Q. Why does China's leader Deng Xiaoping seem to dislike you so much?
A. Maybe it's an honor that he chose me. My family name is very simple: it has just four strokes, and it comes high up on all Chinese name lists ((laughs)). I think, too, he remembers me from the end of 1986 and the student movement at Hefei Institute of Science and Technology. At that time I was vice president ((of the institute)), so he thought I should take the chop for those demonstrations. The second time, he probably said, "Here he comes again, so we should hit him" ((laughs)).
Q. You yourself were a catalyst for the 1986 demonstrations. Why did you stay away from them in 1989?
A. The government was already accusing me in April and May of being part of a handful of people who controlled the movement, because I have a long record ((of human-rights activism)). So I stayed away. Of course, I knew many of the student leaders before the protests began, including at least three among the 21 on the most-wanted list. They often came to my home in the days before the movement began. But afterward, they didn't want to have contact with me, because they wanted to show that their ideas were their own and not simply given to them by Fang Lizhi.
Q. You have been compared with Andrei Sakharov. What is it about the higher sciences, in your case astrophysics, that leads some people to passionate advocacy of human rights?
A. In socialist regimes many famous physicists or natural scientists have been involved in human rights because science always requires independent thought. Even if you are an important man and you say something, nobody just believes it. If a scientist submits a paper to a journal, it goes to a referee for comments. But in the Communist Party they always say they are correct. This is very difficult to reconcile with the scientific approach.
Q. With hindsight, do you think the leaders of the democracy movement in China last year should have acted any differently?
A. They should perhaps have limited their demands and asked to have dialogue with the government. But in the last weeks the movement was completely out of control. The whole movement was spontaneous, so it was very difficult to limit its demands.
Q. You have said that sooner or later democracy will come to China. But don't you find many episodes in the past 200 years of Chinese history when periods of openness to the outside world have been followed by isolation and xenophobia?
A. Certainly. Last year I published a paper, "The Beijing Observatory and Chinese Democracy," about this. You know, modern science was imported into China from the West. There were periods when we completely accepted modern science, and others when for decades we rejected it. Three centuries ago, we used modern astronomy for a short period to establish the Chinese calendar, but suddenly some emperor opposed it, and astronomers were even killed. Only at the beginning of this century did we completely accept modern science. It is the same with democracy. Sometimes we have been open and pro-democracy; sometimes for decades we have been completely closed and isolated and under a dictatorship. This fluctuating cycle is over as far as science is concerned, but not yet in the case of democracy. That is why, looking at the analogy of scientific development in China, I am optimistic.