.

If it hadn't been for a major gaffe by the party, Fang’s star would by then have passed its zenith.

-The Communist Party distributed my speeches all over the country in order for people to criticize them, but people identified with me and my speeches instead. Before that I was only well known among physicists and students, he says.

Either it was a blunder from the conservatives, or a clever trick from the radical reformists. For Fang, it was an unexpected help in breaking through the main obstacle to freedom of opinion in China – the Party's monopoly of information.

It can be difficult for an outsider to understand exactly how difficult it is to maintain what we take as normal contacts in China. The country is huge, poor, and has an extremely underdeveloped infrastructure. Simple things, like making a phone call or visiting a friend in another city, are difficult in China -- both for practical and political reasons.

-I had no telephone until 1987, but I still never communicated with my friends using a telephone, says Fang.

Only two Chinese in a thousand have a telephone. Employment, housing and travel are still things that require approval from the authorities, i.e. approval by the Communist Party. Snitching and spying on citizens are part of everyday life in a way that brings to mind George Orwell's book "1984". It was long forbidden, and sometimes even dangerous, to read foreign newspapers and listen to the Voice of America or the BBC.

Chinese society is thoroughly organized, and that in a way that gives the Party the greatest possible power. All official information channels run vertically -- Reports from the bottom up, and decisions from the top down.

-The Communist Party banned horizontal contacts between people in different fields after taking power in 1949, Fang says. Physicists can talk to physicists, but physicists cannot talk to artists, and certainly not to business managers!

- For example, I know Liu Binyan, but we've only met a few times and I have never met Wang Ruowang (a well-known dissident from Shanghai), he says.

This corporatist system keeps the opposition fragmented into many small isolated islands, whom the party can crush, tolerate or manipulate if it so pleases. In a way, the party swallowed the society, but by doing so downed the political views it wanted to get rid of, even if they were in disguised form. Instead of being ideologically united, the party became a platform for factional strife and conflicts between interest groups.

Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic philosophy – "It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice” – was not much of an ideology, whether to defend the old system or build a new one. The already started reforms followed their own logic, and the very real divisions in the party made it increasingly inefficient as thought police.

-We had many meetings for professionals, and there we could get together and talk, says Fang. It took a lot of travel, because the telephone system is so inadequate.

It would not take long after the expulsion before new political winds blew. It seemed that nothing would be able to stop the gradual liberalization of China. In February 1986 Fang participated in a scientific conference led by Guan Weiyan. Fang was then authorized by Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang to attend a Physics symposium in May 1987 in Trieste, Italy. Once abroad, he took the opportunity to give an interview for the German magazine Der Spiegel, where he said that his goal for China was democratization, and that his next target was Marxism. In the autumn of 1988 he attended a scientific conference in Australia and gave an interview for the Hong Kong magazine "Nineties" on the way home. In it he delivered a scathing indictment of corruption and the "fin de siècle - the mentality" of the Communist Party. Deng Xiaoping was said to have become so enraged that he considered suing Fang for libel.

The struggle within the party leadership between radical reformers, cautious reformers and conservative opponents of reforms grew more intense during 1988, and by the second half of the year, it looked like the radicals had lost control of the Party, while the Party at the same time was losing its grip completely over the society, something that would become apparent in Spring of 1989.

It was in this situation that Fang wrote an open letter to Deng Xiaoping where he spoke about something that China's intellectuals had kept quiet about for ten years: Wei Jingsheng.

The short letter suggested that Deng should declare a national amnesty for political prisoners, including Wei. Fang thought it was fitting, given the 40th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, the 70^th anniversary of the "May Fourth Movement of 1919", and the 200^thanniversary of the French Revolution.

The letter became the starting signal for the massive pro-democracy movement that would dominate the first half of 1989. And it was followed on February 16 by an open letter to the National People's Congress (China's "parliament") signed by 33 famous Chinese writers and artists and supporting Fang’s letter of January 6. And so did 42 famous Chinese scientists in yet another open letter to the NPC. Then came the events in quick succession.

Why did you write the letter in 1989?

-That was ten years since Wei Jingsheng had been sentenced, and even in Mao's time Communist Party's enemies were sometimes released after ten years. Freedom of expression was also quite large, but a difficulty was that Wei Jingsheng’s case was directly linked to Deng Xiaoping personally. It was a symbolic case. My aim was not to provoke. I thought that he should have been able to accept the letter. It would have been in Deng's interest to do it, says Fang with a frankness that has won him so many friends and such powerful enemies.

But Deng and the old guard behind China's shadow government are perhaps simply too old to listen to such talk. Hence, there is not much Fang and the 20.000 Chinese students in the U.S. can do, but to wait. Deng is after all 87 years old, and the next chapter in China's modernization could begin anytime now.

Hans Sandberg

(An abbreviated version of this article was published 

in March 1992 in Z Magazine in Stockholm, Sweden.)

More about Fang Lizhi

Hans Sandberg: Därför hatar Kinas makthavare Fang Lizhi

Wikipedia on Fang Lizhi

Perry Link: On Fang Lizhi (1936 - 2012)

James Fallows: Fang Lizhi

Orville Schell: China's Andrei Sakharov

The Economist: Fang Lizhi

James H. Williams: Fang's Expanding Universe

By Fang Lizhi:

The Real Deng (New York Review of Books, November 10, 2011)

My 'Confession' (New York Review of Books, June 23, 2011)

An Appeal to the ‘Fortune’ Conference in Shanghai (w. Robert L. Bernstein in New York Review of Books, September 23, 1999)

The Hope for China (w. Perry Link in New York Review of Books, October 17, 1996)

The Chinese Amnesia (New York Review of Books, September 27, 1990)

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

Letters from the Other China (w. Orville Schell in New York Review of Books, July 20, 1989)

China’s Despair and China’s Hope (New York Review of Books, February 2, 1989)

Scientific publications since 1989


Books:

Bringing Down the Great Wall: Writings on Science, Culture, and Democracy in China (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1992)

Creation of the Universe (w. T. Kiang and Li Shu Xian, World Scientific Publishing Company, 1993)

Wikipedia Is Not A Weapon

The New York Times calls the 24-hour shutdown of the English version of Wikipedia a "political coming of age". I disagree. If anything, it shows lack of maturity.

Whatever you think of the law, which seems like an overly broad and clumsy attempt to solve a very real problem - online theft of intellectual property - today's protest is naive, bordering on stupid.

The web is a utility for the mind. It should never be shut down, never turned into a spigot that anybody can turn on or off. Just look at China where the autocratic leaders takes information and communication extremely serious, arming an army of controllers with the latest surveillance tools to monitor the collective mind for any signs of cracks and dissent. The opponents of SOPA may think that they are fighting for freedom, but they actually opened the door to a very dark room.

Hans Sandberg

Do We Need A SETI For the Human Mind?

The Swedish author Henning Mankell has written a reflection on the nearly forgotten art of listening, which is published in today's New York Times. His piece comes only a couple of days after Maureen Dowd's column Silence is Golden, which discusses Michel Hazanavicius' new movie The Artist, and laments "'the loss of silence,' once as natural as the sky and air." Mankell suggests that African storytelling is less linear than the European, and stands ready

"to burst onto the world scene — much as South American literature did some years ago when Gabriel García Márquez and others led a tumultuous and highly emotional revolt against ingrained truth. Soon an African literary outpouring will offer a new perspective on the human condition. The Mozambican author Mia Couto has, for example, created an African magic realism that mixes written language with the great oral traditions of Africa." 

Mankell contrasts that with our mostly linear Western literature.

"That’s not the case in Africa. Here, instead of linear narrative, there is unrestrained and exuberant storytelling that skips back and forth in time and blends together past and present. Someone who may have died long ago can intervene without any fuss in a conversation between two people who are very much alive. Just as an example."   

This reminds me of a review I read in 1986 of Timothy Mo's novel An Insular Possession, where the reviewer claimed that Chinese literature was like a lake, while Western literature was like a river. It was a beautiful allegory, but I suspect that it had something to do with the fact that I never read the book. Like so many other books I have bought over the years, it just stands there squeezed in between strangers on a shelf, sometimes making me feel guilty, often reminding me of how short life is.

But back to listening. Maybe we need a SETI for the human mind in this age of mostly mindless chatter and widespread sharing of the inconsequential and mundane.

Sometimes, when something big and sad happens, we gather for a moment of silence. But there is no silence. You can always hear the (lack of) silence. The noise is always there and technology has made us humans capable to produce more noise than ever. If the superstring theory is right - and the world consists of vibrations of tiny supersymmetric strings - then it might end (somehow) not with a bang, but with an overload of microwave emissions that causes the music of existence to stop.

Hans Sandberg

        

Democracy, Dictatorship and Economic Growth

It's a popular notion that dictatorships are more efficient than democracies, and that it is China's political system that explains it's fast growth since 1978. Professor Yasheng Huang from MIT Sloan School of Management challenges that notion, by a series of very interesting comparisons.

Yasheng Huang: Does democracy stifle economic growth?

If you found Yasheng's speech interesting, you may also want to listen to Joseph Nye's speech, which places China's economic and political power in a soft power perspective. 

Ever Heard of Hericsson Mobile, the Chinese Cellphone Manufacturer?

A Chinese company has brazenly copied the Swedish telecom giant Ericsson’s name and logo, but added an H to the name. Hericsson Mobile Technology says on its website that it “is one of the leading manufacturers of cellphone in Shenzhen, China…” and that it distributes its phones in North- and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. “This is not an Ericsson affiliated site,” says Kathy Egan, vice president, external communications at Ericsson North America after we shared the news about Hericsson.

“Hericsson” writes on its website that it “is specializing in designing and manufacturing of quad-band dual SIM dual standby TV mobile phones , also 3G, Smart Phones with WIFI and GPS, dual mode GSM/CDMA mobile phones and Windows Mobile 6.5, also with Google Android. Since established in 2005, we have been always devoting to keep pace with first-class technology and management of the world. Currently, we have several international advanced production lines.”

We called the company, but nobody picked up the phone. It says on its website that it has a “high-tech manufactur park base in LongGang district,We have up to 1,000 employees”, and that it has a R&D team of over 20 engineers. They claim that they “keep close cooperation with world famous telecom company and IC developing companies,RF and software for all our products are from Gualcomm, marvle, MTK，Infineon and Spreadtrum.” (It is hard to know if the referring to Qualcomm, or Gualcomm, which seems to be a software tool. Spredtrum Communications is a Shanghai based RF company.)

The Hericsson corporate culture is – according to the site – “engaged in more convenient for entertainment, information, and communication, we provide products for mobile handset integrated with fashion, simplicity, and function.”

Quality is of course a core value and priority: ”Any idea or action that risks delivery of quality is totally wrong. High quality rises from continuing creative management and technology innovation. Customers will benefit from best quality with lowest cost only if we work hard to cut down cost or improve quality constantly.”

What is Hericsson? We don't know yet, but it is quite possible that it is an Chinese startup that "borrowed" Ericsson's name and logo as they are well-known in China. Most Chinese speak little or no English and are not all that familiar with the latin alphabet, why slight modifications can dupe consumers, making them think that they are buying an Ericsson phone, when in fact they are buying a Hericsson phone.

“Our Corporate Legal and Brand management departments are presently looking into the situation to decide upon the right action,” says Ericsson's Kathy Egan. It's going to be interesting to see what happens now that Ericsson's lawyers take a closer look at Hericsson.

Hans Sandberg

PS. The plot thickens! It seems that Hericsson has been around for a long time. I found a press release from Unitech Industries, Inc., dated Scottsdale, Arizona, March 27, 1995 (!!!) and distributed by PRNewswire.

"Unitech Industries, Inc. (Nasdaq-NNM: UTII) said today that it has completed the first phase of its acquisition of Solidex and its sister company Hericson International Ltd. with the purchase of the net assets of Solidex for $3.4 million in cash. Solidex is a California-based distribution company that markets video, wireless communication and computer accessories.

According to John Londelius, president and chief executive officer, Unitech expects later this month to complete the acquisition of Hericson International, Ltd., a Hong Kong-based engineering and manufacturing company of video cellular and computer accessories. The company believes that based on 1994 revenues the Solidex acquisition could add approximately $17 million to Unitech's revenues during the next 12 months, with an additional $8 million in revenue added when the Hericson purchase is completed."

Is this the same Hericsson as the Shenzhen company?

China's Economy Is Growing Fast, But Still Far From the Top

Remember this when discussing the Chinese Economic Miracle. For all of its impressive economic growth, it still lags behind the EU and the U.S.

Here is Wikipedia's 2008 GNP-list:
1 United States $14,441 Billion
2 Japan              $4,910 Billion
3 China              $4,327 Billion
4 Germany         $3,673 Billion
5 France            $2,866 Billion

Also check out this graph: GDP in 2008, Millions of US Dollars

If you compare per capita, China ends up on 99th place in IMF's list (2009) with $3,566/capita compared to $46,443 for the U.S., $43,147 for Sweden, and $94,418 for tiny Luxembourg, which leads the pack. China's growth is astounding, and shows what a country can do if it can combine market incentives with a clever strategy for investments in infrastructure, education and a trade policy that is heavily focused on promoting it's export potential. The limits of growth will in China's case weigh in more and more as the country depletes its energy and water resources, and the population's willingness to accept severe pollution and social dislocation and inequalities abates, putting more pressure on it's ossified political system.

Hans Sandberg

Google Search Result: China's Emperor Has No Clothes

China's men of power find it utterly hard to rid themselves of the bunker mentality that has shaped its political system for so long, but neither the old Great Wall nor the new Great Cyber Wall will in the long run be able to prevent it's citizens from sharing their thoughts and opinions, and isolate China from the world. The modern Chinese emperor is indeed naked, and Google pointed it out.

Hans Sandberg

Google Takes A Stand for Freedom! Bravo! (And It's About Time)

David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer writes a sharp rebuke of China's surveillance policies and lack of respect for freedom of communication and expression. He also declares that Google is ready to pull out of China.

Here is an excerpt:

A new approach to China


1/12/2010 03:00:00 PM


Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.

(...)
 
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

***

Here is a report from CNET's Tom Krazit.

Grilled Dogs and Cats For Sale at Guangzhou's Qingping Market (1985)

I just signed the "Stop LIVE animal skinning in China" (at Animalsaviors site) and remembered some photos I took in Guangzhou back in 1985.

Russia Looks to China for Power Lessons

"Like an envious underachiever, Vladimir V. Putin’s party, United Russia, is increasingly examining how it can emulate the Chinese Communist Party, especially its skill in shepherding China through the financial crisis relatively unbowed," Clifford J. Levy wrote in New York Times about a meeting between Russian top leaders and leaders of China's Communist Party. (Russia’s Leaders See China as Template for Ruling, October 19, 2009.)

Twenty years ago, during Mikhail Gorbachev's state visit in May 1989, it looked like China's leadership was in need of political help as it struggled to contain growing waves of protest from students and workers dreaming of democratic political reforms. Thousands of students occupied Tiananmen Square on May 13, just before the arrival of the Soviet Communist Party leader, creating a major loss of face for Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese party leadership. We know how this drama ended, but the paradox is that while China entered a long period of relative political stability and unprecedented economic growth, the Soviet Union collapsed, leading to radical economic and political reforms followed by a chaos and lawlessness that ultimately brought Vladimir Putin, a former KBG-chief, to power. He managed to centralize the power, using Russian nationalism, the country's vast oil- and natural gas resources in an era of rising prices, this in combination with his personal charisma and Russia's military strength.

Today, however, Russia is hurt by the global financial crisis, and its fundamental economic weakness became obvious once the oil prices came down. China, in contrast, used its centralized political power and financial strength to push through a huge stimulus package, which turned the economy around, helping the world economy pull out of the Great Recession.

“The accomplishments of China’s Communist Party in developing its government deserve the highest marks,” Aleksandr D. Zhukov, a deputy prime minister and senior Putin aide, declared at the meeting with Chinese officials on Oct. 9 in the border city of Suifenhe, China, northwest of Vladivostok. “The practical experience they have should be intensely studied.” (Quoted in New York Times.)

The recent meeting between top leaders from Russia and China was only one in a series of such meetings, and China's President Hu Jintao has been invited to attend United Russia's convention in November and more meetings are planned. Russia's ruling party is even planning to open an office in Beijing according to the Times.

"Whatever the motivation, Russia in recent years has started moving toward the Chinese model politically and economically," Levy writes.

China is not the only country the Russians are studying: "...Mr. Putin’s political aides have long studied how to move the political system to the kind that took root for many decades in countries like Japan and Mexico, with a de facto one-party government under a democratic guise, political analysts said. The Russians tend to gloss over the fact that in many of those countries, long-serving ruling parties have fallen."

This is an interesting fact since one political system that China's leadership studied in the 1980's was Singapore, a country that had a "de facto one-party government under a democratic guise." China's authoritarian political system, which essentially is a dictatorship where the party elite controls all key levers in the society, is very attractive to the Russian leadership: “We are interested in the experience of the party and government structures in China, where cooperation exists between the ruling party and the judicial, legislative and executive authorities,” Vladimir E. Matkhanov, a deputy in Russia’s Parliament, said at the Suifenhe meeting, according to a transcript quoted by the Times.

It will be interesting to see if the current political exchanges between Russia and China will lead to a closer political, and maybe even military cooperation, something that could change the balance of power between China, Russia and the United States.

Yet another challenge for Team Obama.

Hans Sandberg

If you understand Swedish you may want to read this blog posts on my Swedish blog, Sandbergs hörna.
Ryssland, USA och Kina - Intervju med W. Joseph Stroupe, del I. (2007)
Ryssland, USA och Kina - Intervju med W. Joseph Stroupe, del II. (2007)
Putin släpper inte greppet, men vad är det han vill (December 2007)

Bullets And Batons Outdid Twitter In Iran

I'm mourning, but not Michael Jackson or Farrah Fawcett. I'm mourning the death of the democratic opportunity in Iran, just as I mourned the death of the democratic opportunity in China after June 4, 1989. And just as then, the good guys didn't win, the bullets were more powerful than brittle humans made out of flesh and bones, and there was no real leadership to help them out.

And for those of you who thought twitter and Facebook could do it, well it was a nice thought. Here is a snippet from today's New York Times:

While protesters were aided at first by technology — primarily the Internet and text messaging — the government deployed its control of state television and news outlets to sweep away competing narratives.

“It is still possible that the information age will crack authoritarian structures in Iran,” wrote Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East program for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But it is far more likely that the government will be able to use that technology to secure its own rule.”
Iranian Leaders Gaining the Edge Over Protesters (New York Times June 27, 2009)

Trita Parsi and Reza Aslan sums up the events in an article for Foreign Policy magazine called The End of the Beginning - What will be the legacy of the Green Revolution?

In many ways, the Ahmadinejad government has succeeded in transforming what was a mass movement into dispersed pockets of unrest. Whatever is now left of this mass movement is now leaderless, unorganized -- and under the risk of being hijacked by groups outside Iran in pursuit of their own political agendas.
(...)

Although successful at first, the discipline has clearly broken down. This should be no surprise -- the movement is by now in effect leaderless. A source close to Mousavi says that the first and second circle of people around Mousavi have all been arrested or put under house arrest. Mousavi himself has limited ability to communicate with his team and his followers. The lack of leadership is visible on the streets, where demonstrators exhibit unparalleled will and courage, but lack direction and guidance.

Hans Sandberg

China's Wei Jingsheng Criticizes the IOC

Wei Jingsheng, China's most famous dissident criticizes the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in an Op-Ed piece for the Washington Post today.

"As what the Dalai Lama has called 'cultural genocide' goes on in Tibet, it is wholly unacceptable that Jacques Rogge, the head of the International Olympic Committee, refuses to take a stand against the Beijing government's current crackdown on Tibetan protesters. In fact, this is completely at odds with the 'spirit of the Olympics.'

Far more than Steven Spielberg, who quit his advisory role for the Summer Games because of China's unwillingness to pressure the Sudanese government on genocide in Darfur, the IOC has a special obligation to act. Since promised improvements in China's human rights were a quid pro quo for awarding the Games to Beijing, how can it proceed as if nothing happened when blood is flowing in the streets of Lhasa?"

"Jacques Rogge's unwillingness to pressure Beijing at this moment is so tragic because these Olympics are the turning point in modern Chinese history. Having invited the world to polite tea, the Communist Party rulers have turned their palace of power into a global glass house. They can no longer show both the smiling face of 'a peaceful rise' to the world and the stern face of brutal suppression at home."

It was Wei Jingsheng who in 1979 posted a paper on Beijing's "Democracy Wall" suggesting a "Fifth Modernization", i.e. a democratization of China's political life. In a way, he had taken the great reformer Deng Xiaoping on his own words (Deng had after all blessed the democracy movement when it helped his faction in the Communist Party's power struggle), but he was soon arrested and sentensed to 15 years in prison on bogus charges in a bogus trial. Wei Jingsheng was briefly released in 1993 in a ploy to convince the IOC to give China the Olympics in 2000, but was re-arrested in 1994 and imprisoned again until his final release in 1997. Today he lives in Washington, D.C.

Here is a link to the article: China's True Face - The Host of the Olympics or the Thug of Tibet?

Hans Sandberg