Wang Mingzhen and Yu Qizhong in San Francisco before returning to China in 1954
My father, Zhou Shouxian, was born in Wuhan, Jiangsu Province in 1925, the youngest son of Zhou Boying, the manager of the Qingdao branch of the Golden City Bank during the Republic of China. He was bright and studious since he was young, and in 1942 he was admitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering of Central University with the first prize, before he was seventeen years old. The person who taught him “Radio Engineering” in the Department of Electrical Engineering of Central University was Xu Zhangben.
A native of Changsha, Hunan Province, born in July 1911, he graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering of Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1935, went to the United States in 1937 to study at the California Institute of Technology, where he received his master’s degree in 1938 and his doctorate in physics (Ph.D.) in 1940. (I once questioned Xu Zhangben’s academic qualifications. The article “Tsinghua Professor Xu Zhangben Before and After the Anti-Rightist” signed by Lv Chengdong in Issue 8, 2014 of Yanhuang Chunqiu clearly states that Xu Zhangben was in the U.S. from 1938 to 1940, usually two years to get his Ph.D. In addition, a directory compiled by the Department of Electrical Engineering of Central University in 1947 in my collection clearly states that Xu Zhangben had a master’s degree, and recently (With the help of friends in the United States, I found the entry record and doctoral thesis of Xu Jangben, and my doubts were solved, so it is very good that he could get his doctoral degree in three years.
After obtaining his doctoral degree, he returned to China. After his return to China, he taught in the Physics Department of Hunan University and became a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering of Central University in Chongqing during the war period, and after the victory in 1947, he co-organized the magazine “Science World” with Cai Jintao and Bi Deixian and issued a special issue of “Radar” in 1948. In 1949, Xu Jangben went to the United States again. This Time, his research field gradually shifted to quantum physics.
Shou-Hsien Chou was a senior student of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Central University, with excellent grades, and was highly appreciated by Professor Jang-Ben Hsu. He went to the United States in 1947 to study for his Ph.D. degree at the University of Michigan, and was accepted as a member of Sigma Xi in 1948 for his unique ideas on electrical theory. He published three papers in the journal Applied Physics in 1954 and received two patents for computer technology.
After graduation, Shouxian Zhou joined the Association for the Study of Science in the United States, a progressive organization of International Students in the United States. In May 1954, at a summer camp in New Hampshire (the main purpose of the camp was to fight for the return to China, and Qian Xuesen attended the gathering), Shouxian Zhou and his teacher Jangbun Xu met again after eight years of absence.
At this camp, Zhou met his fellow Michigan senior sister, Mingzhen Wang.
Mingzhen Wang is a native of Suzhou and her ancestor was Wang Ao, a scholar of the Wen Yuan Ge of the Ming Dynasty (Mingzhen Wang is the 15th generation granddaughter of Wang Ao). Mingzhen Wang’s father, Ji Tong Wang, was a mathematician in the late Qing Dynasty and early Civil War; her brother, Shou Jing Wang, was a physicist; her sister, Shuzhen Wang, was a gynecologist and obstetrician on par with Qiaozhi Lin; and her two brothers, Shou Wu Wang and Shou Jue Wang, were academicians in semiconductor and microelectronics. Wang Mingzhen’s cousin is the famous physicist He Zehui. The hero behind this very rare scientific and technological Family in modern China is Wang Mingzhen’s grandmother, Xie Changda, a famous female educator in Suzhou and the principal of “Zhenhua Girls’ High School”.
In 1938, she went to the United States to study at the University of Michigan under Professor Ullenberger, who almost won the Nobel Prize in Physics. The main part of her doctoral dissertation, entitled “The Theory of Brownian Motion”, was published in Modern Physical Review in 1945, and for the next sixty years, this dissertation remained as the authoritative literature in the field.
I have known Mingzhen Wang since childhood and called her Mama Yu. She was 56 years older than me, so I should have called her Grandma Wang, but since my father always called her “Big Sister Wang,” I followed my Uncle Channing’s children and called her Mama Yu. After completing her studies, Mingzhen Wang returned to China at the end of 1946 and was hired as a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Science at Yunnan University.
After the ambassadorial negotiations between China and the United States in Geneva in 1954, a large number of students from the United States returned to the motherland from 1954 to 1955. After declaring their volunteer in the Ministry of Education, Shouxian Zhou, Zhangben Xu, and Mingzhen Wang came to Tsinghua University to teach at almost the same time. After the restructuring of the faculty in 1952, the whole physics department of Tsinghua University went to Peking University, leaving only the physics teaching and research group of basic courses in Tsinghua University, which was greatly damaged. The arrival of Xu and Wang greatly strengthened the physics teaching and research group.
At this time also happened a joke: Wang Mingzhen was designated as a second-class professor (monthly salary of 280 yuan), she asked the school Xu Zhangben how many levels? The school told her that she was one level lower than you, and she immediately asked herself to be lowered to the first level, the same level as Xu Zhangben. The school told her that first class professor was the highest level and Xu Zhangben was third class (with a monthly salary of 240 yuan), Wang Mingzhen immediately asked very firmly to be set as third class, otherwise she would leave Tsinghua immediately …… Tsinghua reluctantly agreed to her request.
They moved into the professor’s residence in the new Linyuan of Tsinghua University, Wang Mingzhen lived in No. 6, Xu Zhangben lived in No. 7 (Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng lived in No. 8), and the one living behind them in No. 2 was President Jiang Nanxiang. Zhou Shouxian was still single at that time and lived in the 1st dormitory in Hehuachi, and moved to No. 21 of Xinlinyuan in front of them after a year.
To the west of Wang Mingzhen’s house was a street garden, and to the west of the garden, directly opposite her house, lived No. 5 Xinlinyuan, where Huang Wanli, a professor in the Department of Water Resources, lived.
The famous Huang Wanli, who will not be mentioned here, was branded as a rightist after the “Anti-Rightist” movement began in 1957 because of his novel “Little Words from the Flowers” and his opposition to the construction of a dam at Sanmenxia on the Yellow River. He was relegated from second-rank professor to fourth-rank professor (with a monthly salary of 207 yuan).
At the end of the “anti-rightist” struggle, Xu Zhangben suddenly proposed to organize a so-called “Labor Party” with a program, a manifesto, a theory and a plan. He asked the CPC Central Committee to abandon Marxism-Leninism and recognize the legal status of the “Labor Party”. He wanted all his friends at Tsinghua University to join the “Labor Party”, and Wang Mingzhen and her husband, Uncle Yu Qizhong, were appointed by Xu Zhangben to be the organization minister and Culture minister of the “Labor Party” respectively… In addition, he wrote small-character posters declaring that he wanted to “fight for the youth” and that “China’s youth is my youth”. Wang Mingzhen thought that Xu Zhangben was fooling around and advised him with good intentions many times.
In December 1957, Xu Jangben was arrested by the public security authorities at Tsinghua University and sentenced to Life imprisonment for both historical and current “counter-revolutionary” charges (the Internet rumor that he was sentenced to 15 years in prison is false), which started his 18-year-long prison career.
Zhou Shouxian was assigned to teach in the Department of Radio at Tsinghua in 1955, initially as a lecturer, after six months as a fourth-ranking associate professor (monthly salary of 204 yuan), the Department of Radio was decomposed from the old Tsinghua Department of Electrical Engineering, commonly known as strong electricity, radio is commonly known as weak electricity, the head of the Department is the famous Chinese radio expert Meng Zhaoying. Zhou Shouxian successively offered courses such as “Radio Antenna” and “Principle of Magnetism”.
In February 1956, because of his professional background of Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan and his four years of practical experience in scientific and technological research at the Paul Computer Company in the United States, Shouxian Zhou was appointed by Li Chuanxin, secretary of the Party General Branch of the Department of Radio, to be in charge of preparing for the establishment of Tsinghua University’s electronic computer program (the first electronic computer program in Chinese universities). He was the first to formulate the teaching plan of the computer program at Tsinghua University, and the first to write and teach the professional courses such as “Computer Principles”, “Pulse Technology”, “Magnetic Core Memory” and “Computer Circuit” at Tsinghua University.
From April to June 1956, he represented Tsinghua University to attend the meeting of the State Council to formulate the visionary plan for the development of science and technology for twelve years (the 14th item “the establishment of computing technology”), and was received by the state leaders Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Deng Xiaoping and others in Zhongnanhai on June 14. Represented Tsinghua University in a delegation of Chinese computer scientists to Moscow and Leningrad, USSR.
After his arrest, Xu Zhangben was imprisoned in Beijing Taoranting Prison No. 1, but he was not engaged in heavy physical labor and could return to Tsinghua University every weekend to reunite with his family, and was transported by public security officers. Xu Zhangben translated a large amount of scientific and technical materials in German in prison. After he was arrested and imprisoned, his wife and three children had difficulties in life, so his wife Wang Xiqiong asked for help from Xu Zhangben’s old classmate Qian Xuesen, who entrusted his student Zheng Zhemin to help the Xu family with 90 Yuan in three installments (40 Yuan, 30 Yuan and 20 Yuan). In addition, after Xu Zhangben was arrested and imprisoned, Qian Xuesen visited the prison many times.
After Wang Mingzhen arrived at Tsinghua, she interrupted her research on “Brownian motion” and “noise theory” due to the limitation of scientific research. She devoted herself to education and gave lectures on “Thermodynamics and Statistical Physics” and “Mathematical Theory of Non-Homogeneous Gases”. She was loved by her students for her rigorous and easy-going lectures.
Wang Mingzhen’s husband, Yu Qizhong, whom I call Uncle Yu, was seven years younger than Wang Mingzhen. After the victory of the war, the Southwest United University was disbanded, and the head of the training department, Cha Liangzhao (known as Cha Bodhisattva), stayed in Yunnan and became the director of the Kunming Teachers’ College, and Yu Qizhong was the director of the basic education research department under him. He introduced Wang Mingzhen and Yu Qizhong to each other and married, and this sister-brother relationship in the late 1940s became famous among family and friends.
Yu Qizhong was known as one of the “four young men” of the Yu family in Shaoxing, his grandfather Yu Mingzhen, his father Yu Dachun, and his third brother Yu Qiwei, also known as Huang Jing, who was one of the leaders of the “January 29th” student patriotic movement. He was one of the leaders of the “January 29th” Patriotic Movement. His cousin Yu Dawei (Yu Dachun’s cousin) was an expert in military engineering who studied in Germany, and in 1933 he became the director of the Ministry of National Defense’s military engineering department, and in 1954 he became Taiwan‘s minister of military affairs.
After Wang Mingzhen and Yu Qizhong got married, the civil war between China and the Communist Party intensified, so Wang Mingzhen took Yu Qizhong to the United States again in September 1949, and Wang Mingzhen taught in the physics department of Notre Dame University.
In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution began, no one expected that the bad luck would fall on Wang Mingzhen, a kind and elegant professor at Tsinghua University, who was already 62 years old, and late at night on March 14, 1968, Yu Qizhong and Wang Mingzhen were suddenly awakened from their sleep by the banging on the door. The other side said, “You have committed a crime, don’t you know it? Wang Mingzhen replied, “I don’t know. Nearly six years later, Wang Mingzhen was released from detention and returned Home with a fresh pot of roast pork on the kitchen floor.
In 1969, Sino-Soviet relations were tense and Beijing underwent a massive war evacuation. Xu Zhangben was moved with the prison authorities to Handan Prison in Hebei. At about the same time, Zhou Shouxian and Huang Wanli were sent to work at the “May 7” cadre school at Tsinghua University in Liyu Zhou, Jiangxi Province.
Huang’s aunt, Ding Yujun, was the daughter of Ding Weifen, a Kuomintang patriarch. There is a saying that “Chiang’s family is the world’s Ding’s party, Kong and Song are ministers”, Ding Weifen followed Sun Yat-sen in Japan when he founded the League, the family had a wife and a son, this wife is not educated. Later, Ding Weifen married a second wife, who was Ding Yujun’s mother. After the second wife died of an unfortunate illness, Ding Weifen brought his wife and son from his hometown to live with him.
Huang Wanli is tall and sturdy, while Huang’s aunt Ding Yuzhun is small and delicate, they are the most loving couple I have ever seen. Ding Yuyun originally studied Medicine in Japan, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, she was forced to interrupt her studies to return to China, on the way back to the ship met Huang Wanli returned from the United States, the two young people fell in love at first sight ……
In 1952, Huang Wanli came to Tsinghua to teach in the Department of Water Resources, while Ding Yujun worked as a medical doctor in the university hospital. After 1957, Huang Wanli was branded as a big rightist and was demoted to a lower salary, and even her children’s education was affected. She sometimes complained to her husband, “You old rightist, causing me and my children to suffer with you. ……
The experimental farm of Tsinghua University in Jiangxi, near the entrance of the tributary of Ganjiang River entering Poyang Lake in Nanchang suburb, was a labor reform farm, which was abandoned because of the serious schistosomiasis Epidemic, Chi Qun specially chose this place for the labor reform of intellectuals from Tsinghua and Peking University. Carp Island is a mudflat outside the dike of Poyang Lake, with artemisia grass and mosquitoes, named Carp Island without carp, but with schistosomes. Ganjiang River flows over the head, it is a “hanging river”, and the reclaimed rice field of the farm is a few dozen meters below the dike, and you can see the white sail on the river when you look up.
In the summer of 1970, during the “August 7th Storm”, the farm was suddenly turned into a swampy land. Nanchang was a famous “furnace” in southern China, and it was often 37 to 38 degrees in summer. During the double robbery (harvesting and planting) season, these intellectuals had to work hard for more than ten hours under the blazing sun, and everyone was tanned. Because there were “bugs” in the water, they needed to apply a potion “dibutyl” to their calves before working in the fields. “The dibutyl ester forms a hard shell, so the larvae of the “small worms”, the “larvae”, cannot enter the body. The unfortunate infection of schistosomiasis requires an injection of “antimony”, which is very toxic.
I once asked Ding Yujun, “What did you do in Liyu Zhou? She said I did all kinds of work, planting rice, harvesting, playing field, burning bricks, feeding pigs, raising chickens …… She also said your father did not work, so people called him “observer” and was often criticized ……
My father, Zhou Shouxian, was attacked during the 1968 “Clear the Team” campaign, and the labor propaganda team investigated and transferred internally and externally, repeatedly censoring him, and coming to our home on Sundays to hold a study class, asking my father to study the “Letter Urging Du Iu Ming and Others to Surrender”. In 1969, when he came to Liyuzhou, Jiangxi Province, he was often criticized and scolded, and contracted severe schistosomiasis, which almost killed him.
In 1971, more and more people were infected with schistosomiasis in Liyuzhou, and there was a strong reaction from the bottom, so Tsinghua University had to withdraw the so-called experimental farm. Huang Wanli was soon sent by Tsinghua University to the Sanmenxia teaching base in Henan Province (in 1957, he was branded as a rightist for his strong opposition to the construction of the Sanmenxia Water Conservancy Hub), where he had to clean toilets and was criticized.
After his arrest, Wang Mingzhen was formally arrested (handcuffed) in the spring of 1970 and imprisoned in Qincheng Prison. After three years of intense interrogation, she wrote a lot of explanatory materials. She survived on the belief that “I am convinced that I have never committed a crime” and her love for her lover Yu Qizhong, and was finally released in November 1973, after five years and eight months in prison. When she asked the police about the reason for her arrest, the answer was “there was a reason for it, but there was no evidence.
Yu Qizhong was released from prison on April 5, 1975, after more than seven years of incarceration.
Xu Zhangben was pardoned in the spring of 1975, after 18 years of imprisonment, and worked locally in Hebei, where he was paid a small monthly living allowance.
On May 30, 1976, the founder of Tsinghua University’s computer science program, my father Shouxian Zhou, hanged himself in despair.
In February 1978, Tsinghua University removed the rightist label for Huang Wanli.
On May 16, 1978, Wang Mingzhen, Qian Ning, Li Hengde, Tong Shibai, Gao Lianpei and Shi Shisheng, who were all old classmates of Tsinghua University, held a memorial meeting for Zhou Shouxian and restored his reputation after the new president of Tsinghua University, Liu Da, presided over the memorial meeting.
In January 1979, the Central Organization Department officially informed Wang Mingzhen and Yu Qizhong of the couple’s arrest. The couple was arrested because they were implicated in the unjust case of Yu Qiwei (Huang Jing) and framed by Jiang Qing for no reason.
In the fall of 1979, Xu Zhangben was acquitted by the court and his sentence was reversed. Xu Zhangben soon returned to Tsinghua University in Beijing, he came to visit Huang Wanli in Unit 101, Unit 4, 8th floor of Tsinghua South, Huang Wanli was very happy and said, “Brother Xu, you are finally released, great, I’ll treat you to dinner. Huang Wanli then set up a banquet at home to entertain Xu Zhangben.
On February 26, 1980, Tsinghua University issued a “decision on the correction of Comrade Huang Wanli’s rightist issue”, the text reads: According to the spirit of document No. 55, we have reviewed Comrade Huang Wanli’s original rightist classification, and according to the provisions of the 1957 CPC Central Committee on “Criteria for Classifying Rightists”, Comrade Huang Wanli’s original rightist classification is a misclassification. The CPC Beijing Municipal Committee approved the correction, restored his political honor, and reinstated his salary as a second-class professor of higher education.
In February 1981, my first job in the Department of Water Resources of Tsinghua University after I joined the workforce was to handwrite Huang Wanli’s “Theory of Probability” lecture notes, using steel plates engraved on waxed paper, and then mimeographing them and sending them to the lecturers. Huang Wanli found me and said, “Xiaozhou, your father and I are friends, our families used to live in the neighborhood, do you still remember? I replied that I remembered. He also said, I want to see your home, can you? I said yes.
In the summer of 1981, Huang Wanli and Huang’s aunt and uncle really came together, Huang’s aunt said to me, I have seen you when you were a child, you sat in the children’s car, your sister pushed in the big playground to play ……
October 3, 1996, is the 90th birthday of Wang Mingzhen, Huang Wanli in the youngest daughter Huang Xiao Lu accompanied, came to Tsinghua University seventeen apartment for the oldest sister Wang Mingzhen birthday, he sent a large hand full of a whole 90 red roses. Wang Mingzhen was very happy and embraced Huang Wanli warmly.
In 2009, Huang Xiaolu and I met to visit Wang Mingzhen, who was 103 years old (Uncle Yu Qizhong had passed away in 1999). Wang Mingzhen was lying in bed, she was already showing some symptoms of dementia and her memory was failing. Huang Xiao Lu said, I am Huang Wanli’s daughter, he is Zhou Shou Xian’s son …… Wang Mingzhen thought for a long time and said, I can’t remember anything now, how can I be so useless …… and then wept.
On August 28, 2010, Wang Mingzhen passed away at the age of 104 at Beihang Hospital. According to the wishes of Mama Yu and Uncle Yu before their death, they donated their bodies to the Department of Medicine of Peking University.
Wang Mingzhen, Xu Zhangben, Huang Wanli and my father, Zhou Shouxian, epitomize the older generation of intellectuals who stayed in the United States. They were all well-educated at top universities in China, where they laid a solid foundation in science, and were elevated at prestigious American universities to achieve success in their respective fields of science and technology. Huang Wanli was a scientific fighter who believed in science, defied power and insisted on truth, and was the Galileo of China. Xu Zhangben was a “Hunan mule” who was deeply influenced by Western democratic and liberal ideas, and who advocated science and democracy with a stubborn character. Wang Mingzhen and Zhou Shouxian were scientific scholars who did not care much about politics and were disciplined and devoted to their studies.
They were full of the heart to serve their country with science and technology, and gave up the status of fame and fortune and good academic environment they had achieved abroad to return to their homeland from a foreign country, experiencing many hardships and difficulties. Now it has been more than a century (Huang Wanli has been back for more than 80 years).
The year 2018 is the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Department of Computer Science (formerly the Department of Automatic Control) at Tsinghua University, and I would like to commemorate my father Zhou Shouxian with a small poem, may his spirit rest in peace!
I was a young man who became famous in Yuzhong University.
He was a young man who became famous in Yuzhong University, and his studies were endless.
I am insane and humiliated.
The “observer” at the head of Carp Island.
August 2020
Huang Wanli’s 20th wedding anniversary photo taken with his wife when he was branded as a “big rightist”.
Photo of Zhou Shouxian back then
Xu Zhangben in his later years
Yesterday, No. 160
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