Recently, Netflix adapted Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin's novel The Three-Body Problem into a television series. The show opens with a scene the Chinese authorities are loath to acknowledge — a Cultural Revolution struggle session — bringing the cruel and absurd history of nearly sixty years ago vividly back before people's eyes. More absurd and horrifying still, the target of this struggle session was a physicist who was beaten to death by Red Guards for insisting on the validity of Einstein's theory of relativity.
Today's audiences find it hard to believe such a thing really happened, and some Mao loyalists have seized the opportunity to whitewash the Cultural Revolution online, accusing the show's writers of maliciously fabricating anti-China propaganda.
The scenario may seem unimaginable today, but it is entirely credible. I myself lived through the Cultural Revolution and witnessed a great deal of its darkness, cruelty, madness, and absurdity firsthand — including one truly bizarre case in which a photograph taken with Einstein was actually put on public display and denounced as a crime.
This was something I personally witnessed in 1968, the third year of the Cultural Revolution, when I visited a friend at Sichuan Teachers College (now Sichuan Normal University) in the southern suburbs of Chengdu. This friend was a student there; although she was a university student and I was still in middle school, she was only two years older than me, and we had become friends through Red Guard activities in Chengdu. By that time the Red Guard movement was nearing its end — having been used by Mao to bring down his political rival Liu Shaoqi, the Red Guards, like hunting dogs after the game is caught, were about to be discarded by Mao. University-student Red Guards were returning to their schools to await assignment to state farms, factories, and other grassroots units across the country. Mao's directive that ‘it is highly necessary for educated youth to go to the countryside to be re-educated by the poor and lower-middle peasants’ had not yet been issued, so we middle-school students had no idea what the future held for us. Since this friend at Sichuan Teachers College was not from Chengdu, and once she was assigned a post we might scatter far apart and perhaps never meet again, I decided to go see her.
That day (I no longer remember the exact date), when I arrived at Sichuan Teachers College, the school was holding a ‘class education exhibition,’ displaying so-called ‘reactionary evidence’ that Red Guards had confiscated from the homes of ‘monsters and demons’ and teachers during the Cultural Revolution. My friend happened to be one of the exhibition's guides, pointer in hand, giving a talk when she spotted me. She was thrilled to see me but couldn't leave right away. While waiting for her, I took the opportunity to browse through the exhibits. I was accompanied that day by a classmate from Chengdu No. 1 Middle School.
I recall among the exhibits some antiques confiscated from the home of a history department teacher — bronze vessels and several Han dynasty bricks. Everyone today would recognize these as precious cultural relics of great historical value, but the class education exhibition at Sichuan Teachers College used them to expose the supposed ‘ignorance’ of a ‘reactionary academic authority.’ I remember the caption describing these precious relics as ‘broken bronze and cracked tiles,’ mocking the scholar for treasuring at home objects that were neither means of production nor useful for daily life, presenting it as proof that this ‘stinking old ninth’ intellectual couldn't tell grain from chaff — pedantic and laughable, a good-for-nothing parasite.
I was rebellious by nature and loved reading. I too had been confused in the early days of the Red Guard movement, but by its later stages I had already woken up from Mao's intoxicating spell. I often passed around banned books and discussed current events with a few independent-minded peers my age, and I already understood how absurd and cruel the Cultural Revolution truly was. So when I read the caption calling those relics ‘broken bronze and cracked tiles,’ I couldn't help but laugh. But what I saw next was even more absurd. Among the exhibits was a photograph meant to expose a teacher's ‘reactionary crimes’ — and it turned out to be a photo of this teacher together with Einstein, the scientist universally recognized as one of the greatest of the age. A photograph with Einstein had actually become a crime to be publicly denounced!
My classmate and I were stunned. Though we didn't know much about Einstein or his theory of relativity at the time, we already knew he was one of the greatest scientists of the modern era, and we couldn't help whispering to each other: what an honor it would be to have your photo taken with Einstein — how on earth had that become a disgraceful crime?
Yet such bizarre things were common in Mao's era. As a student, Mao had been severely lopsided in his studies, failing math, physics, and chemistry — he could fairly be called scientifically illiterate. Yet in the era of ‘Emperor Mao's’ rule, this Chinese emperor, who understood essentially nothing of math, physics, or chemistry, was treated as an all-knowing genius unmatched anywhere on earth, one supposedly capable even of guiding modern physics. Mao had his own so-called materialist dialectical theory of ‘dividing one into two,’ holding that all matter in the world could be endlessly divided into two, and that whatever conformed to this theory was ‘science,’ while whatever did not was ‘idealism.’ The Japanese physicist Shoichi Sakata's concept of elementary particles happened to fit Mao's framework, and was therefore held up for praise, with Sakata receiving special treatment from Mao when he visited China.
Einstein's theory of relativity was so profound that Mao, who had failed math and science, naturally understood none of it — yet he styled himself a genius and held forth on the subject as though he did. Absurdly, since relativity is a physics theory about time, space, and gravity, Mao — seeing only the Chinese translation containing the word ‘relative’ — took it at face value and assumed it must mean philosophical relativism. In 1963, discussing elementary particle theory with his son-in-law Kong Linghua, Mao declared: ‘From Newton's theory of the absolute to Einstein's theory of relativity, and then to a unified theory of the relative and the absolute — this is the dialectic of scientific understanding, and Einstein and his theory of relativity should be viewed from this vantage point.’ Mao had gotten it wildly wrong, but the terrifying thing was that not a single person in the entire country dared point this out. To say Emperor Mao was wrong was a death sentence — one could really be beaten to death by fanatical Red Guards for it. Later, at Mao's instruction and following his line of thinking, Kong Linghua and others spent years ‘researching’ relativity, ultimately concluding that Einstein's theory of relativity was idealist relativism, a reactionary scientific outlook that served bourgeois interests. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Academy of Sciences actually launched a full-scale campaign to denounce Einstein and his theory of relativity.
A man who was scientifically illiterate launched a campaign to denounce the towering giant of theoretical physics recognized the world over — and not a single person in the entire country dared question it. Could anything be more absurd? And yet this was a real event of the Cultural Revolution.
Back to the story of how a photo with Einstein became evidence of a crime. The man in that photograph was Professor Luo Zhongshu of Sichuan Teachers College. In 1947, representing the Republic of China, he attended a UNESCO annual conference in Mexico; upon returning to the United States, he received an invitation from the director of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study to meet with Einstein. After an hour-long conversation, the two took the photograph that Luo cherished as one of the great honors of his life. Even the famous physicist Yang Chen-Ning, who had once worked alongside Einstein, later expressed deep regret that he had never thought to take a photo with him. Who could have imagined that during the Cultural Revolution, an honor so supreme that even Yang Chen-Ning had longed for but never obtained would turn into a badge of shame?
Professor Luo Zhongshu was a philosopher who had studied at Oxford University in England, and in 1948 returned to China to serve as dean of the College of Arts and chair of the philosophy department at West China Union University, which was jointly run by four American, British, and Canadian mission boards. After the CCP came to power in 1949, it took over West China Union University; in 1950 the People's Liberation Army moved in and dismantled the university, keeping only its medical school, which later became Sichuan Medical College, while its other liberal arts and science departments were parceled out to other universities during the 1952 reorganization. Professor Luo, learned in both Chinese and Western scholarship but never trained in Marxism-Leninism, no longer fit in under the new ‘red dynasty.’ He was assigned to teach psychology and foreign languages at Sichuan Teachers College, where he tried to live cautiously and keep a low profile. During the Cultural Revolution, though, he was cast into hell along with every other prominent intellectual in the country. The ‘Campus Stories’ column on Sichuan Normal University's own website today confirms that during the Cultural Revolution, ‘like many senior intellectuals, Luo Zhongshu suffered brutal persecution.’
After the college entrance exam was restored following the Cultural Revolution, I was admitted to Sichuan University, where my English teacher turned out to be Luo Yiyun, Luo Zhongshu's daughter — though I had no idea at the time that she was the daughter of that Sichuan Teachers College professor whose photo with Einstein had become a ‘crime.’ According to the recollections of students who were at Sichuan Teachers College at the time, as soon as the Cultural Revolution began, Luo Zhongshu and all the school's senior faculty — the so-called ‘reactionary academic authorities’ — were subjected to struggle sessions and then locked into makeshift detention sheds (‘cowsheds’). A female teacher named Song Yuanyi, persecuted alongside Professor Luo, unable to bear the humiliation, drowned herself in the university's swimming pool.
As for the photograph with Einstein, Luo Yiyun wrote in her memoir that when their father's home at Sichuan Teachers College was ransacked during the Cultural Revolution, her brother Luo Yide, upon hearing the news, immediately burned the family's related photographs and letters, including the photo with Einstein and a signed photograph given to Luo Zhongshu by one of the founding masters of quantum mechanics. Yet Luo Yiyun's recollection may be mistaken, since the photograph was in fact not burned — it turned up more than two years later in the class education exhibition at Sichuan Teachers College. Could it be that her brother, in the end, could not bear to burn it, but under the harsh circumstances of the time never told his sister the truth?
As for Professor Luo himself, what must he have felt on seeing his own photograph with a scientific giant put on display as evidence of a crime? Was it unbearable pain, or utterly absurd laughter — or perhaps both at once?