| This dissertation is a biographical study of the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, in the context of the political history of science in China during the Mao era (1949-1976). Fang's life graphically illustrates how the policies and programs of the Chinese Communist Party affected the conditions of scientific work and the lives and careers of individual scientists, as pragmatist bureaucrats, Maoist radicals, and professional scientists vied for control of scientific institutions. The dissertation describes the path of intellectual development that took Fang from being an elite young scientist and Party member in the 1950s to one of China's leading dissidents of the 1980s. The galvanizing event in this process was a controversy over the subject of cosmology in the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution, in which Fang Lizhi played a key role. From 1972 to 1976, Fang was the focal point of a Maoist campaign against the "big bang" theory, which was held to be in violation of the dialectical materialist precept of an infinite universe. The dissertation describes the transmission of the "infinite universe" doctrine from the Soviet Union to China, and the ideological and political role that it played under Mao, culminating in the cosmology campaign. This campaign was tied to a larger set of issues involving Marxist-Leninist ideology and Party control of theoretical science, and demonstrates the Stalinist character of Cultural Revolution Maoism in this area. The dissertation shows how Fang's defense of his research and his field during the campaign led him to become an important de-Stalinizer of Chinese science, and laid the intellectual foundations for his broad critiques of Party rule and Chinese political culture of the 1980s. This history also sheds a new light on conflicts between the Party and intellectuals in the post-Mao period, and helps to explain the peculiar vulnerability of Deng Xiaoping's modernizing, technocratic regime to political criticism emanating from the science sector. |
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