The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State is the autobiography of the Chinese astrophysicist and activist Fang Lizhi. Fang narrates his experiences from youth through his 1989 request for asylum at the U.S. embassy in Beijing.
In the introduction,[1] dated October 27, 1989, Fang provides a brief overview of his present circumstances in the embassy. He then begins the book with a review of his family origins, before delving into the politics, science and personal relationships of his life as a Communist Party member and physicist through the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
Fang notes the animosity of the Communist Party to relativity and cosmology[2] as well as parallels between his situation and that of Galileo.[3]
Reception
Richard Bernstein said in the New York Times that the book is "remarkably cool, precise and in places even good-humored".[4]
In The New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson wrote that Fang has "..a two sided heritage...a role model for a group of rebellious spirits...[and] the rebirth of Chinese science as a full partner in the emerging world community of inquiring minds".
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Publication details
July 2013, World Culture (天下文化出版股份有限公司), ISBN978-9863201878, hardcover, Traditional Chinese
February 2016, Henry Holt and Co., ISBN978-1627794992, 332 pages, hardcover (translated into English as The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State by Perry Link)
