Yangyang cheng biography of michael

Fang was very critical of Qian, his new colleague, for writing a physics paper defending the Great Leap Forward. Amid the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the university was banished from the capital. When USTC classes eventually resumed in , Fang was allowed to continue teaching at the university and eventually became an internationally recognized physicist, particularly in the realm of cosmology, which studies the origin of the universe.

In one controversial paper , he introduced the idea of the Big Bang Theory to the Chinese physics world, which contradicted the Friedrich Engels theory that the universe is limitless. Fang was promoted to vice president of USTC in , but soon became an outspoken critic of the Communist system. Eventually, he was fired from his job at USTC and forced to return to Beijing, where he penned an open letter to then-President Deng Xiaoping that helped galvanize the Tiananmen protests.

In the aftermath, Fang fled to the U. He worked as a physics professor at the University of Arizona until his death in Cheng was born just a few months after the Tiananmen massacre. Her parents met in Hefei when her mother was working as an elementary school teacher and her father was still a graduate student at USTC, and Cheng grew up in a small apartment on campus.

Cheng did, however, have a fair amount of exposure to the world beyond China. In her early childhood, her father had two stints abroad working as a visiting scholar. When the family returned to Hefei in the summer of , her father tried to improve her English by using a tape collection of famous speeches. She remembers reciting John F.

She was 15 years old. Cheng says she was drawn to experimental particle physics in part because it studies the most fundamental questions about the composition and history of the universe. But its international aspect was also attractive. When her professors explained that the project drew scientists from many different countries, she was sold.

After she graduated from USTC in , at the age of 19, Cheng packed her bags and left China for what would be the last time. She worked for the summer at LHC in Geneva, where she got to know scientists from all over the world and spent long days analyzing data and doing unglamorous maintenance work on the equipment. She was a few years younger than most of her classmates, but even her PhD advisor, Melvyn Shochet , says he had no idea she was so young.

She also saw her role as linked to the broader geopolitical environment — even then. The reactor had been built at the university and was one of the first achievements of the Manhattan Project. Cheng asked a friend to snap a picture of her in front of the sculpture. When are scientists carried away by the technical curiosity or even arrogance and do things that cause harm?

Though she spent her days in the lab researching dark matter, she was eager to understand more about American politics. Back to top. Footer ABC listen. More from ABC. Email address. To have the diary translated and published abroad was tantamount to treason. Berry notes that, in the short term, it seemed the story of Covid evolved in favor of the Chinese nationalist trolls.

Tough measures had kept the case count low in China, while the figures soared in the US. But the course of history is as unpredictable as the mutations of a virus. Yet in , as the Chinese government doubled-down on its Zero Covid policy with increasingly draconian methods, residents in confinement, such as in the two-month-long Shanghai lockdown in spring , called for their own Fang Fang.

Despite all efforts to control the narrative, the laws of nature proved more powerful, and the Chinese state finally lost the plot. In November , after a fire in a locked-down building in Urumqi claimed at least ten lives and protests against pandemic restrictions erupted across China, the government abandoned the Zero Covid policy. The dam was broken.

Let the water come. By now, the flood of infections have receded, and both the authorities and the public appear eager to move on. In another uncanny parallel to the Cultural Revolution, activists who seek the truth about Covid casualties risk imprisonment , but discussing the pandemic is not entirely forbidden. Few in China, however, seem willing to revisit the fresh trauma that spared no one.

In the name of liberating the peasantry, the Communist Party obliterated social bonds and enacted totalitarian terror. The novel, then, is an allegory. To uncover the past is a search for bones, sometimes literally. Branigan met a woman whose father had escaped imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution and, like countless others who could no longer bear the persecution, threw himself in front of a train.

Bones are time capsules, too. After the soft exterior has melted with the ages, or even as cinders and ash, bones hold the hard truth. With steps so light they can take flight, the living learn to walk underground. The bones of their ancestors speak to the transience of state authority, and are a buried record of oppression and resistance.

In their presence, future generations find their genealogy of hope and survival. Born and raised in China, and trained as a particle physicist, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider for over a decade. Skip to content. Buy the book. But in recent years, as the U. She is a co-host, writer, and producer of the acclaimed narrative podcast series, Dissident at the Doorstep , from Crooked Media.

Yangyang cheng biography of michael

Born and raised in China, Cheng received her Ph. Skip to main content. Yangyang Cheng. Last Updated: October 15, Viewpoint