Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (32 page)

Fortunately for the new party leaders, SARS proved a less formidable opponent than feared. Jiang Yanyong was right: the disease was no match for a government willing to confront it openly and honestly. Under Hu’s leadership, the party mobilized the full power of the state to contain the epidemic, setting up infection-control checkpoints, opening fever wards, ordering mass quarantines, even setting up temporary hospitals. Three months later, after infecting more than eight thousand people in twenty-nine countries and taking the lives of 774, including 349 in China, the virus was gone. But the party’s victory had come at a price. The government had been forced to admit it lied about a pressing matter of public health, and the shine on the Chinese model of authoritarianism was tarnished. Perhaps as important, the SARS epidemic showed the public that one man with the courage of his convictions could challenge the party-state and not just survive but prevail.

S
UDDENLY,
J
IANG
Y
ANYONG
was a national hero. State media portrayed him as the honest doctor who dared to speak when others were silent, the man who stood up to the party bosses and saved lives around the world. His wizened face appeared on the cover of
Sanlian Shenghuo,
the popular weekly newsmagazine published by Xinhua, and producers at China Central Television invited him to appear on one of the nation’s top news shows. Even the staid
People’s Daily
posted a flattering article about him on its Web site. The censors, meanwhile, didn’t know what to do. The leadership had abandoned the cover-up so abruptly, the rank and file in the party apparatus were stunned and confused. Did Hu and Wen really mean it when they declared that lies—the stock and trade of the party hacks—would no longer be tolerated? Were they planning political reforms and proposing greater freedom for the press, or just distancing themselves from the cover-up and the old guard that had just retired? The propaganda department wasn’t sure, and journalists eager for change sensed the hesitation. Emboldened by the reversal of the cover-up, encouraged by the talk of openness coming from the party’s new leaders, they seized on the chance to tell the world about Jiang.

He was just an elderly surgeon, but he presented a dilemma for the government. Punishing him while the nation and the world were watching would undermine its attempt to put the cover-up behind it and bring the epidemic under control. But the propaganda czars were accustomed to handpicking the nation’s heroes and celebrities—even its film stars—and they were uncomfortable when someone won the public’s respect on his own, especially if the person in question had an independent streak. Fame, they knew, could mean influence, and they worried when someone they couldn’t control had influence. Jiang presented a particularly troublesome case because, despite his party and military credentials, he had already demonstrated an ability to think for himself and a willingness to challenge the government. So as the campaign against SARS began to show results, the party began to rewrite history. In a news conference on national television in late May, a deputy health minister, Gao Qiang, denied the government had ever tried to conceal the epidemic, and when a reporter asked about Jiang, he feigned exasperation and said he didn’t know why people were interested in him. “We have six million doctors and health-care workers,” the minister said. “Jiang Yanyong is one of them.” It was an unconvincing performance, but it served its purpose. The censors snapped into action, the state media fell into line, and the doctor’s run of good press came to an end. Persuading the public to forget him, though, would not be as easy.

Jiang wasn’t surprised when the state media stopped writing about him. He had been told by the military he needed permission to speak to the press, and he had referred countless reporters to hospital officials, who always rejected the interview requests. Many of these reporters had gone ahead and written stories anyway, but Jiang never expected the coverage to continue for long, and in any case, it wasn’t that important to him. He had not spoken out about SARS to bring attention to himself but to force the government to openly confront the disease, and by that measure, he could feel good about what he had accomplished. He had called on the health minister to resign, and the health minister had been dismissed. He had recommended infection-control measures, and they had been implemented across the country. He had urged the party to share what it knew about the disease, and a propaganda campaign had been launched.

But even as the government contained the epidemic, Jiang felt a pang of guilt. The SARS cover-up was not the first time he had to decide whether to submit to party authority and keep quiet about wrongdoing. He had confronted a similar choice after the Tiananmen massacre. At the time, he believed he had acted honorably. He had accepted retirement rather than endorse the crackdown, and for years he felt that his conscience was clear. Occasionally, he told friends in private what he saw in the emergency room on the night of June 3, 1989, but he never became a public critic of the government. He sympathized with the families of those who were killed, but he knew that speaking out would cost him his job, perhaps his pension and apartment as well, and it would certainly make life more difficult for his wife and children. And what would it accomplish? Like millions of others angered by the massacre and disappointed in the path that China took after it, Jiang had chosen to live in silence.

As the years passed, though, the decision began to weigh on him. Had he really done enough? Could he have done more? Now, as the public praised his integrity and hailed him as the “honest doctor” who exposed the SARS cover-up, those feelings of shame and remorse were stronger than ever. If one person speaking truth to power could force the party to admit its crimes and change history, as he had shown in the SARS crisis, then why had he remained quiet for so long about the Tiananmen massacre? Had he been too quick to compromise, too willing to play it safe all those years? These were difficult questions for the elderly surgeon to consider as he looked back on his life, and Jiang wrestled with them for months. Then, as the party celebrated its victory against SARS and did its best to persuade the public to forget him, Jiang quietly decided he would speak out again. He had gained a measure of fame and political capital in the SARS crisis, and he resolved to use it on behalf of the victims of Tiananmen and their families.

Jiang sat down to write, to record what he had seen that night so many years ago and share it with the party’s new leaders. The words came easily, in a flood of suppressed memory and emotion. “I am a surgeon at the PLA No. 301 Hospital,” he wrote. “I was chief of the department of general surgery on June 4, 1989.”

Jiang wrote about how he had struggled to save a young athlete who died on his operating table because the hospital didn’t have enough blood. He recalled his conversation with an army major who had been shot but counted himself lucky because an elderly man and a young child standing next to him were killed. He reported that tiny bullet fragments had shredded the organs of several patients and suggested soldiers had used special ammunition that shattered to cause more harm. The students he treated that night were innocent civilians, Jiang wrote, young men and women who were peacefully protesting corruption and demanding honest government. His fellow soldiers in Beijing understood this and they refused to use violence to suppress the demonstrations, he wrote, but “a small number of leaders who supported corruption acted in a frenzied manner” and summoned reinforcements from the provinces, troops who were kept in the dark about the student movement and told to open fire on a “counter-revolutionary rebellion.”

On page after page, over a period of months, Jiang poured his heart into the letter. He had been thinking about breaking his silence on Tiananmen for a long time, and over the years, he had discussed the subject with friends, many of whom had also been pushed into retirement after refusing to adopt a “correct attitude” toward the crackdown. Now, he shared drafts of his letter with them and asked their permission to write about them. In some ways, they had inspired him to act, and he felt as if he was writing for them as much as for himself. One classmate he wrote about, Tang Peixuan, a ranking official in the Academy of Military Sciences, lost his job in the purge that followed the massacre. When party officials pressured him to endorse the crackdown, Tang reminded them that as a young man he had participated in Communist-backed student protests against the Nationalist government. The Nationalists had used fire hoses to break up the demonstrations, he said, so how could the party that overthrew them resort to machine guns and tanks? Another acquaintance, the famed playwright Wu Zuguang, spoke out against the massacre at a meeting of prominent writers and artists on a party advisory committee. None of the other committee members—some of the nation’s brightest talents—had the courage to stand and support him. Their silence disappointed Wu and weighed on him in his final years, Jiang wrote. Not long before his death, Wu told him that a person’s mouth was only good for eating and speaking, and if it could not be used for speaking the truth, then it was only good for eating and that wasn’t much. “My conversations with Wu taught me a lot,” Jiang wrote. “People should speak out, and speak the truth.”

Jiang also wrote about the wife of one of his patients, Ding Zilin, a historian whose seventeen-year-old son died in the massacre. She was the leader of the Tiananmen Mothers, a group of parents and others working to record the names and stories of all those who were killed or injured in the crackdown, and Jiang had recently read a book she published in Hong Kong about the group’s efforts. “She and other family members of the victims have located and contacted the families of nearly 200 of the dead and injured, and in various ways, they have expressed their hope—their demand that the government earnestly and responsibly explain the killing of their innocent relatives,” Jiang wrote. “This is a completely fair and reasonable request. Who doesn’t have a father, a mother, children, or siblings? Anybody whose loved ones have been murdered like this would make the same request. As Communist Party members, as Chinese citizens, as human beings, we should all support their righteous demand with the knowledge that justice is on our side.” Every year, Jiang wrote, the Tiananmen Mothers appealed to the National People’s Congress for redress, and every year they were ignored.