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Writer's picture张家卫

Hundred-year-old Yang Zhenning (Day 3)



Today is September 22, the sixteenth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, and the fifteenth moon and sixteen round days. Reading Lu Yao's "Life" is a coincidence.


I couldn't help but swipe my phone. I saw all the screens full of posts celebrating the 100th birthday of Mr. Yang Zhenning, saying that September 22 was his 99th birthday. According to the old Chinese custom of "beyond nine but ten", the one hundredth birthday is today.

I have always respected Mr. Yang Zhenning. In fact, I have full respect for every real individual.


However, Mr. Yang Zhenning’s birthday does not seem to be September 22. His birthday is October 1, 1922 in the Gregorian calendar. And his birthday in the lunar calendar is long past, it is August 11 (August 11th in Renxu year), the zodiac is dog.

source: vikipedia


September 22, the eighth month of the lunar calendar, is a good day anyway. Greetings to old Mr. Yang Zhenning for good health, reunion, happy birthday, and celebrations everywhere. It is a joyous thing. If it is wrong, it is wrong. The daily news seems to be very few.


Mr. Yang Zhenning is a Chinese American physicist. In 1957, he and Mr. Li Zhengdao won the Nobel Prize in Physics for proposing the theory of "non-conservation of parity in weak interaction". And because he was the earliest Chinese winner of the Nobel Prize, he is the pride of the Chinese, and he has always been famous.


Mr. Yang Zhenning returned to Tsinghua University from the United States in 2003 to settle for a long time. In 2015, he gave up his American citizenship and officially became a Chinese citizen. As a result, he was renamed the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel Prize.


In 2004, the 82-year-old Mr. Yang Zhenning married Weng Fan, who was 28 years old at the time, and was born in 1976, which caused a lot of controversy. Today, the two of them are still holding hands happily, and those who verbally criticize may have forgotten the people around them.


The moral values of the Chinese often show such an emotion that they look down on sentient beings in the way of saints, comfort themselves in the way of villains, and even look up to themselves. For example, stealing and playing slippery, slapping beards and horses, arrogant and arrogant, arrogant and arrogant, conspiracy and intrigue are all inspiring and thick black methods.


Also on September 22, there was news that Wang Like, former member of the Standing Committee of the Jiangsu Provincial Party Committee and Secretary of the Political and Legal Committee, fell. A new statement appeared in the double-opening circular of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the State Supervision Commission: "Never really establish ideals and beliefs, and have never been loyal to the party." I was wondering, how did he get up? Perhaps he can be regarded as an outstanding representative of the Chinese people's moral values.

source: website

Old Mr. Yang Zhenning said: "I know that there are all kinds of strange criticisms against me on the Internet. I think there are very complicated elements in it, and my attitude has to leave it alone."


I went to review the deeds of the old Mr. Yang Zhenning. His old man really made a lot of contributions to the Chinese people.


In March 1971, Sino-US relations, which had been frozen for several years, began to thaw due to ping-pong diplomacy. In July of the same year, Mr. Yang Zhenning returned to China for the first time to visit his father, Yang Wuzhi, who was seriously ill. Because of his reputation, Premier Zhou Enlai allowed him to draw up a long list of friends and relatives to meet.


The first on the list is his old classmate-Chinese atomic bomb scientist Deng Jiaxian. Premier Zhou Enlai therefore recalled Deng Jiaxian to Beijing.

According to Deng Jiaxian's wife, Xu Luxi, later recalled, this affectionate act inadvertently rescued Deng Jiaxian who was caught in the Qinghai Cultural Revolution. Because of this move, the Red Guards never killed scientists at the Qinghai 211 Factory. Yu Min, Chen Nengkuan, and Hu Side were even lucky enough to be saved from the Qinghai Cultural Revolution.


Yu Min, Chen Nengkuan, and Hu Side are all Chinese nuclear weapons scientists, the two bombers and one star. Among them, Yu Min has the title of [Father of China's Hydrogen Bomb].


In a sense, it was Mr. Yang Zhenning's identity as a Chinese-American scientist who saved these fathers of the motherland.


However, with regard to Mr. Yang Zhenning's past that he obtained American citizenship in 1964, the net soldiers of the motherland have always been brooding about him, believing that he is not patriotic enough. Old Mr. Yang Zhenning explained in an interview: “The reason for changing the American passport is because of the relationship between academic and work, and you have to travel to various places. Traveling with a Chinese passport was very inconvenient at the time.”


During the three years from 1971 to 1973, Mr. Yang Zhenning returned to China four times and received high courtesy from national leaders. However, it also attracted the attention of the United States. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States asked him to drink tea once. However, the CIA did not cause any trouble to Mr. Yang Zhenning. He continued to do what he liked to do.


Compared with Mr. Yang Zhenning, another famous scientist, Mr. Qian Xuesen, who returned from the United States in the early days, was not so lucky.


In 1950, the "Cold War" between the United States and the Soviet Union had begun, and anti-communist political persecution represented by McCarthyism became widespread. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) accused Qian Xuesen and others as communists, posing a threat to the national security of the United States. He was briefly thrown into prison. After bail, he fought a lawsuit with the US Immigration Service for five years. Although he won the lawsuit, he did not return to China until 1955 with a number of US military pilots captured in the Korean War.


Mr. Qian Xuesen was right and wrong during the Cultural Revolution, so I won’t say much about it. In any case, he has made significant contributions to China's rocket, missile and aerospace industry, and he is also the father of China's "two bombs and one satellite".


Seventy years later, the US-Soviet Cold War that ended in the 1990s seems to be back today. This time, the U.S. opponent was directly replaced by China.


In 2018, the National Security Department of the U.S. Department of Justice under the Trump administration launched a special program called "China Initiative", claiming that its goal is to combat intellectual property theft. Large-scale investigations focused on economic Spy crimes turned to university campuses, and most of them involved Chinese descent.


The American media [New York Time] once published an article "Chinese American Scientists Harassed by the State for 50 Years", saying:

"The United States regards immigrants and naturalized Asian scientists as permanent targets of suspicion. This began in the Hoover era and cooled down in the 1990s. As tensions with China intensified during the Trump era, related accusations began to surge again."


On September 9th, local time in the United States, Mr. Hu Anming, a Chinese professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, a nanotechnology scientist, and a Chinese Canadian, who was censored for the “espionage case”, won a “victory” in a US court. According to Article 29 of the Federal Criminal Procedure Law, the Federal Court sentenced Hu Anming to three counts of telecommunications fraud and three counts of misrepresentation. So far, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) failed to prosecute Professor Hu Anming for espionage.

Professor Hu Anming was the first Chinese scientist to participate in the trial among the Chinese scientists prosecuted for the "China Action" plan in the United States. Therefore, since the trial, it has been affecting the hearts of Chinese in the United States and overseas Chinese, and the result of his acquittal will have a huge impact on the subsequent court trials.


The words of a Chinese-American friend are indeed worth pondering. "Whether you like it or not, regardless of your political orientation, and regardless of your feelings for Taiwan and mainland China, your American dream is closely connected with Sino-US relations. When China is seen as a friend of the White House and Congress, we are a model minority; when China becomes the devil in the eyes of Americans, we are the agent of the enemy."


The ups and downs of Mr. Yang Zhenning, Mr. Qian Xuesen, and Mr. Hu Anming are not so much a choice of personal destiny, but rather a choice of the destiny of the country and nation.


When Mr. Yang Zhenning accepted the Nobel Prize in 1957, he said: "I was deeply aware of a fact: In a broad sense, I am a product of Chinese culture and Western culture. It is a product of mutual harmony and conflict. I’m willing to say that I am proud of my Chinese tradition, and likewise, I am devoted to modern science.”


As overseas Chinese, without exception, they pride themselves on accepting the influence of Chinese culture, and so are we.


The Nobel Prize is an internationally recognized superb prize. There are only three winners from mainland China, but they are also quite controversial. One is Mr. Mo Yan, one is Ms. Tu Youyou, and the other is Mr. Xiaobo who won the Peace Prize in 2010.


Mr. Mo Yan admires Mr. Yang Zhenning quite a bit. He once wrote a couplet for him: "Looking up at the big universe, looking down at the tiny particles". However, the old Mr. Yang Zhenning mentioned Mo Yan's book, but he bluntly said that it might be the reason that he hadn't read it carefully, and he didn't see where it stood out.


After a long time, I found out why Mr. Yang Zhenning’s birthday changed to September 22. It turned out to be:


Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, September 22. Entrusted by the Supreme Leader, the responsible comrades of the Ministry of Education visited Tsinghua University on September 22 to visit Yang Zhenning, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a well-known physicist. On behalf of the Supreme Leader, he presented a basket of flowers and conveyed that the Supreme Leader gave him Wishes for his 100th birthday, wishing him health and longevity.


It seems that the Xinhua News Agency’s report and the greetings of the leaders are still great, and they can even change the date of the birthday of the hundred-year-old Mr. Yang Zhenning.


The leaders paid a good visit on September 22, but the people should not "listen to the wind as the wind and say that the rain is the rain". When you go out, you always have to look up and see if the sky is right.


Lu Yao quoted two words from Mr. Liu Qing at the beginning of the novel "Life":


"Although the road in life is long, there are often only a few steps to the important points, especially when people are young.

No one's life path is straight and without divergence. There are some forks, such as political forks, career forks, and personal life forks. If you take a wrong step, you can affect a period of your life or your entire life. "


——100 Days In Chengdu (Day 3)







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