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The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State
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Published:
Henry Holt and Co. 2016
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Description

The long-awaited memoir by Fang 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 after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, but the cycle soon began again. This time his struggle became a public cause, and his example helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests.
Immediately after the crackdown in June 1989, Fang and his wife sought refuge in the U.S. embassy, where they hid for more than a year before being allowed to leave the country. During that time Fang wrote this memoir The Most Wanted Man in China, which has never been published, until now. His story, told with vivid detail and disarming humor, is a testament to the importance of remaining true to one's principles in an unprincipled time and place.

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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
02/09/2016
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781627795005
ASIN:
B011I42X4W
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Fang Lizhi. (2016). The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State. Henry Holt and Co.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Fang Lizhi. 2016. The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey From Scientist to Enemy of the State. Henry Holt and Co.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Fang Lizhi, The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey From Scientist to Enemy of the State. Henry Holt and Co, 2016.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Fang Lizhi. The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey From Scientist to Enemy of the State. Henry Holt and Co, 2016.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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      • bioText: Fang Lizhi was an astrophysicist and the vice president of the University of Science and Technology of China. A recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, he was a professor of physics at the University of Arizona until his death in 2012.
      • name: Fang Lizhi
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The Most Wanted Man in China
fullDescription

The long-awaited memoir by Fang 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 after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, but the cycle soon began again. This time his struggle became a public cause, and his example helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests.
Immediately after the crackdown in June 1989, Fang and his wife sought refuge in the U.S. embassy, where they hid for more than a year before being allowed to leave the country. During that time Fang wrote this memoir The Most Wanted Man in China, which has never been published, until now. His story, told with vivid detail and disarming humor, is a testament to the importance of remaining true to one's principles in an unprincipled time and place.

reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Ha Jin, author of Waiting and War Trash
      • content:

        "The Most Wanted Man in China is a remarkable memoir, full of candor, insight, and wit. Fang Lizhi writes with ease and precision and astute intelligence. He shows how a society was corrupted and shaped by absolute power and how the people suffered but managed to survive. It is an informative and intimate book."

      • premium: False
      • source: Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans
      • content: "A remarkable story, told with honesty and eloquence."
      • premium: False
      • source: James Mann, author of Beijing Jeep, About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, and The China Fantasy
      • content: "Fang Lizhi's memoir is the most biting and the wittiest critique to date of the Chinese Communist Party and its leaders. One of China's leading scientists, Fang explores the absurdities in the party's logic, its hypocrisies and cruelties. His observations are at once comic and tragic, making the book a pleasure to read."
      • premium: False
      • source: Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director, Center on U.S.-China Relations, Asia Society
      • content: "The Most Wanted Man in China makes for wistful reading. Beautifully translated by Perry Link, it is a pleasant reminder of what an interesting, truthful and intellectually wide-ranging man the Chinese astrophysicist Fang Lizhi actually was. But it is also a sad reminder of how the rigidity of the Chinese Communist Party has too often prevented it from finding a way of embracing so many of China's most creative, honest, thoughtful, and eloquent citizens."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        November 30, 2015
        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.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        Starred review from November 15, 2015
        A dissident astrophysicist who died in 2012 offers rare, revealing glimpses inside the opaque Chinese communist system. Fang (b. 1936) wrote this memoir while he and his wife, Li Shuxian, were offered refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing over the course of 13 months following the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, after which he eventually settled as a professor of physics at the University of Arizona. In this eloquent memoir, Fang has utterly shed his illusions about the Communist Party, which the Beijing-born author joined at age 12. Enamored by physics, he gradually came to grasp that the communist formula was anathema for the practice of independent thinking that science required. As an idealistic youth in the Institute of Modern Physics, at Peking University, Fang organized meetings and "class-struggle campaigns." Denounced as a "rightist" in 1958, he would be exiled from his physics work four different times between then and the 1970s and sent to the farm fields because his "thinking needed reform." In between, he was assigned to teach at the University of Science and Technology of China in Beijing. It wasn't long before Fang realized the absurdity of "socialism saving China," one of numerous ironic slogans during the brutal years of famine, Cultural Revolution, and Mao Zedong's "self-proclamation as emperor" when Fang was often separated from his wife and children. His lectures in the field of cosmology stimulated "counterrevolutionary" criticism, and his sense of urgency for reform and getting modern science accepted in China ("opening in all directions") was denounced as "bourgeois liberal thinking." His support of his students and writing of a letter urging amnesty for political prisoners in 1989 helped ignite the Tiananmen Square uprisings that spring, leading to his taking refuge in the U.S. Embassy. Throughout the book, Fang is candid about the development of his thinking, and his prose is clean, readable, and often forceful. A wonderfully crafted memoir, shimmering with intellectual honesty.

        COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        October 1, 2015

        Leading Chinese astrophysicist Fang was cast out of his job, deprived of his Party membership, and shipped off to a remote village to become a farm laborer for promoting reforms within the Communist Party. Repeatedly denounced, rehabilitated, and denounced again, he proved an inspiration to the Tiananmen Square protesters and fled the country with his wife, becoming professor of physics at the University of Arizona until his death in 2012. Here's his life story.

        Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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The long-awaited memoir by Fang 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 after...

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