At his old age, Zhengao Wang’s life story is becoming more widely known
John Nash, an American mathematical genius, suffered from a severe mental illness as a young man and became an anomaly at Princeton University. His biographer once called him “the ghost of the Princeton campus. With the love and care of his faculty, friends and family, Nash’s genius was not buried, and he won the Nobel Prize in economics in his later years, making for a great story in the history of science and a great Hollywood film, “A Beautiful Mind”.
In the faraway China, a major university campus, there is another “genius” legend. The main character is named Wang Zhengao. Now, he is in his old age and dying, but his story has started to circulate on the Internet. Only, his experience is not a good story, but a tragedy.
Wang Zhengao, a physics student of Shandong University in 1950, was once a valued student of physicist Shuang Xingbei, who was called “Chinese Einstein”. According to Wang Zhengao himself, Shuang Xingbei once commented that his qualifications might be better than those of his other famous student, Li Zhengdao.
But back then, just when Wang was standing at the beginning of his academic path and ready to look forward to the future, fate led him to another end – “informer”.
Zhengao Wang had a great talent in theoretical physics, but he accepted a secret mission against his mentor, Xingbei Shuang, and hid his identity for 25 years, which brought bad luck to many colleagues and students.
Back then, Wang Zhengao’s secret mission was divided into three parts: first, to monitor Shuang Xingbei and learn about his actions, thoughts and words; second, to learn about other teachers designated by Gong Niansheng, the director of the school’s security office; and third, to take into account other unusual situations at the school.
Wang Zhengao was to report to his superiors on a single line at a weekly frequency and to write weekly reports. As to whether there are others doing the same job as himself, Wang Zhengao said he did not know.
Sok Xingbei was kind to Wang Zhengao, and let him study in a heated office because of his frail health. Over time, the relationship between Wang and the teachers were also good, they chatted in front of him without avoidance. It was then that Wang Zhengao, who had already accepted the task of confidentiality, began to report these remarks to the school’s security office and the Public Security Bureau.
The archives record that Wang Zhengao’s surveillance of Shuang Xingbei began in mid to late August 1952, when “the school’s security department and the Qingdao purge group organized an in-depth investigation of Shuang Xingbei’s materials, and the leaders concerned gave clear instructions that once the problem was finalized, it would be immediately submitted for legal action.”
Wang Zhengao, who later stayed on to teach at the school, remained an honest, kind and obedient personality in the eyes of his colleagues, calling even ordinary experimenters by their first names and doing the chores he was told to do with the same smile. He never refused people, colleagues to borrow money, if not, to find a third party to borrow, he was afraid of disappointing others.
In the network of secret work, he was also just an insignificant role. On the second night of the seminar, Wang Zhengao came back from the liaison station and found the physics building lit up with banners in the corridor. The students were very dissatisfied with the distortion of the seminar speech by Qingdao Daily and intended to demonstrate at the newspaper office.
More than forty years after the “anti-right” movement, people looked up the archives of Shuang Xingbei and found that in 1957 there was a record that Wang Moumou reported, first, that Shuang Xingbei had a gun, and second, that Shuang Xingbei said that if something really happened to him, Li Zhengdao would definitely help. Six months later, Shuang Xingbei was designated as a counter-revolutionary and sent to the Yuezikou Reservoir for labor reform.
After 25 years of secrecy from 1954 when he stayed in school until 1979, Wang Zhengao’s identity was accidentally exposed. Afterwards, colleagues around him politely categorized him as a “secret agent”. A relatively good personal friend of his classmates was shocked to learn about this, and asked Wang about it specifically, with reproach. As far as he knew, several other students who stayed in school were also pulled by the security department to be informants, but they all excused themselves on the grounds that they were “incompetent”.
The secrecy work took up Wang Zhengao’s main energy. He was only a mediocre associate professor, and finally retired in Hangzhou, with no more academic or career to speak of. He also divorced his two wives successively, both for reasons related to “secret service work”.
In his later years, Wang Zhengao returned to Shaoxing, his birthplace, with an illness, intending to live out his remaining days in the quiet streets of the town.
Two years ago, he read an article in the Hangzhou Daily, in which he recalled the famous scientist Shuang Xingbei from the era of atomic physics and mentioned that he had enlightened Nobel Prize winner Li Zhengdao during the war years. Wang Zhengao sent a long letter to the newspaper, telling the editor, “Shuang Xingbei’s best student was not Li Zhengdao, it was me.”
This is the Wang Zhengao that Mr. Du Qiang outlined for us in his article “The Twilight Years of a Genius Falling from Grace” and Mr. Teng Wei in his article “The Informer Around the Famous Physicist. It was too much of a surprise that the experience of Wang Zhengao, a secret agent and a despicable and shameless agent in his wife’s eyes, could surface. The number of his peers, in fact, far exceeds the average person’s imagination, yet they are hardly known.
If there were a chance to write a biography of this original physics genius plus secretive worker, the best title would already be readily available: “The Ghosts in Shandong University”.
In A Beautiful Mind, Nash lives in the delusion that he is a CIA agent. That’s just a delusion. But in Wang Zhengao’s life, the university teacher was nothing more than his cover identity. The organization’s special trust allowed him not to panic in the center of various saber-rattling political campaigns, and he was particularly confident.
It was only when he was burdened with the two humiliating labels of “informer” and “associate professor” that he had to say goodbye to the world that he became torn.
The ghost of Princeton was able to win the highest honor under the care of a beautiful mind. The ghost of Shandong University, on the other hand, served as a tool to destroy genius while extinguishing the light of its own genius. It turns out that it is better to be a serious psychopath in a proper place than a savant in two jobs in an inappropriate place – even if he is a genius.
If there is a future film with Wang Zhengao as the main character, it should be a black-and-white style tragic film. Not so, not enough to show the heaviness of history. Of course, it could also be like Schindler’s List, where the end of the film is suddenly converted into color: a bouquet of flowers is placed in front of Mr. Shuang’s tombstone.
What is saddening is the false throw of genius. What is frightening, on the other hand, is the ghostly wandering night.
Addendum: Shuang Xingbei (1907-1983), a native of Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province. Great theoretical physicist, “the father of Chinese radar”. In 1952, he taught at the Physics Department of Shandong University and began to study meteorology, publishing many academic papers such as “Meteorological Dynamics” and “Fluid Mechanics”; later, he went to Qingdao to prepare for the establishment of the Institute of Meteorology. He was once classified as a rightist and suffered a lot, but was later rehabilitated.
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