The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey From Scientist to Enemy of the State

Description

The long-awaited memoir byFang 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…

The celebrated physicist and political dissident recounts his clashes with the Chinese regime in this "fascinating and insightful" memoir of science under siege ( The Washington Post ). 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 became one of the world's leading astrophysicists. But his devotion to truth led him to question the Communist regime. And that got him in trouble. In 1957, after advocating for reforms in the Communist Party, Lizhi was dismissed from his position and sent to a remote village to be a farm laborer. Through the decades 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. He returned to academia after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. But when the cycle began again, his struggle became a public cause—one that helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests. In 1989, Lizhi andhis wife sought refuge in the U.S. embassy, where they hid for more than a year before fleeing the country. During that time Lizhi wrote this memoir, which has never been published until now. Told with vivid detail and disarming humor, The Most Wanted Man in China is a testament to the importance of living by one's principles in an unprincipled time and place.