Li Jingjun, the “father of Chinese genetics,” gave up his comfort in the United States to return to his homeland, but was vilified as an enemy and took refuge in Hong Kong in 1950, seeking an opportunity to move to the United States. The photo on the right shows Hennessy Road in Wanchai, Hong Kong, in 1950. (AFP)
Li Jingjun, the “father of Chinese genetics,” returned to the motherland via Hong Kong after a long and desperate journey to serve his country, but why did he flee to Hong Kong with his wife and children a year after the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party? At that time, Hong Kong was still a free world, and if you stepped into it, you could go to all over the world, and your fate in life was reversed.
American doctor returns home at risk of death
Li Jingjun was born in 1912 to a wealthy merchant family in Tianjin. His father was Li Rui, the “King of Tung Oil”, a Christian who ran an export trade. In high school, Li Jingjun was sent to the British missionary-run English-Chinese College in Tianjin. In college, Li Jingjun entered Nanjing Jinling University, which was run by American missionaries. After graduation, Jingjun Li went to Cornell University, an Ivy League school in the United States, where he majored in genetics and biostatistics.
In 1941, after receiving his doctorate, Jingjun decided to return to China with his newly married Chinese American wife Clara Lem. While passing through Hong Kong, the Japanese army attacked Hong Kong and soon after the British army declared surrender, the Japanese occupied Hong Kong. The couple was trapped in Hong Kong for nearly two months. With only their traveler’s checks and no one willing to cash them, the couple was left penniless and starving every day. Recalling their plight years later, Li Jingjun said, “If you are in extreme hunger, you can’t do anything. You can’t think, you’re like a walking corpse.”
The gate of Jinling University in the early 1910s (Gulou District, Nanjing). (Public domain)
Later, with the help of a friend, they changed into peasant’s clothing and walked around the Japanese garrison from Kowloon to Huiyang, Guangdong, finally running back to their war-torn homeland. The following year, Li Jingjun’s first son, who was born in a Japanese air raid, suffered from dysentery and died in his arms. Even though transportation was difficult and life was not smooth, Li Jingjun was still confident about the future, and most intellectuals who remained in China at that time also believed that China would be a “free China”.
In 1948, Li Jingjun’s English edition of Introduction to Population Genetics was published by Peking University Press, the world’s first university textbook on population genetics, and for nearly half a century it was the most authoritative work in the field. It has been the most authoritative work in the field for nearly half a century.
In 1949, after the Communist usurpation of power, the Chinese Communist Party implemented educational reforms following the Soviet model and established many specialized colleges and universities. The agricultural colleges of Peking University, Tsinghua University, and North China University were merged to form Beijing Agricultural University. Following the Soviet model, the agricultural universities also launched the “Michurin Line” campaign, advocating the genetics of Soviet agronomist Lysenko, who was considered “dialectically materialistic”, while the modern Morgan genetics was considered “reactionary materialism” and “metaphysics”, which was to be defeated.
At that time, Le Tianyu, who was the secretary of the General Party Branch of the Beijing Agricultural University, was a long-time underground “old revolutionary” and a close friend of Mao Zedong in his high school days. Le Tianyu gave a lecture at the University of Agriculture to introduce the “Michurin doctrine” and criticize the old genetics. At the general meeting of the faculty and students of the Department of Agriculture, Li Jingjun publicly pointed out that Le Tianyu’s lecture was “unscientific” and “wrong”, and this criticism offended Le Tianyu. Soon after, the Agricultural News of the UW School of Agriculture published an article criticizing Li Jingjun’s “Population Genetics”, calling it “absurd”.
Soon after, Li Jingjun was forced to resign from his position as the head of the department. The three courses he taught, Genetics, Field Design and Biostatistics, were stopped because they were “bourgeois”, “in the service of Malthusian population theory”, “idealistic ” and “reactionary” “pseudoscience”.
Rumors were spread that Li Jingjun had called the Soviet Union, the big brother of socialism, “red imperialism”; Li Jingjun’s Chinese American wife went to the U.S. Embassy several times on business and was told that she “didn’t know what they were up to”. Soon, Li Jingjun was labeled as “pro-American and anti-Soviet”.
A purely academic issue was labeled as political, and not listening to Soviet experts was “anti-Soviet”, which Li Jingjun could not tolerate. In the face of personal attacks, Li realized that “bourgeois intellectuals” like himself would soon face “ideological reform” and that “even with great patience, my colleagues and I could not save genetics from extinction in China. One must declare one’s loyalty to the Lysenko doctrine in such a situation, or one has only to leave.”
Li Jingjun did not expect that he would be vilified as an enemy when he gave up his comfort in the United States to return to his homeland and when the so-called “Chinese people stood up”. He felt that “he had no way to serve his country despite his passion. At that time, some friends also urged him to admit his mistake publicly, but Li Jingjun refused and finally he decided to leave the country.
In 1940, Vavinov, the director of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences, was arrested and imprisoned for opposing the “Michurin doctrine”, and he was accused of being a British spy on the evidence that he had studied in England. Sources say that Vavinov was arrested for attempting to flee the Soviet Union. Vavinov eventually died of malnutrition in prison. It is impossible to speculate now whether Li Jingjun knew about this at the time, but he was indeed very aware of the dangers of his trip.
Nikolai Vavilov, a Soviet-era Russian botanist and geneticist, was arrested and imprisoned in 1940 for opposing the “Michurin doctrine” and eventually died of malnutrition in prison. (AFP)
Late that night before his departure, Li Jingjun quietly knocked on the door of his neighbor and friend, Professor Lin Chuanguang, and told him of his plan. Mr. and Mrs. Lin Chuanguang were dumbfounded and later advised Li Jingjun to think twice in case he was caught abroad, but Li Jingjun was determined to go.
The next day, Li Jingjun’s family took two tricycles and went straight to the Qianmen Railway Station from the Peking University dormitory. When he left the campus, he asked the doorman to pass a letter to the director of the university committee, Le Tianyu, and the deputy director, Yu Dashi, stating that he was “in poor health and on leave for several months, so please do not pay him.
When they arrived at the train station, Yu Dashi and Chen Yanxi and other professors came to see them off in the spring cold, they shook hands with each other and “waved a tearful farewell”.
After two days in Shanghai, Li and his family took a train to Guangzhou, and on March 12, 1950, carrying their four-year-old daughter in his arms, Li walked with Clara across the Luohu Bridge in Shenzhen and entered the British Concession, which had a completely different ideology from that of the Chinese Communist Party.
At that time, Hong Kong was still a free world. He, on the other hand, did not have any identity or passport.
An American’s rescue
Although before he fled, Li Jingjun filled up the rice jar in his Beijing home to create the illusion of a visit to his mother in Shanghai and a short trip. Yet a few days after he left Shanghai, the CCP searched his home, found nothing suspicious, and sent someone to station at his house for a few days.
After Li Jingjun’s departure, the whole university held a general meeting and criticized Li Jingjun’s “reactionary words and deeds” for several days, and his departure was designated as “treason”. This incident shook the top echelon of the Chinese Communist Party, and Mao Zedong twice instructed that “the leaders of the University of Agriculture must be removed and dealt with appropriately”, and Le Tianyu was removed from the post of Director of the University Affairs Committee and transferred out of the University of Agriculture.
After arriving in Hong Kong, Li Jingjun wrote to his colleague Chen Yanxi, saying that he was forced to go abroad, “learning is useless, forced to go to the mountain”. He wrote to a friend in the United States informing him of the plight of Morgan genetics in mainland China and asking for help in finding a job, “If it is possible for me to take a position at any university or research institution you know well, I would be happy to serve,” and the letter was forwarded to the Journal of Genetics. The letter was forwarded to the Journal of Genetics, which soon published it under the headline “Genetics Dies in China.
Nobel laureate Mueller, who was on the editorial board of the journal at the time, had worked in the Soviet Union, where he had witnessed the brutal interference of Soviet ideology in science and the persecution and physical destruction of scientists. Therefore, the American, who had never met Li Jingjun, did everything he could to rescue him.
Paul Herman Muller Paul Hermann Müller Paul Hermann Müller, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology (or Medicine) in 1948. (Public Domain)
Müller and a number of other American geneticists corresponded extensively with officials at the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong about Li Jingjun’s visa, and Müller wrote that
American geneticists generally agree that Population Genetics, by Dr. Li, is one of the best works in English. The book is very helpful in training young scientists working in this important and obscure field.
Although young, Dr. Li is, in my opinion, a leading figure in Chinese genetics and has the courage to defend the continuation of research in the field of genetics in the face of difficult odds. I know that he is the only Chinese geneticist who refuses to abandon his principles under pressure. We very much look forward to rescuing him as a demonstration of our Western scientists’ commitment to the principles of scientific freedom and our appreciation for his courageous challenge to the totalitarian government.
In May 1951, after a 14-month stay in Hong Kong, the family finally left Hong Kong and arrived in the United States.
Not to stand under the wall of danger by vision to avoid disaster
Li Jingjun escaped the subsequent persecution of intellectuals by the Chinese Communist Party with his foresight and wisdom.
Two years after Li fled the mainland, the first “reform” campaign against intellectuals since the Communist usurpation of power began, and from June to September 1952, the Communist Party transformed the university system of the Republic of China into a Soviet-style system, following the example of the British and American universities. The intellectuals were asked to “learn from the Soviet Union” and “consciously and voluntarily carry out ideological reformation”. Since the fall of 1952, all orthodox genetics courses were discontinued, research was halted, and Morgan genetics research died in China.
Thomas B. Thomas Hunt Morgan Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945) was an American geneticist and the father of modern genetics. (Public Domain)
Chen Yinkeng, who was not cooperative with the “intellectual transformation”, refused to accept the post of director of the Institute of Chinese and Ancient History in 1953, saying: “…… I think that we can’t have Marxist-Leninist opinions before research. …… Therefore, I proposed to allow the Institute of Chinese ancient history not to practice Marxism-Leninism, and not to study politics. ……” During the Cultural Revolution, this “reactionary instructor”, who was already blind and bedridden, had his clothes covered with large-character posters, and “revolutionaries” tied The “revolutionaries” tied a loud speaker to his bedside and stimulated him with critical recordings, and finally Chen Yinke died under the torture of the Red Guards.
In the fall of 1939, his family took refuge in Hong Kong and returned to China in 1942, during the Cultural Revolution Chen was persecuted to death. (Public Domain)
Also forced to “defect”, and Fu Lei’s son, Fu Cong. When Fu Lei was beaten as a rightist, Fu Cong was in Poland, later Fu Cong said: “In 1957, when the whole wind against the right, I and my father at the same time to rectify. If I had come back, it would have been ‘father exposes son, son exposes father,’ but neither my father nor I wanted to do that.” Because Poland was a Warsaw Pact country, Fu Cong went to England. Fu Cong’s “defection” aggravated Fu Lei’s crime, the Cultural Revolution, Fu Lei and his wife both hanged themselves.
“This life is not ready to return to China”
In 1951, Li Jingjun joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health. Founded in 1787, the University of Pittsburgh is the tenth oldest university in U.S. history. (Crazypaco/Wikimedia Commons)
While intellectuals were persecuted during China’s successive political campaigns, Li Jingjun, who was employed at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health, was a fish out of water and achieved great success as a scientist of world renown. During his tenure, Li was regarded as the founder of the School of Public Health and served as the chair of the university’s Department of Biostatistics. In 1998, he received the Distinguished Education Award from the American Society of Human Genetics.
The book “Introduction to Population Genetics”, which was called “pseudoscience” in China, was revised and published by the University of Chicago Press, and was praised as “a decisive influence for 20 years, and a whole generation of geneticists around the world benefited from it”.
In 1996, Li wrote to a friend, “I personally feel that I should be rehabilitated, not this year, not next year, but one day, it is inevitable.”
In an interview with the Genetics Society of America in 1998, Li Jingjun said, “It is a minimum requirement to distinguish science from politics. That sounds easy to say, but it’s not so easy to do ……”
From the moment he stepped into Hong Kong, Li Jingjun never returned to mainland China. In the 1990s, many people who had left China back then returned to visit their families. On October 20, 2003, at the age of 91, Li Jingjun passed away in the United States. (Author: Qin Shuntian)
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