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

In this harrowing memoir, Chinese physicist Fang (1936–2012) chronicles his increasingly perilous political status before his exile to America, where he became a professor at the University of Arizona. This meditation on “Mao’s whip of power” and story of courtship under duress was composed in 1989, while Fang and his wife were in protective custody at the U.S. embassy in Beijing after being expelled from the Communist Party of China (CPC) by Deng Xiaoping. Fang opens with his upbringing in Beijing and education at Peking University in the 1950s and describes his struggles as the scientific community fell out with Mao’s ideology. He was recruited by the CPC for a secret cadre of nuclear physics majors, but his opposition to Mao’s Anti-Rightist Movement earned him his first sentence of hard labor and set him on a course of political agitation. Despite his value as a scientist, Fang’s subversiveness proved too much for the CPC, particularly during the student protests that led to the bloody events at Tiananmen Square in 1989. China’s economic metamorphosis and the CPC’s program for “erasing the memory of protest” have blurred recollections of Tiananmen, as Fang predicted, but his book serves as a testimonial to the students killed there. (Feb.)