Wang Mingzhen was a Chinese theoretical physicist and a professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. As one of the first few Chinese female students studying science abroad, she was best known for her work on stochastic processes and Brownian motion with theoretical physicist George Uhlenbeck.
Following the Armistice Agreement signed between Korea and the United States, in September 1955, Wang Mingzhen, along with her husband, was finally allowed to return to China from the U.S. Shortly after that, she was assigned to the Department of Physics at Tsinghua University. She became the first female professor in the history of the university.
Wang Mingzhen and her husband became victims of secretive forces
It came totally and mysteriously out of the blue that after 11 years of teaching at the university, Wang Mingzhen and her husband were inexplicably arrested and then imprisoned in the notorious Qincheng Prison for five years and eight months. Her arrest happened after the odious Cultural Revolution was unleashed. What was her awful sin?
What unspeakable crime did she commit for such extreme punishment? During that time, it was common for people to be tortured, arrested, and, or murdered simply because they were good, decent Chinese people, mainly if they were talented or successful. For Professor Wang, there was another sinister reason behind her incarceration.
Today, based on Wang Mingzhen’s 90th birthday autobiography and other materials, we are going to reveal the “dark mystery” behind the unjustified imprisonment that this professor went through.
Seized from their home in the middle of the night
In the middle of the night on March 14, 1968, a sharp banging on the door woke up Wang Mingzhen and her husband, Yu Qizhong, who were already fast asleep. After anxiously opening the door, several police officers rushed in, went straight to the bedroom, and arrested Yu Qizhong. Less than two minutes later, two more police officers came in and arrested Wang Mingzhen.
When the police asked Wang Mingzhen to sign the detention warrant, she asked cautiously while signing: “Why are you arresting me?” The police replied, “You committed a mistake, and you don’t know?” Wang Mingzhen said: “I don’t know,” and was escorted into the car outside. Wang Mingzhen thought there must be some misunderstanding, and as soon as the misunderstanding was cleared up, she would be able to return home without any further delay. However, she never anticipated that she would not be allowed to return home for more than 2,000 long days and nights!
The police never told her why she and her husband were arrested. She could not figure it out. Both led a quiet life; they were not rebellious or political. She thought it might have something to do with their origin and background. It was a complete mystery to her.
Born into a distinguished family
Wang Mingzhen’s family background was indeed extraordinary. In 1906, she was born in an old house on Shiquan Street in Suzhou and was the fifth among her siblings. Her distant ancestors can be traced back to Wang Ao, a scholar of Wenyuan Pavilion in the Ming Dynasty. Her grandfather, Wang Songwei, was a Jinshi in the sixth year of Guangxu’s reign and one of the famous “Three Talents of Suzhou.” Cai Yuanpei, the then-president of Peking University, called her grandfather his “mentor.”
Her grandmother, Xie Zhangda, was a famous educator in modern China and the founder of Suzhou Zhenhua Girls’ High School. Her father, Wang Jitong, was a pioneer of modern Chinese mathematics and an expert in electromechanics.
When Wang Mingzhen was 10 years old, she entered the primary school attached to Zhenhua Girls’ High School. When she was in her second year of junior high school, her family moved to Shanghai. There, she entered the missionary school Yan Mo Girls’ High School and obtained A’s in all subjects.
In 1926, she was admitted to Jinling Women’s College in Nanjing with excellent results. After two years of study, she was transferred to the Department of Physics of Yenching University in Peking, where her coursework was consistently excellent.
Offered full scholarship by the University of Michigan
After graduating from college, Wang Mingzhen, along with her application, sent her high school and college transcripts and several letters of recommendation from her teachers to the University of Michigan in the United States. The University of Michigan quickly said they would offer her a full, four-year scholarship.
With that, her tuition and living expenses for studying abroad had been secured, but her travel expenses had not yet been raised. Wang Mingzhen dared not ask her father for the money because she had broken the marriage contract arranged by her family. While she was at college, she was sponsored by her brother and sister, but this time, she was too embarrassed to talk to them.
So she had to shelve her plans to study abroad temporarily. She entered Yenching University to work as a teaching assistant to earn money while finishing her master’s degree. Later, she was invited by Wu Yifang, the president of Jinling Women’s College, to teach mathematics and physics there.
Her destiny changes with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War
Five more years passed, and in the fateful summer of 1937, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China, and soon its troops would arrive at the city of Nanjing. Wang Mingzhen had to move to Hankou. At that time, President Wu Yifang suddenly asked her: “Do you still want to go to the University of Michigan?” Wang Mingzhen replied: “I want to.” Wu Yifang immediately wrote a letter of recommendation to the University of Michigan. Quickly, there was a reply from the university saying that they were willing to accept Wang Mingzhen and offered her a full, four-year scholarship.
Her dream came true at the University of Michigan
In August 1938, Wang Mingzhen went to the United States, and her dream of studying abroad finally came true. She was pursuing her Ph.D. in physics at the University of Michigan, where she was the only female and foreigner in her class.
She got a “B” in one lab course in the first two years, and all the other subjects were A’s or A+. She also won three “Golden Key” honorary awards, one being “Phi-Beta-Kappa,” the most famous Golden Key honorary award for American students then.
She received her Ph.D. and went on to MIT
After receiving her Ph.D. in 1942, Wang Mingzhen’s teacher, Professor S. Goudsmit, introduced her to the Theory Group of the Radar Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was the only Chinese in this group. Soon after her Ph.D., her supervisor, G.E. Uhlenbeck, became the head of this Theory Group.
Based on her doctoral dissertation in the summer of 1944, she co-wrote an article on Brownian motion with her supervisor, published in the Review of Modern Physics in 1945. To this day, this paper remains one of the leading papers on understanding Brownian motion.
See Part 2 here
