The Man Who Told The Truth: A Film Screening & Discussion Honoring Fang Lizhi

- I am Larry Diamond. I'm a senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution who is struggling with the pollen in the air here in the springtime, but my remarks will be short. Before I make these opening remarks, I would just like to say two logistical matters. The first one is that we ask you not to take any photographs of the the event nor any videos. We will be posting a video of the remarks that are made here today, but otherwise we ask that you not do that. And the second thing is we have a very big crowd, but we do have some seats in front. And part of the price you have to pay for coming in late is that you have to see it sit in the front row. So it's a great honor for the Hoover Institution and its program on US, China, and the world to sponsor this event. Honoring the late Chinese astrophysicist and human rights activist Fong jour. We are deeply grateful to all the speakers who we will hear from today. Most of them longtime friends of our program, they will be introduced later in the program. But I wanna acknowledge now the participation of Fong Leisure's son, F Key, and Perry Link, who helped put this event together. They will engage in a conversation on this stage following the screening of the film and some brief thoughts from the filmmaker Tony Choi. Tony, I don't know where you are right now. Okay, there you are. But thank you for making this important film and for choosing the Hoover Institution to debut it. Before we screen the film, I want to say a few words about Fong Leisure, who I came to admire greatly as someone who was not a China specialist and just watched what was happening in China in the 1980s. And on June 4th, 1989 and thereafter, a repeated victim of political repression for his liberal views. During the frenzy periods of the anti-US campaign and the cultural revolution, Fung nevertheless managed to build a trailblazing scientific career in astrophysics and cosmology fields that were considered opposed to the Communist party's ideology of dialectical materialism. In 1980, he was elected the youngest member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but his membership was revoked after the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, the day after the brutal crackdown on June 5th, 1989, Fong and his wife Lee Shun, took refuge in the US Embassy, accompanied by a US academic named Perry Link. They remained there for a year. I don't think you remained there for a year until June 25th, 1980, when they were permitted to leave on a US government plane for Britain. FG then taught at Cambridge University in Princeton before settling in at the University of Arizona as professor of Physics. Throughout his exile, he continued to speak out for human rights and democracy, and he served on the board as co-Chair of human rights in China. And I wanna say as well, just briefly, you can explore this later, that our celebration of FG today and his combination of scientific genius and principle defense, courageous defense of human rights, reminds me a lot of the great Soviet scientific dissident Andre ov and the special relationship that Hoover had with him through our longtime fellow, the the famous physicist, Sidney Drell, who had a decades long, very principled and close friendship with Andre ov. I wanna read from two O obituaries of Fong briefly, one that was published by The Economist soon after his death. I'll begin with that. Fgli Jo was the man who had encouraged students to speak out in December, 1986, the first and so far only intellectual and communist rule, China, whose descent had spurred the young to challenge party rule. He liked to describe himself as just a physicist, a professional star, gazer and longstanding party member who had been vice president of the University of Science and Technology in Hue since 1984. But he was far from ordinary. He had assumed, then demanded freedom from his earliest days in science, scientific inquiry as he repeatedly fearlessly wrote, needed spirit ideas, passion, and individual integrity. What it did not need was the guiding role of Marxist ideology to attach philosophical pedigrees to scientific theories, usually in order to discredit them was the method of the inquisition and the tormentors of Galileo whose stories Fong knew. Well in 19 72, 1 of his papers, papers was condemned as capitalist metaphysics. Go figure out how that's possible. Big bang theory of that sort was not Communist doctrine had not angles declared that the universe had always existed and was infinite and space and time. Mr. Fong spent the rest of his life, retorting, not necessarily. He did so in goading playful styles, still quoting from the economist obituary he wrote for public consumption in newspapers as well as academic journals. And with unheard of daring, he sniped at political structures as well as pseudoscience. Marxism. Leninism was, he said in his famous phrase, A worn out dress that should be thrown away. And if every one of those good words, liberty equality for fraternity democracy, human rights has been qual called Bourgeois. Fong wrote, what on Earth does that leave us? In 1980 six's chie, I reverence for party authorities, Stu Stokes student unrest, not only in Hae, but also in Shanghai and Beijing. Deng Xiaoping denounced him and party cells across the country were ordered to study and criticize Mr. Fong's views usually gaining him a readership of millions. In 1989, he spurred forward their campaign for change that January he wrote to dung, demanding the release of political prisoners, inspired dozens of other intellectuals to sign up and support, and kicked off a spring of unprecedented upheaval. When protests broke out in Beijing in April, 1989, he stayed in the background, but hard hardliners saw him as the black hand in Tiananmen. At one rally after the unrest had been crushed, his effigy was burned. And now finally, and more briefly from the eulogy or obituary that we j Chang wrote soon after his death way being the human rights activist who whose release FG had demanded. In part, for those of us whose memories have not been erased by the censorship of getting rich, gloriously Fong was a hero in the years and months leading up to the Tiananmen demonstrations. In 1989, he dared to tell the historical facts, the man who told the truth about Mao the party, the great leap forward, the cultural revolution to a new generation. It was Professor Fong's open letter to Deng Xiaoping on January 6th, 1989 that sparked the mass movement that dung would crush in June. In that letter, he called for my release that is waging Chings from prison where I'd already served 10 of the 15 years. I would ultimately serve for my big character poster, calling for the fifth modernization democracy. And way concludes my gratitude to Fong remains immense for foreign dignitaries. To ask the Chinese government to release me was one thing, and I am of course grateful. But for the person whom Deng Xiaoping hated most to openly offend the dictator required enormous courage. And with that, we present to you the man who told the truth.

- What made Folger such a threat was that he refused to submit and yield to historical amnesia.

- So I think a main reason the Chinese government saw Professor Fliche as such a threat was because he was so popular, he was so well respected.

- He seems so confident about what he's talking about and what he believes. He can challenge an authority. He can directly speak of his mind. He seems to really embody this, what we, that time we call science and democracy. Yeah, the two things China lack, but the two things China need.

- You've got,

- He never was trying to be a messiah or a political leader. He's trying to be a physicist who is also an honest citizen and is saying what he thinks the truth is.

- One person was by my father's side through everything. My mother, the also a physicist and a professor, their story, A love story is also a story about the modern China. But in China, my parents' life have been deleted.

- He used a metaphor later of saying that his future glowed on a tripod, his communism, his physics, and his girlfriend. And they completely meshed with each other. They mutually supported one another. Then they got persecuted and she was designated a rightist.

- My father wrote, the days of morning glow ended and the disaster strike. One of the key policies of the anti right movement was to send urban use to the countryside for reeducation. Many couples were broken up

- And they finally decided on a creative middle position, which was, we will freeze our romance by which they meant we will pretend we have broken off.

- My mother and father survived the turmoil of those time, but many did not.

- You know, one guy,

- Both of them were outcasts and they were sent to the countryside to learn from the farmers. And Fong went there. And one thing he learned from the farmers is the farmers didn't want to teach him. They looked up to him. He was an intellectual,

- A scientist, a physicist was sent to work. Us were so many intellectuals. During China's turbulent years in break making pay grazing as a manual laborer,

- He was sent to a coal mine in Anhui Province where he went down to the bottom of the mine and talked with the workers there.

- During his time in the coal mine, he began searching what he loved most. He chose the field far removed from laboratory work, making the entire universe his laboratory. My father had a single book, a classical serial field by Lab Lando. He read and reread a book and it changed the direction of his career.

- When Professor Fang became an astrophysicist, he was very much a pioneer in China, and he published the first paper on modern cosmology in China.

- He was a genius young physicist, and was given this post of vice president of the Maine Science and Technology University when he was still not 50 years old.

- When he traveled to Europe, he'd be thinking, thinking, thinking and start. Talk about how the Catholic church persecuted Galileo and the party was persecuting him. And he had this kind of wonderfully global reach to his logic.

- He wasn't just talking about lofty ideals of democracy and human rights and political freedom. He was also very much talking about the material conditions of how students live, how faculty live, how much intellectuals are paid materially so that they have these spaces to be able to carry out their work.

- When the question and answer period, professor Fang, what do you think about Maxism? He didn't even take a pause. He immediately said, it's outdated with his clear, loud, the Ian voice.

- And they put them all into a compendium and then they set it out to all party branches all over China and said, this is a bad guy.

- That book probably did more to garner a wellspring of support for Fang liger than anything else that he did. People liked what they read and it spread his reputation more than anything else he did.

- Fang Liger is to China. What Andre Soff was to the Soviet Union in the days before glasnost, the standard bearer of the opposition, the intellectual who had the courage to stand up and denounce the system.

- He began to rock it around China, giving these talks at one university after another. But he had transformed himself from being just a sort of a hum drum astrophysicist into being something of a cause. Celebra

- Jacob.

- He used his rational mind as a scientist to look at politics and to say things that a rational, empirically minded person would say

- To.

- He was very impressive because the other speeches are kind of official speeches, like typical Chinese leaders at the time. But he was different

- Unlike many dissidents. His dissenting thinking never in his own view became the central part of his identity or being. There were just miscellaneous things and thoughts he had that he uttered.

- He saw himself as doing what a scientist ought to do when young people are asking what is to be done.

- Although I think he was painfully aware there was a cost and he ultimately did pay it for going over red lines.

- I,

- You know, I have a chance to contact with international community in my field. So I think I am duty is to introduce something modern concept more than a did.

- To prove that my father was in the parties cross here came on February 26th, 1989 when my parents were invited to a banquet to be hosted by the visiting American president

- F and me and my wife were invited to George Bush's, Texas barbecued. When we got about 400 yards, I would say shy of the hotel, suddenly a bevy of policemen, plain closed policemen came out and surrounded the car and opened the doors, inducing us to come out. There was a reporter from a B, c News who wanted to get a huge scoop

- This way, please

- And brought us up to his room in the shangrila. But Fong didn't want to talk until he could address squarely to everybody in one place what had happened.

- Here's the Chinese communist party trying to shut ger up by shutting him out of the presidential banquet. And what do they get? Do they get a giant press conference? And he showed up. There were like hundreds and hundreds of people there. There's, there's no amplification.

- But we told the story of the whole saga start to finish.

- But true, the our car catched by the police.

- Then the next day it was headlines all over the world

- That elevated him even more. He became a kind of a global nae idol

- Fondly. A J is one of the strongest and most persistent voices in China for democracy and human rights.

- Someone who tells the truth in a closed society, it sounds like a gunshot going off

- In April, 1989, we bound a former leader of the Communist Party died, sparking a series of student led protest, which centered on Tianmen Square. And the life of my parents would be again turned upside down.

- This was millions of people on the street that day. The banners. We want democracy. This was so free. They had hope. It was beyond my any control. I was just tears on my face and, and and cried.

- There was a sense that possibly things would really change, possibly the party would yield, possibly even it would be overthrown.

- And then it was martial law and there was citizens in Beijing went down the street, block the troops.

- Finally, you didn't want to go to the square to be seen there, let alone to say something there. It would play into the argument of the government that all of that student demonstration was a CIA plot or a British plot or some foreign plot.

- The situation has become a dangerous for my parents. There were poor government rally against the student protest where an refugee of my father was burned in public. My father described the bot follow on June 5th, the found ring. It was the senior diplomat of the US Embassy in Beijing. He hurriedly said, you are a guest of President Bush. If you agree, we will drive to pick you up immediately.

- You might think a guy like that would be whining and complaining and moaning and, and saying, you know, why is this happening to me? Not at all. I don't think he got into the very victim couture that was so much a part of the party's narrative about what had happened to China.

- Diplomatic negotiation over my parents' fate continued for four years during which time the remained in crime quarters in the American embassy. Finally, a diplomatic solution was agreed. My father recalled Chinese custom officers set up a temporary custom office next to the plant. Ling we shook hand with the ambassador and board the plane. Neither of my parents ever returned to China. They settled in the United States where my father continued his support for advocacy of human rights and the democracy in China and his work as an astrophysicist. As a professor at the University of Arizona,

- We cannot return back to China anymore because our human rights activity. So the question for him and for me is how to live a dignified life in exile. He always doing his physics, even in the American embassy surrounded by Chinese military troops. He was doing his physics. He always so calm when he was doing his physics. So when he was exile, when he was doing physics, I'm sure he's at home. I'm sure he would feel like there's no exile where he lives. I went to visit him. He showed me his house and walk outside of his house. SRAs Horizon, those nowhere else. I've seen those tall, dignified, spiritually, almost mystical SRAs. He lives with the SRAs and with the universe. And to me that's dignified life in exile. He find a home. He always at home with universe. That's the family tree will never die. That's the spirit. That's the exile is at home with universe.

- The

- Good afternoon everybody. My name is Francis Hiin and I'm the senior research program manager for the program on the US China and the world here at Hoover. And it is my great pleasure and really great honor to be in a short conversation with you, with Tony Toy, who is the director of this wonderful film today. And so I'll start off by asking you just a, a really simple question. What inspired you to make this movie and what inspired you to make it now in this moment?

- I came to admire f ju relatively late, only a few years ago. I I believe most of you were drawn to him for what he did in the 1980s. My admiration for him was about the totality of, of his life. That's why my film did not end at the US Embassy in, in Beijing. His exile years a big part of, of, of my film. And also, you know, it's my understanding, you know, of, of him the, the exile years are important for a different reason because I am also in exile. Being in exile is not easy. And I was able to observe witness read about, you know, fg, you know, how he carried himself in this, in this exile years. I think it's a, it's a big part, you know, you know it, running into him, you know, it's, I'm so grateful, I'm so lucky. It's he formerly g to me, especially the, the exile years. It's, it's, it's, it's more than more than a documentary subject in a way. It is kind of a, a life guide to me. So yeah. So why did I make the film? Yeah. I really wanted to, to to make a film about someone I look up to and I wanted to emulate. And I never, I never met him. And, but I feel like, you know, I know a lot about him. And so, yeah. So that's, that's my answer to the question of why

- Tony, you're, you're a businessman, you're a writer, you're the founder of Stand News in Hong Kong, RIPA publication. Many of us in the audience know and love, but this is your first documentary film. I was wondering if you could share a little bit with the audience about the process and production of it.

- Oh, the process. The process. In the beginning it looked impossible and I've never made a film. This is my first film. Possibly my last, yeah. And well, I think the toughest part, you know, was not the technical because you can, you can, you can get help, you know, you can pay for help. Okay. Technical help. You, you can, you can, you can, you can buy. Okay. But it's how, how do I make this film? I, I didn't, I didn't know anyone. Well, I didn't know anyone in the film before I, before making the film. Not only that, I didn't know anyone who knew anyone in, in, in the, in the film. So, you know, so where, where do I start? Okay. And then I know of course, by that time I already, I've, I, I already know known the story, the, the, the family ge story really well, okay, because I, I was a fan already. Okay. And, okay, so that won't stop me from, from, from making it, you know, not knowing the people or not knowing how to make a film won't stop me from, from doing it. And so I said, where do I start? Okay, you have to start somewhere. And, and then I look at fondly Jews' life, I think, as you can agree with me as well as well, after seeing the film, there is a person who is like the Forest Gum or F Jews Life, and that's Professor Perry link. Okay. And so, okay, so I have zeroed in on, on him as my first contact. The trouble is I don't, I didn't know him and I was very lucky. He was, Perry was, it was about two years ago he was still teaching. He, he was in his last year as a professor at, at uc Riverside. And so I went to the website of uc Riverside. I didn't know that, you know, if you send an email to the email address listed that people actually reply to you. Yeah. There is an email address listed on the, the uc webpage. Yeah. And, and, and then I sent him a cold email and, and he replied, he, and here we are. Yeah. He said that, he said, not only would I talk to you, I would do everything to help you to make this film. Yeah, that's Perry, I I tell you, Francis, I mean in, in certain circles, you know, knowing Perry link, you know, it's, it's a big factor. Okay. Yeah. So yeah. And, and the process of making the film, it's so interesting. I didn't know that I would walk into a love story. I didn't know that. I mean, I think you would agree with me. Li Chen people, all the people are interviewed. They, they, they kept reminding me, Chen Fun's wife is an equal partner in everything. They, they, they do. And she's 90 years old. And this film was made just a year ago. I think he, he's asked robust, as feisty as as ever. And I'm, so, you know, about, you know, people ask me, why, why did you pick or identify Fung as a your, your idol, your hero? I think what what struck me most, most is was his sense of humor. Even in the very dark moments, his friends, you know, remember him for his hong's voice and his laughter, and he's just very loud. He said, people said he was very loud and yeah, you know, he was, you know, it's, it's not easy to be not bitter as, as an, as an as an exile. And he focus on what he was really passionate about, which was teaching, educating young people. And you know, that he spent the last two years of his life as a professor at the University of a Arizona. And, and besides all that, you know, he never retreated from a, a deeper ideal, which was, you know, seeking, seeking truth. The seeking of truth. Okay. He never, he never, I mean he, for many, many years he was a, a, a key participant of various human rights organizations in, in, in the us Yeah. So I didn't get a chance to, to to meet him in, in in, in person. And I've learned so much, you know, from him, especially his, his exile years. But one thing I know Exile did not silence, you know, fondly to, and I remember this is before your time, you know, Francis, I remember a TV ad, you know, from many, many years ago. It just three words, it's a TV commercial, it's a be like Mike as in Michael Jordan. Okay. And to me it's both simple and and difficult. I guess it's be like Fong, that's, that's

- Be like Fong.

- Yeah. For, for me at least. Yes.

- Well Tony, thank you so much for these reflections. For those of you in the audience who'd like to ask Tony a question, we'll have time for that later in the program. And for now, I'd like to welcome up Forrest Gump, Perry Link and Fun Han Funk.

- Well, you'll all know which one is Perry Link, because I'm wearing the same jacket that I had. That's great. And it's a big honor to be able to say, ask a few questions to my friend Vanko. And I wanna start with an essay that you wrote in, I think 2012 and published as a preface to your father's autobiography, where you had this one charming paragraph that I'll read in translation. In 1992, I traveled to Tucson to visit my parents who had recently arrived. Thereafter, my father had accepted a tenured professorship at the University of Arizona. They were still living in temporary quarters, it was early summer and Tucson was already torrid. Their sparsely furnished two room flat bore a certain resemblance to the one we had lived in on the Beijing University campus three decades earlier, my father wearing a sleeveless undershirt, but dripping perspiration anyway, was hunched at his desk, focused on writing something. It was the very image I held of him from those long gone years in Beijing. So my first question is about that image that you so perceptively captured. Why did it, what did it mean to you that your father's image was the same after 30 years?

- Yeah, first of all, I wanna thank you for Tony for making the film. It is actually gave me a chance to relearn my father. So you have to learn, understand, because the, the terminal and the prosecution he lived with lives through, I actually could, didn't have a chance to live in the father continuously for very long. And see actually the one part is in part of the 1968. And the other part is then after that he was, his university was relocated to southern China. He only come back to Beijing to live with us sporadically. So at that time, yeah, the, when when they got new job in University of Arizona, I visited them. I had a lots of questions and because we have been so many things has go through and there's lots of questions I wanna ask him. But also we only have meet very briefly. So it just somehow always a sudden the image like 30 years ago, it pop up to my mind, which I, which somehow just, just clicked. The reason I remember that is at that time I started to learn his history, his research and his academic life. So in 1972, he actually published the first paper for the Chinese physicist for the modern relativistic cosmology research. And at that time, I was only less than 10 years old. And I remember there was a small flat in Beijing University campus, very small room, like nine square meter I remember and were hot and I barely can read at that time, right? I was just like second grade. And he was writing in a stack of paper writing beautifully. But it's all symbols or letters, English letters or numbers. He's doing calculation, which I don't understand, but I remember the image only years later, I, I understand he was doing his research and he come back from the southern China to visit my mom because at the time he was allowed maybe like two weeks per per year to like revisit, visit my, my family. But during those times, he would go to the library to do, to get the information, get to read the, oversee the journals, the scientific papers to get information to do his research. And then he would come back at the night to, to doing his calculation. So that's how I remember.

- I wanna press you a little bit more on the sameness of those two images though, because in the first case, he's not yet famous. He's not yet in international headlines. He's not obviously persecuted. He's been through a lot. And yet 30 years later there's something the very same about him.

- Yeah, I, I think he was very driven. He was really focused, he really devoted his life with the research. He, he is a physicist, so he's a physicist. He's not a politician. I think it's quite clear that people has been observing that. And also I was reading his students reflection, we collect when after his passing, most of almost all of them saying he doesn't talk about politics, politics with his student. They all talk about only physics. And only like recently, some people even say, oh, I just read your father's autobiography. I just learned he's a phy political side. He was very surprised. So, so he was a physicist and he was very driven. He almost have a mission. He wanted to do his physics.

- What would you say, I know you're not a physicist, your father was, but you observed him for so many years. What were his major contributions to physics?

- Yeah, so I I, I did study physics for a while. I didn't finish as a physicist, but, so I, I then I learned recently, lately some of his work. So he did his 1972, that's a very, I happen to realize that that's also the year we go to the moon in the us. So he did the, published his first paper to study the big band theory. And that was a taboo in the, in the, in China, especially in communist China because from the Marxism also orthodox Marxism and angles. The space and time is it's uniform, it's infinite, but that's not a physics. That's not a physics. And so he publics first paper to, to give a solution to do calculation about that. And only five years later he used another method, used a quiz to try to estimate if the famous is the universe is is closed or not. And this very pioneer work. And actually he published in Chinese journal but was a spot by I think a Chinese Irish astronomer. And he, their work was introduced in the nature journal. So there are other things,

- I'm sure there are other things and we could stay here until midnight unraveling them all. But I do want to invite to the stage now for other people who are not related conseque by blood with ger, but are very close to him in other ways. And we'll have a panel where each of these speaks for maybe five minutes and then open it for discussion.

- Thank you.

- And those being X Chang or Bill, she ong ginger wan, please come up. I won't take a lot of time introducing all of these distinguished people. Orville shell, you probably know is one of America's leading, in fact I would say the leading China watching expert ever since the 1970s and eighties. And by the way, one of the first Americans to discover Fgli J and make something of his importance. He, in fact Orville's the one that introduced me to Fgli J We also have Jiang, who is a junior version of Fgli J He went to the University of Science and Technology that where j was the vice president and was very deeply influenced by him. Even then when he came to America, he came as a physicist, went to Notre Dame to study physics. But like FJ in fact professionally even more switched to work on democracy and human rights. And in New York was the mainstay of the founding of the group called Human rights in China. And then he came to California, to Berkeley and founded the China Digital Times and became, in my mind, we all know about the Great Wall, right? The great firewall. X Chang in my estimation is the great dismantler of the Great Wall. Ginger. We wanted, especially to have Ginger come to be a representative of the younger generation because things that f drew put in motion and others of his generation put in motion have inspired younger people. Ginger was an activist in China, especially in Western China and Tibet. And now she's an activist in the Bay Area. The founder of a group called Called called called Where's my ginger

- Star Shiner.

- Yeah, Shiner, yes, star shiner, right? Working to shine the stars in China, China's DPO community by hosting free speech events and speaking truth and power and all of those things that Bonger did so well. The fifth member of the panel will be me. But let's start first with, if we might, and I've asked each of the panelists not to spend time on elegant reminiscences and how much we love the man, which of course we do. But to try to pinpoint for the audience

- You missed

- Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. Is is an economist, a distinguished economist and historian and has recently written a book, published a book called Institutional Genes, which has made quite a splash in the China watching world who as a economist, not a physicist, is not in the same field as Fong, but his father that is Chen's father Ing, was a very close friend of Fli J and therefore Chang also has personal insights to share. I'm sorry, Al, I just, I'm too old already. Orville, can you share some thoughts with us?

- Well, it's wonderful to see the film Tony, and it, it makes, of course all of us remember back to those times, I think the really extraordinary thing my wife and I got to know Fang and Chen very well and was so extraordinary about him was he was an accidental dissident, an accidental political figure. He was somebody who almost simplicity and rationality compelled him to see the world as you saw it. There was no dancing and weaving and ducking and diving and it, it, it meant that he couldn't help but be truthful. And that was such a startling thing in a world that had been in a revolution where anybody telling the truth would quickly run into trouble. Maybe I'll just tell you one little sort of interaction with him. You know, when he went into the embassy in Beijing, Perry facilitated that the embassy was divided into three pieces and the, the Chinese government didn't know which part he was in the ambassador's residence, the, the, the actual embassy or there was one other building. I got a phone call one day from Teddy Kennedy saying, would you go and talk to Fang Liger? He's your friend. We want to give him the Robert F. Kennedy Award. And I said, well, I I mean I I don't know, I'll try. So I called up the State Department and they said, well, we're not so sure you're going to that, that's possible. Why? Because every one of the buildings of the embassy was surrounded by people's liberation army and they were afraid that they might jump over the wall if knew which building he was in and grab him. And so nobody had been in to see him and nobody knew exactly where he was. So I was very dubious. But they said, go anyway. So I went, got to the hotel and the phone rang and a voice said, meet us downstairs. We're going to drive you to the embassy to have dinner with the ambassador. I went, I sat with James Lilly, we had dinner together alone, no mention of Fang juror. I didn't want to particularly raise it. No one had promised anything At the end, after all the servants had left, he beck into me and I followed him. We walked down the stairs into the court chart. This is in the ambassador's residence across the court chart. Knocked on the door, there was some little code went in, it was a dark room. I really didn't understand what was gonna happen to us. Knocked on another door, the door opened and there was Fang and Lee Han beaming, has several of you have no noted no, no sort of grievance. He was in there reading. We spent the whole night talking and he said he did indeed want the, the, the Robert F. Kennedy a Human Rights Award and wrote a wonderful speech that was given at the award. I think that of all the people I've known in China over all the years I've been there, I I don't think I've ever met a human being who was left less self-promotional and sort of had no hidden agenda except to say what he saw to say what he thought. And of course the basis of all of that was scientific rationalism in empiricism. And that gave him a kind of a shocking quality of truth of truthfulness, which is, I have to say, all too rare in the world and particularly at that time in China.

- Hi, thank you Tony for making this film. Thank you Hoover Institute to host this event. Perry gave me a question, said what, what was the source of found courage? I studied physics in under him and I worked at the human rights person in exile with him. Let me give him my take. And I wrote it down, it's a sign of aging, but I'm not eating very well compared with you two. Let's take this situation we just saw in the movie and heard from Perry and over, which is he and his wife was under the siege in refugee living in US Embassy outside. I was back in Beijing in the summer of 1989. There was a tanks on the street. There were the soldiers on the street. There was a thousands of people already being imprisoned. And I also know the secret agent all over US. Embassy finally finished several of his astrophysics papers during that 13 months and he complete the draft of his biography, autobiography reflecting with full clarity of the meaning of his life. How, how does a man under that kind of threat maintain that kind of concentration, calm and productivity? My take the answer is in something he said during that period when he accepted that Robert Kennedy human rights award speaking from inside of embassy, he ended his speech in these words, may our universe bless us. Now finally, ju was not shaped by, he was shaped by classical Chinese culture, okay? Trained by modern physics. He was not a Christian. He didn't pray in any traditional sense. So he wasn't simply reaching for a substitute word when God felt un unavailable for him, he was speaking from the deepest place he actually inhabited. Einstein wrote in 1930, the most beautiful emotion we can experience is mysterious. It is a fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of old true art and science. For Einstein, that wasn't a romantic sentiment, it was a precise description of what drives the physicist into a interior of things. Those patterns, those order, those beauty. The fact that there is actually something but nothing of this universe. The fact that we actually aware and for me f spent his life at that interior gravitational equations, the arrow of time, the large structure of the universe for a physicist at that depth, the universe is not a objective study, it is a home. It is a place you truly come from and it's a place you truly return to. When finally Drew said, may our universe bless us, he was saying, I know where I belong. And no political power on earth can take that away from me. There's another man Andrew ov once he wrote in his diary, God is not a ruler of the world, not a creator of his loss, but the guarantor of the meaning of existence. Despite all appearances of a meaningless sinness, even in a brief moment of life and a communion, a person can feel the infinite ov wasn't a religious man in any conventional sense. And he had found something, a fixed point beneath the apparent absurdity of existence that no gula, no persecution, no state power could reach something that guaranteed meaning when everything around him argued for despair, where OV said God, FG said universe, but they were pointing at the same thing, a truth beneath existence that hold that has always held and no political power can confiscate. And that's where Fang lived, even inside of those embassy walls. And that is the source of his moral courage. I'm about to finish, but lemme just say this, as someone who studied physics and as someone who worked at the human rights cause with for decades, I know that when you truly trust that, not as a slogan, but as something you have arrived at the deepest hours of your work at a deepest place of your life where thought and what you have lived through becomes certainty. And the certainty becomes the ground you stand on, then the courage to say this is wrong. That doesn't feel like heroism. It feels like telling the truth about what you completely see. And finally, j was not extraordinary man. That braver than other people was extraordinary because he was more at home in the universe than most people ever allow themself to be. That is what his life and this film is all about. Thank you.

- Well, ginger, she Chang's eloquence is a very difficult thing to follow, but that's your fate, I'm afraid. And we look forward to what you want to say.

- Thank you everyone. Yeah. First of all, I work for Star Shiner. I'm the founder of Star Shiner, as you can see our name in the cards you have. And the second, I'm not sure if I can represent new generation Chinese per se activist. 'cause I think I'm kind of like very unique person. It's like not menstrual, not not educated by the mainstream education system from China. But I will think, I will share what my point of view and what my, what my vision about found Egypt today. I, I wanna say, first of all, I took a survey last night and asked everyone in my friend circle like they are not all kind of like American. I also post that in WeChat, but no, not much. People respond to me. I'm not sure if my survey got blocked or yeah, I just ask a question about my friends. Do you know about A, yeah, I know him a lot. BI know him a little bit, I heard about him, but I'm not sure. And CI never heard about him. And the result I got is, so there are 40% of people say they have heard about Ji, but they're not sure. And there are 30% of people have never heard about Ji. And there are 30% of people I think there are all sort of learn science. They know vantage very well in my friend circle science people. I I'm science student and I, I'm activist. So that's kind of, I wanna share with the, our generation. I'm 30 this year, so you can have a sense of the this like how much new generation, new like younger Chinese know about Chu. And when I, I think for myself, I am kind of like, oh, I know about chu when I was in China. I know about him but not exactly know what he's doing. I know he sort of escape to China and he have make, he, he used to be very famous as a scientist in Jungle Ash, but I don't really have access to know about him. I try to search online, but as we just learn, it's, he, his work and his life story basically deleted in China. So yeah, we do not really have a, like a book or documentary to learn about his, his work. So I feel like today's screening really, really appreciate Tony to make this documentary to help us to give us a chance to kind of like in this short film, just like 20 minutes we can learn what he do in his whole life. Yeah, very appreciate. Thank you Tony. And the, the second one is I, I want to share a little bit about my, kind of like, my specialty is I'm a Tibetan Tibetan scholar and I, I do all my research and activism about Tibet. And when I first search found just work, I actually haven't found a lot of Chinese article. I found a very interesting article about his point of view about Tibet when he just arrived us. He have a chance to have a speak in a conference in New York with, and he have chance to meet his Holland Dalai Lama in that, in that conference. And they share their perspective about what do they think the future should be about hand Chinese people empty bat back in day. And I, I feel, and obviously I, I do see still have a photo with his holiness and found they're sitting together, they're smiling to each other and I do find an article to talk about it. And I have to say, oh wow, have such a very, I would say progressive point of view rather than the mainstream Chinese, like hand like b big hand Chinese kind of a dream that Otbi should part of China. You should all looking for the chin China democracy, the first then we are going to solve the Tibetan issue later. Funny just said, oh, we should, like, we should acknowledge that that Tibetan people have suffered about 40 years already, then they have suffered more than Chinese people. And in China, Tibetan people and Chinese people, they're not equal. And when the Tibetan people stand up want to say that the Chinese people will just, would not say, oh, you are not trying, you are trying to overturn our government. They will say those Tibetan, they are separatism. But I think that's difference. I think many Tibetans they are trying to seeking for more equal life, just like hand Chinese. So, and the funny also also mentioned that in the future Chinese people should have a prepare a space, open space to have a openly dialogue with Tibetan youth, with Tibetan people to talk about the future of two group. And I think that's exactly what I am doing. I have a independent kind of like social media platform to have more Chinese people to learn about Tibetan. And we o we occasionally host the event to have actually we host the event last summer semester here in some in Stanford with group of Chinese people. Chinese youth student scholar with Tibetan student union in Stanford. I think that's kind of like ton, I don't know how to say that or I never, when I do the things about Tibetan, I never learn, oh family actually, actually have kind of like very similar point of view with our work. So that's kind of like very, a good karma. We we will say. Yeah. And the, the last things I want to share is by this, by this screening, what I learned, I think found it was also the part of the international council of advise advisors in international campaign for Tibet. And he have read his holiness book, the Freedom of, of in Exile in Chinese it's called. And by seeing, by watching today's film, I really learned that he did gain his dignity, gain his freedom in the exile life. And that's for me. Thank you.

- Thank you Chang. My apologies again for forgetting to introduce you originally, but please give us your views.

- Thank you for making this great film before talking, answering this question raised by Perry. He, he asked me to make a, a kind of a judgment about the contribution of fj. So before answering the question, I just like to explain my relationship with fj. So we are intimate family friends since the 1970s means half century ago. So started from my father's work, they, to some extent they were colleagues related to the work of Albert Einstein. So they got to know each other from that channel. And I joined that kind of work in the 1970s. So at that time we were actually planning a joint work, my father and the, and I was participating to write a book about Albert Einstein in terms of methodology. So then we get to know each other. And I learned hugely so personally, we are family friends and he is one of my best teachers in my life in the sense that he changed my way of thinking about the science, about the philosophy and integrity and to the public returning to answering your question to the public in, in my view, he is, he's a, the pioneer of astrophysics in China, and he is a pioneer and a spiritual leader of the, of China's new enlightenment, so-called new means postal enlightenment, enlightenment in the sense of democracy and science. And to be short, so he is China's Andre Ov. So then here I like to narrow down the focus because of the time limit. So I like to like to narrow down the focus to starting from where the whole thing start from. So the Chinese, this Chinese Communist party charged the found Jew saying that he is the most important secret mastermind of the Tiananmen movement. So is, is that a fair acquisition? So here it, the answer is yes and no. So spiritually indeed, he's the person spiritually. So in the sense that he's the most important spiritual leader in China in advocating for human rights and for democracy and anyone advocating for human rights and the democracy is inherently challenging the communist rule. So in that sense, yes, but he actually, there was no conspiracy and he had nothing to do with any of the organized activities there. So then the, the, the question is where, what is the source of ideas? So he, he's a very, very rich person spiritually where, what is the source? The source actually the really the biggest source is Albert Einstein in every aspect from science to human rights to democracy. So this is a, a a so for him, science and human rights are inseparable. Indeed, actually he proposed, he even proposed the five actions about the, the inseparability between science and human rights. So later I, I will cover that five actions. So it is a pure scientific way of looking at human rights issue. So then let's start from the cultural revolution that's necessary because that is where the idea started from. So it, let's just start from the, this anti Einstein, anti relative relativity campaign during the cultural revolution, that campaign was peaked in 19 70, 71. So, which means that anyone doing a research about instance theory is on the opposite side of party. However, that was exactly what he was doing. So he was doing the research, he was fairly lonely just by himself. So he was reading the literature and deriving the equations, exploring the cosmos. So then in 1972, right after the peak of this anti Einstein campaign in China, the, the first paper was published and that in, actually that was the first paper in China about this subject in physics. So this is not only making him the founder of actual physics in China, that also at the same time put him into a dangerous situation because doing a research in that direction means you are challenging the party ideology. So that's the, that is really the starting point. So not only his doing that work by himself, he organized, so he didn't organize anything politically, but he organized in doing this scientific research. But organizing this kind of a scientific research, you have to take care of the philosophy. You have to take care of the ideology. So you will have to criticize why you, why the Marxism is wrong. So that really is the beginning. And so then this whole thing happened in the, during the cultural revolution. And in 1976 there were some big events at the, the UST China about this part of science in contradicting to the ideology. So then in the, in the 1980s, late seventies and eighties found j mounted, a fundamental critique of the Marxist landing is the doctrine of natural dialectics that shakes the CCPs ideological foundation. So nowadays in the all Chinese universities, no one believes that anymore. And take people take that for granted, that people thought that is the consequence of the open up an economic reform. People don't know, actually this is the contribution of a found. So in all the universities, this natural didactics is a, is a course everyone must study. And so in that period of time, there were lots, lots of debates. And essentially the whole foundation of that kind of philosophy was shaken up by what has done. So what he did was not slogan, was not philosophical debate, it was science. So he was providing scientific evidence, scientific logic, arguing that this is a part of science. So this is no longer ideology. So you don't use ideology to make a judgment about the science. So eventually people are convinced that at least that part of philosophy is a completely at least obsolete if, if we don't say it's wrong. So it is obsolete. So no longer these kind of things are going to be taught in universities. So that's a, that is a huge contribution and, but that makes himself troubles. So starting from 1981, the CCP singled him out as the most prominent target in scientific circles. So on and off they, they, there have been purges against him. So although later he was appointed as the vice president of the UST of China, but the, the purges within the party and the top leaders of the party, many of the top leaders of the party criticized him, regarded him as an enemy. So eventually in 1987, they purged him formally together with purging Huang. And indeed Huang's stepping down was closely related to er because Huang refused to purge. But within the party they were quite many top leaders. They wanted dearly to purge Fre. I guess I should stop here. I I still have this five actions of ger not reported yet, but I I stop here.

- We are getting close to the six o'clock hour when we were supposed to end up and we won't make it. I'm gonna ask right now, Francis Haskins permission to go over time a bit, especially if we want to share with the audience and myself a couple of observations that reinforce I think what your five points were gonna be and also reinforces what X Chang said. And that's that about 20 years ago, the editor of the New York Review of books, Robert Silvers called me up and said, do you think we could get Fali ger to write an essay for us about democracy and human rights? And I said, yes, I think we could. And we called him and he said yes. And we did. I say we did. I translated it for him. It was called China's Hope published in 1996, in which he made the point that he learned human rights from science. Yeah. And this is different from the way most Chinese intellectuals starting from about a hundred years ago in the great May 4th movement took human rights as a, something that grew out of the European tradition with John Locke and Montesquieu and Js Mill and were introduced as, as it were, foreign concepts into Chinese culture. And that's great and I think Fang j thought that's great, but no for him, no, it came from science. And he wrote in this essay five or six ways in which that happened. And I'll cut that short and just introduce three of them. One was the autonomy of the individual mind. He said that when he was a first year grad, first year student in physics at Beijing University, they learned about Maxwell and Bore and Einstein. But you didn't take what they found on authority. It's not because Einstein said this, that I believe it, it's because Einstein offers something to me that my mind grasps. And it doesn't count as it were until I, my mind absorbs it. And, and this reminds or suggested democracy to fja because it's parallel to way the individual voter has a vote and can listen to all kinds of different things. But it doesn't count. The vote isn't shaped until I decide to do it. So we have the autonomy and equality of human minds as something he learned from science. Another was the importance of free expression, free sharing of information. Sharing of information is the lifeblood of sciences. Scientists all over the world share their hypotheses in their experiments. Same with democracy. You know, you need freedom of expression, freedom of of, of assembly and so on in order to make democracy work. So these two are similar in that way. A third similarity has to do with the universal, the universal values that the two systems generate in science force equals mass times acceleration. Anywhere you cross a border from California into Nevada, and it's still true. You go to St. Louis, you go to Timbuktu. It's still true, it's true everywhere. And that reminds or suggests to Fang Liger the same principle of the universality, of the legitimacy of human rights. Near the end of his autobiography, he quotes from Emmanuel, K I'll find it here. The, that you've probably heard this from Kant quote, two things fill my mind with ever increasing wonder and awe, the starry heavens above and the moral law within this echoes. I think what she Chang was saying, those two things are mysterious and suey generous in human life. I want to say from an observer of fgi, that I think for him, those two things were not two things, they were the same. This, I think, echoes what she Chang was saying. The starry heavens above and the moral law within are connected. They become the root of his intellect and moral compass at the same time. So this makes it almost easy for him to turn to a political authority like de Xiaoping and say, no, sorry, that's not the case. This is the case. And from th Xiaoping's point of view, it rings home as well. Oping was the top man in a regime that claimed to be based in science. Marxism was science. Engles even said, it's the science of all sciences. So here I am Donia being a top this pinnacle of science. And along comes a real scientist, the best one in the country, arguably, and says, no, that's not right. This is right. And someone mentioned a moment ago that De Xiaoping had a sort of Fang Niger complex. I think that's right, right from the mid eighties when Fang started giving his speeches to students in, in Jfe, in Shanghai. De Xiaoping couldn't take it, I think because Father Nature's a scientist and I'm a pseudo scientist. Maybe even he thought that. But anyway, one who, whose political legitimacy rests on the claim that I'm scientific and then the scientist comes in, rebuts me. But there's one last puzzle here in my argument about science being the root of fgi j's democracy and human rights. And that's that not all scientists want that root. I'm sure all of us in the, in the audience today can think of Chinese scientists who did not infer human rights in democracy and did not stand up the way Fgi j did. So it still leaves us with the puzzle of what was extremely unusual about this man. Not to say maybe even unique, the word courage that XO Chang brought up is, is good for, for describing that quality to him. But it's not exactly perfect and shall you can tell me if I'm misinterpreting you. But it's, it's not just courage, it's sort of stubborn lucidness. Here's what I see and I'm gonna say it and I don't get worried about it. I personally have seen f Niger in a couple of cases where he was under very intense political pressure. And someone else mentioned this a moment ago. He didn't get nervous. This is that. And that is that, and that's something a little bit different from courage of the kind you see in a battlefield where someone's risking a life and running forward. It was a very low key, but extremely stubborn truth telling so that he was unique and in my mind almost resembles a comet flying across those starry skies that he so admired. And reminds me of a couplet that I found from the tomb of a famous hun dynasty explorer in China that I'm gonna read to you. And I'm in a moment. This was John Chen in the early Hyundai Dynasty who went to Western China and came back and at his tomb there's this couplet across 90,000 li the wind whistles by every 500 years a worthy appears. This reminds me of, of in a sense in Chinese that is. So I'm getting choked up myself here too. I think we should ask Francis what to do now. It's past six and we originally hoped that the audience could ask questions or raise objections or whatever.

- I think why don't we allow some time, maybe 10 minutes or so for some audience questions. We also have a reception set up in the back, so feel free also after that 10 minutes to stay linger, grab a tear masu or a cookie and find our speakers there as well. So maybe we can take two or three audience questions.

- And since there's very little time for it, let's all agree that we ask TERs questions. If you have a long point of view you want to express, let's do it during the reception later.

- And there will be folks from Hoover coming around with mics. So raise your hand or if you have a card to hand in, catch my eye.

- This question is for Ang since your family and Mr. Fang's family close, what was your dinner conversation like with him? What was the like intimate Yeah. Conversation like what do you guys talk about when your family and his family spend time together? So thank you.

- Good question.

- We are pretty dry always Einstein Markle and other physicists and so history of science and philosophy of science, all, all of those kind of things. So when I say that he has changed my way of thinking is due to all of these conversations. Give you one example. One example is about what should be a proper subject of scientific research. So he told me what has said that. So supposedly you have a someone a poor water and splint water on the, on the wall. So it is a completely chaotic situation. So that turns out is not a subject of scientific research because there is no interesting regularity there. So things like that. So yeah, and, and, and of course all of those explorations of history of science and the philosophy of science would lead to the direction of a human rights and a democracy. So these are intimately intertwined.

- More questions. Yes. Right here in front row

- This question's for overall, when you met Fgi in the embassy, you spent whole night talking to him. What exactly you guys talked?

- It was a long time ago. I remember one thing. I had been sending him books, which I could do through the embassy diplomatic pouch. So I sent him the entire collected works of Cher and he really, we talked a lot about that, about another person who at another time could speak forthrightly clearly, openly and honestly. And I think he took great inspiration from that sort of, as Perry suggested, that May 4th generation, which was China's sort of enlightenment.

- So this question is to to, to Perry, so glad to see you in person here then for a while. So I think my question is what's your confidence in modern China's democracy right now?

- What is

- Your confidence?

- Well, what is my confidence in Chinese democracy right now? Yeah, I'm a long-term optimist. I I think that the daily life values of the Chinese people are still there. Despite the trampling of the Communist Party of China and especially of Mr. Xi Jinping, just the ordinary garden variety values of Chinese people among each other. I can't believe that those have been completely ruined. And therefore, and in the long term, I'm an optimist in the short term. I'm not so optimistic. I think the way Xi Jinping is pulled to society is fairly disastrous and will take time to recover. Orville, what do you think she, what do you think about that question?

- I mean, remem remember that China has had a century of on, again, off again, it's had some periods of immense openness and, and very active sort of intellectual free thinking. And that's not gone. It's all there someplace. I mean, when I went to China in 75 and Mao was alive, I saw no suggestion that China would ever change. And yet a year or two later it changed profoundly because there were these wellsprings of other influences that I think we've all alluded to and they're still there. And at some point they're gonna reappear when God knows

- On that hopefully optimistic. I hope everybody in the audience will join me in thanking our five panelists and in thanking our filmmaker, Tony Toy and F and the FJA family.