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SCMP Reporter

'I feel fine,' lied Yang Liwei , eyes closed and arms drifting weightlessly. 
It was 9.31am on October 15, 2003. Yang had just become China's first astronaut, and ground control was asking him how he felt.
His positive response brought enormous joy and relief to hundreds of millions of people holding their breath  in front of television sets around the  country. 
'I actually felt wretched,' Yang admitted recently in his best-selling autobiography, The Long March to Space. 'The fact is, I was suffering something called inversion illusion and summoning all my willpower and strength to fight against it ... no one had ever mentioned it to me during training. The experience was very terrible.' 
Similar torturous moments occurred throughout the mission, but Yang almost always chose to keep the pain and worry to himself, beaming mostly good news to the ground. By Western standards, he was telling bare-faced lies, but  on the mainland almost everyone thinks he did exactly the right thing. 
Zhang Hesheng , a professor at Beijing Normal University's  College of Chinese Language and Culture,  said Yang's remarks were white lies that harmed no one and were intended to benefit the hearer. 
'He chose to keep the suffering and fear to himself to make ground control and the whole country relieved and happy,' Zhang said. 
'In Chinese society it is regarded as an act of personal sacrifice. It is common practice.' 
And it's one that dates back to Confucius. A famous tale about lies in the Analects of Confucius tells  of an official who reported to the government that his father had stolen a goat. 
Confucius  commented: 'I don't think he is a virtuous man. A father should lie for his son, and a son lie for his father - that's real virtue.'
Dr Lin Siyun , a Japan-based sinologist, said  many Chinese people had a habit of lying for others. 
'If you think  the Chinese lie simply to dupe the hearer, you would be very wrong,' Lin said. 'In many circumstances, Chinese people lie not for themselves but for their families and even the country. It has little to do with communist propaganda and has roots deep in traditional culture.' 
On that first space flight, the illusion tortured Yang for a long time,  making him feel he was tumbling backwards. When it finally ceased, his nerves were in for another shock. 
Something 'extremely bright' flashed  outside a window. 
'I was startled, thinking: has something gone wrong with the spacecraft?' he said. To make matters worse, a mysterious sound began to echo in the capsule. 
'It came in waves ... not from within the spacecraft but sounded like someone knocking the hull from outside with a wooden hammer, dong ... dong ... dong ... dong.  I was very nervous, but since all readings were normal, I did not report the phenomenon to the ground.' 
 Yang was supposed to sleep for six hours. But he could not.  The non-stop  flashing and sound made him extremely uneasy. 
To avoid raising suspicions on the ground, he decided to cheat. 
'When the spacecraft entered a zone visible to ground stations, I lay down quietly. As soon as the spacecraft became invisible, I went about my own business.' 
Lin says such 'virtuous lies', though commonly accepted, have repeatedly led to disaster in Chinese history. In the late 1950s, the whole  nation, from the  leadership to the  peasants, was caught up in a big lie that the  country had harvested more crops than it could  consume. 
Many people knew  it couldn't be true, but to save the image of chairman Mao Zedong , few were willing to speak out. When the bubble burst, more than 30 million  had starved to death in the biggest man-made disaster in human history. 
Severe acute respiratory syndrome, in the same year as Yang's historic flight,  is another example. Some officials and scholars,  thinking  lies could save China's image and prevent chaos, deliberately played down the severity of the epidemic.  
Of course,  one can lie in  more ways than one.  Yang said last year female astronauts should  go into space only when China's space station was ready. 'We need larger rooms, or astronauts will get too intimate with one another,' he said with a wink. 'Especially when they can't be seen.'




Why suffering astronaut told the nation he was fine