Fang Lizhi (; February 12, 1936 – April 6, 2012) was a Chinese astrophysicist, vice-president of the University of Science and Technology of China, and activist whose liberal ideas inspired the pro-democracy student movement of 1986–87 and, finally, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.Yam, P. (1994) Profile: Fang Lizhi – Fundamental Rights, Fundamental Physics, Scientific American 270(5), 39-40. Fang was considered as one of the leaders of the New Enlightenment in the 1980s. Because of his activism, he was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party in January 1987. For his work, Fang was a recipient of the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Award in 1989, given each year. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980, but his position was revoked after 1989.
Life and career in China Fang was born on 12 February 1936 in Beijing. His father worked on the railway. In 1948, a year before the People's Liberation Army took over the city, as a student of the Beijing No. 4 High School, he joined an underground youth organization that was associated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). One of his extracurricular activities was assembling radio receivers from used parts.
In 1952, he enrolled in the Physics Department at Peking University, where he met his future wife, Li Shuxian (). Both Fang and Li were among the top students in their class. After graduating, he joined the CCP, started working at the Institute of Modern Physics and became involved in China's secret atomic bomb program, while Li stayed at Peking University as a junior faculty member.
In 1957, during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, people were strongly encouraged by the CCP to openly express their opinions and criticisms. As party members, Li, Fang and another person in the physics department planned to write a letter to the party to offer their suggestions on education. This letter was still unfinished by the time the Hundred Flowers Campaign abruptly came to an end and the Anti-Rightist Campaign started. The opinions and criticisms solicited during the earlier campaign were then interpreted as "attacks on the party", and those who had expressed such opinions were labelled "rightist" and persecuted. Although no one knew about the unfinished letter, out of loyalty to the party, Fang, Li and their friend confessed to writing it; Li also confessed her doubts about the party. Li was expelled from the CCP, and sentenced to hard labour in Zhaitang, a town near Beijing. Fang was not immediately expelled from the party, because he played a lesser role in writing the letter, and also because he had left Peking University, where the punishment was particularly severe. However, he was removed from the nuclear program and sent to do hard labour in Zanhuang, Hebei province from December 1957 to August 1958. Out of political pressure, Li and Fang put their relationship on hold until early 1959, when Fang was also expelled from the CCP. In August 1958, Fang was reassigned to the faculty of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), which was located in Beijing at the time. In 1961 he married Li, who remained a faculty member of Peking University. In spite of his experience in the anti-Rightist campaign, Fang published an article in the Guangming Daily, encouraging the independent thinking of students.
Fang published his first research paper on nuclear physics in Acta Physica Sinica 17, p. 57 (1961) under the pseudonym Wang Yunran, since as a rightist he was not entitled to publish research papers. Later, on the recommendation of Qian Linzhao, he became an associated member of a research group led by Li Yinyuan at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Since Li's group was at a different institute, this arrangement took advantage of a loophole in management rules, allowing him to publish papers under his own name. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fang conducted research in particle physics, solid state physics and laser physics. By 1965, he had published 13 research papers and was considered one of the most productive physics researchers in China. That year, as part of the effort of cleansing Beijing of "undesirable elements", Fang was to be removed from the faculty of USTC and sent to work in an electronics factory in Liaoning province. Learning about this, vice president Yan Jici intervened on Fang's behalf; he pleaded the case to the party secretary of USTC at the time, Liu Da, who cancelled the cleansing order for Fang and other faculty members of USTC.
Academic activities were interrupted when the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966. In 1969, along with other universities and research institutes, USTC was ordered to be evacuated out of Beijing, ostensibly in anticipation of an impending invasion by the Soviet Union. USTC was moved to Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, where it remains to this day. Upon arriving in Hefei in 1969, Fang, along with other "problematic members" of the faculty, were sent to do hard labour for "re-education by the worker class" in a coal mine. Fang secretly brought with him one physics book, the "Classical Theory of Fields" by Lev Landau and learned the theory of general relativity by reading this book in the evening. Later, in 1971, along with a number of other faculty members, he was assigned to do labour work in a brick factory, which produced the bricks for constructing the new USTC campus buildings.
Research in astrophysics and cosmology In 1972, the worst chaos of the Cultural Revolution was over and scientific research resumed. Fang found an opportunity to read some recent astrophysics papers in western journals, and soon wrote his first paper on cosmology, "A Cosmological Solution in Scalar-tensor Theory with Mass and Blackbody Radiation", which was published on the journal Wu Li (Physics), Vol. 1, 163 (1972). This was the first modern cosmological research paper in mainland China. Fang assembled a group of young faculty members of USTC around him to conduct astrophysics research.
At the time, conducting research on relativity theory and cosmology in China was very risky politically, because these theories were considered to be "idealistic" theories in contradiction with dialectical materialism, a central component of the Communist Party's ideology. According to the dialectical materialism philosophy, both time and space must be infinite, while the Big Bang theory allows the possibility of the finiteness of space and time. During the Cultural Revolution, campaigns were waged against Albert Einstein and the Theory of Relativity in Beijing and Shanghai. Once Fang published his theory, some of the critics of the Theory of Relativity, especially a group based in Shanghai, prepared to attack Fang politically. However, by this time the "leftist" line was declining in the Chinese academia. Professor Dai Wensai, the most well-known Chinese astronomer at the time and chair of the Astronomy Department of Nanjing University, also supported Fang. Many of the members of the "Theory of Relativity Criticism Group" changed to study the theory and conduct research in it. Subsequently, Fang was regarded as the father of cosmological research in China.
Fang published a large number of papers on astrophysics and cosmology. In the late 1970s, he and his group used the luminosity of selected radio quasars to measure the Hubble diagram, and with data available at the time, suggested that the universe may be closed (Fang et al., Acta Astronomica Sinica 17, 134 (1977)). This work was noticed by researchers outside China; a Nature article noted that it obtained similar results to, but appeared earlier than, the paper by Davidsen et al., Nature 269, 203 (1977). Fang also carried out research on topics including neutron stars, black holes, inflation and quantum cosmology. He soon gained international recognition, and as China began to open up in the late 1970s, he was invited to international conferences outside the country. In 1985, together with H. Sato of Kyoto University, Japan, Fang won the first prize of the Gravity Research Foundation essay competition by proposing that the periodic distribution of quasars observed can be explained if the Universe is multiply-connected, i.e. has a non-trivial topology.
He was elected as the youngest member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980. His membership was, however, revoked after the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989. He helped promote international academic exchange in China. Together with Remo Ruffini, he organized the first major international scientific conference in China: the 3rd Marcel Grossmann meeting in 1982. During this meeting, Tsvi Piran and T.G. Horowitz became the first two Israeli scientists to enter the People's Republic of China; at the time, there were no diplomatic relations between China and Israel. He invited Stephen Hawking to visit China in 1985, and organized the International Astronomical Union conference IAU-124 on "Observational Cosmology" in Beijing in 1986.
Fang also trained many younger colleagues and students in the field of astrophysics and cosmology; he was considered an excellent teacher. Fang and Li coauthored "Introduction to Mechanics", an introductory book on Newtonian mechanics and special theory of relativity. This book has been considered a classic by many teachers and students, although few students are aware of it in recent years. Fang was also the first scientist in China to write popular accounts of contemporary astrophysical developments, such as cosmology and black holes. Fang's book, "Creation of the Universe" (Yuzhou de chuangsheng in Chinese) which was published in 1987, introduced basic cosmological ideas, and influenced a large number of physics and astronomy students growing up in the 1980s in China.
Political activism During the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Fang was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party for his "reactionary activities", viz. publishing an article critical of the government's policies on science education.
He was rehabilitated after the reform of China in late 1970s, and resumed his party membership. During this time, he held many academic positions, including the director of the astrophysics research group of USTC, and director of the science history research group, chief editor of the USTC academic journal, chair of the Chinese society of gravity and relativistic astrophysics. In 1984, Fang was appointed as the vice president of the USTC under president Guan Weiyan. Fang was very active in this role; for example he helped to set up the telex service for USTC. He was very popular among the students. Fang also began to write essays for publication in popular magazines, and gave lectures on a variety of topics in universities, though usually not in USTC. Many such essays and lectures expressed his liberal view on politics, reflections on history, and criticisms on CCP dogma. He also emphasized social responsibility of intellectuals. In late 1986, Fang, together with Xu Liangying and Liu Binyan, wrote letters to a number of well-known "Rightists" from the 1957 Anti-Rightist campaign, suggesting a meeting in memory of that event.