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

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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 once some of the prominent scientists of the People’s Republic of China; he worked at the country’s first nuclear program and later became one of the crucial 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 within the Communist Party, Fang — just twenty-one years old — was once dismissed from his position, stripped of his Party membership, and sent to be a farm laborer in a remote village. Over the following two decades, over the years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, he was once 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 started again. This time his struggle became a public cause, and his example helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests.

Instantly after the crackdown in June 1989, Fang and his wife sought refuge within the U.S. embassy, where they hid for more than a year before being allowed to leave the country. Right through 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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