Wall Street Journal editorial headline: “Fang Lizhi and freedom”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0185
Early on the weekend of 7 April, articles appeared in the Wall Street Journal , the Washington Post , and the New York Times marking the death of Fang Lizhi, the physicist and Chinese dissident. On 8 April the WSJ posted online an editorial framing Fang’s life in terms of the struggle for freedom.
The Times article begins with an overview. Fang’s ‘advocacy of economic and democratic freedoms shaped China’s brief era of student dissent that ended with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and his exile,’ the Times says, and reports that he died Friday at age 76 in Arizona. The initial summary continues:
A brilliant scientist—and in his early years a loyal member of the Communist Party—Mr. Fang had become China’s best-known dissident by the 1980s, his views shaped by persecution in China and exposure to Western political concepts abroad.
In early 1989, he published an open letter to China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, calling for the release of political prisoners. The letter helped galvanize a pro-democracy student movement that spring, peaking on June 4, when Chinese troops killed hundreds of student protesters among the masses occupying Tiananmen Square.
Fearing arrest, Mr. Fang sought refuge with his family at the United States Embassy in Beijing. President George Bush’s decision to grant him protection there provoked a yearlong diplomatic standoff with the Chinese that ended, after secret negotiations, with a decision by Chinese leaders in June 1990 to allow the family to leave China, ostensibly for medical treatment.
Mr. Fang later became a professor of physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he taught and continued to speak out on human rights until his death.
All three articles elaborate on that basic story, but the WSJ editorial takes things further. It begins by calling Fang ‘Communist China’s first independent intellectual'; by noting that ‘in 1986 he brought student demonstrators to the streets with a simple message: ‘Democracy is not a favor bestowed from above; it should be won through people’s own efforts’'; and by asking, ‘But do those words still resonate in China today?’
The editors seem to think that the answer is a restrained yes. They stipulate, ‘Cynicism about government is the rule today’ in China, but add that ‘while many discuss the need for political reform in private, only a few activists and human-rights lawyers are willing to take personal risks to make it happen.’ They admit that “in retrospect, Fang may seem naive in his call for democracy.’
But they also write that ‘young Chinese, raised on Party propaganda, were searching for a new source of idealism’ and that ‘Fang directed them toward the classical liberal values of the 1919 May Fourth movement, which rallied behind two imported words, science and democracy.’ They say that with the progress of economic reform, ‘those ideas have quietly triumphed, leaving the Communist Party to rule by fear and bribery.’
At the end, the editors declare that Fang ‘believed that nothing should interfere with the search for truth, and that this would lead his countrymen to win democracy.’ They predict, ‘Eventually his countrymen will prove him right.’
To add a dimension to their comments, the WSJ editors also ran a 1988 Fang quotation in the recurring ‘ Notable and Quotable ’ space:
In a roundabout way, I find a correlation curve: The less people know about China, the more optimistic they are. For example, foreigners are the most optimistic, babbling on about how much housing has improved and so on; overseas Chinese are a little less optimistic because they have access to more information; Chinese studying abroad are more pessimistic — it wasn’t easy for them to leave the country, and they have their personal experience to go by; the Chinese in China, people like us, are even less optimistic. But there’s one category of people who are the most pessimistic of all. Who are they? Those close to the top leaders, their attendants and secretaries. They say you can’t believe anything at all.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.