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In the beginning, though, even after the success of his Keshan research, Li was virtually unknown in China. Newspaper reports never mentioned the names of Li and his colleagues. His achievements were ignored. Instead of honoring him, the authorities tried to silence him: Li was sent to a labor camp.

The year was 1968 and Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution was in full swing. Intellectuals like Li, who were devoted to learning and free thought, were out of favor. Graduate schools were shut down. Countless professors were put under detention, including Li's advisor, who was dragged out every day to be publicly criticized by the Red Guard. Angry mobs surrounded him, shouting, "Down with the anti-revolutionary academic authority." Others were not so lucky and died of abuse or suicide.

Li, meanwhile, spent his days taking orders from the army, planting rice and wheat alongside fellow students and others the regime considered untrustworthy. For two years, he was not allowed to go home. But Li refused to give up his research. Ignoring army officials, who threatened to keep him in the camp forever, Li wrote letters to his Keshan team, offering advice and support.

Perry Smith One of 720 samples of rice brought back recently from China for analysis at UNH.

During his years in the labor camp, Li was sustained by ideas he had gleaned from reading. Jack London's Love of Life, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and other books--even in their Chinese translation--had stirred in him a sense of life's larger potential and the inherent goodness of humanity. Li, who had discovered the books as a young man, had never dared discuss the controversial ideas they introduced. But he took their messages to heart. "I learned that people must be brave and speak out if something is wrong. I learned about the beauty of the world, the beauty of human beings, their good hearts and good spirit."

When Li was released from the labor camp in 1970, he went straight to Xian to see his mother, who had been widowed for ten years. His father had died the same day Li had started college in Beijing. But his mother had forbidden her oldest son to interrupt his studies to come home and help. Instead, she began making matchboxes to support herself and her six children.

During Li's visit home, he also met his wife-to-be, Ruilan Lu, a childhood friend recently released from another labor camp. In 1972, the newly married Li received a call from the Beijing government, asking him to help solve China's massive pollution problem. "Until then, people were not allowed to say we had a pollution problem," says Li. "It was a political issue. Pollution belonged only to capitalism."

In reality, China's air, water and soil, especially in cities, were seriously contaminated. Li's team studied the problem near Beijing, where pollution and disease were occurring simultaneously. The methodologies they established were eventually adopted throughout China. But when the research began, it was, like the Keshan project, highly classified.

When the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Li played an active role in the intellectual rebirth of China. He participated in the first conference designed to launch a long-term plan for scientific development. He was elected to the committee on environmental science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. And the research achievements of Li and his team were finally recognized with China's first national scientific achievement prize.

Ignoring an opportunity for a senior position at the academy, Li surprised his colleagues and friends by going back to school as soon as graduate training resumed. "I wanted to gain more knowledge," says Li, "especially in thermodynamics and chemical reaction kinetics, to understand how the chemical elements link life to its environment in such a harmonious way."

During the next 10 years, Li immersed himself in academia, making up for lost time. He earned a master's degree in environmental chemistry, and in 1985, after two years alone at the University of Wisconsin --his wife remained in China raising their two young daughters--he received a Ph.D. in biogeochemistry.

A Chinese farmer, left, separates grains of rice from the stalks and husks by throwing it in the air with a wooden shovel.

In 1987, Li received another call from the Chinese government asking him to become a senior administrator of China's environmental protection agency. "Basically, I had to say yes," says Li. And so he was thrust from the world of academia into the world of policy making. As relations with the West improved, Li was sent to Washington, D.C., for a crash course with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on how to run an organization.

And then came June 4, 1989. Li and his wife, who was in Washington for a visit, watched on television as tanks drove into Tiananmen Square, firing on pro-democracy student protestors. "We really felt like we had to support the students," says Li. "What they did could help stem the rapidly increasing tide of corruption. We had to do something, or there would be no hope for China." Li joined the demonstrations in Washington, and at the urging of his mostly younger companions, and in spite of the pleas of his wife, who feared for their daughters' safety in China, the softspoken Li stood in front of television cameras at the Lincoln Memorial and voiced support for the Tiananmen Square protestors. "It was hard for me to do it," he says. "If I was viewed as anti-revolutionary, my daughters could be in big trouble." Li's courage did, in fact, change his life forever. The next day, Chinese authorities called the EPA demanding Li's return to China. Many protestors back home were already in prison. More phone calls and telegrams followed. In the end, Li chose to disobey the order to return. And with that decision, his career in China was over.

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