Einstein’s Man in Beijing: A Rebel With a Cause

By Dennis Overbye : The New York Times
August 22, 2006

BEIJING — The first time he was purged, Xu Liangying was 37, an up-and-coming physicist, philosopher and historian and a veteran of the Communist underground. He had to divorce his wife, leave his sons and go live on his mother’s farm in the country.

Three decades later, only a heart attack saved him from imprisonment or worse during the massacre that ended the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.

During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards stole the Einstein translations that Dr. Xu had labored over during his farm exile. Armed guards once surrounded his apartment to keep him away from Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

For seven decades, Xu Liangying has been Albert Einstein’s man in China, intertwining revolution and physics to speak up for political freedom and the value of scientific curiosity in a land where the rulers have often had a different agenda. His Einstein translations, retrieved and published, helped inspire a rebirth of interest in Einstein and in science in China.

Chinese leaders say today that science is the key to the country’s modernization and growth, but Dr. Xu finds no pleasure in that.

“They are just using it to serve themselves,” he said recently.

His phone, he says, is still bugged.

Today, at 86, his hair is white, and history, in the form of scholars, human rights activists and journalists, comes to him, in his book-lined apartment overlooking the university district in Beijing.

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