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.”
On the night of June 3, I heard repeated broadcasts urging people to stay off the streets. At about 10 P.M., I was in my apartment when I heard the sound of continuous gunfire from the north. Several minutes later, my pager beeped. It was the emergency room calling me, and I rushed over. What I found was unimaginable—on the floor and the tables of the emergency room were seven young people, their faces and bodies covered with blood. Two of them were later confirmed dead by EKG. My head buzzed and I nearly passed out. I had been a surgeon for more than 30 years. I had treated wounded soldiers before, while on the medical team of the PLA railway corps that built the Chengdu-Kunming Railway. But their injuries resulted from unavoidable accidents during the construction process, while before my eyes, in Beijing, the magnificent capital of China, lying in front of me, were our own people, killed by our people’s army, with weapons supplied by the people.
I didn’t have time to dwell on it. After the sound of another round of gunfire, ordinary residents using wooden boards and pull carts brought more injured young people to the emergency room. As I examined the wounded, I asked the staff to tell other surgeons and nurses to hurry to the operating rooms. Our hospital had a total of 18 operating rooms, and all of them were put to use saving lives. I was in the emergency room, doing triage and emergency care. In the two hours between 10 P.M. and midnight, our hospital’s emergency room admitted 89 patients with gunshot wounds. Seven of them later died because efforts to save them were ineffective. In the hospital’s 18 operating rooms, three groups of doctors worked late into the night, saving all who could be saved.
I will never forget some of those who died. There was a young man in his 20s, whose parents were retired officials from the Seventh Ministry of Machine Building across from our hospital…. There were shots outside, and this young man—the youngest of the family, who had picked up his marriage license earlier that day—ran out with his fiancée. Just before they reached the Wukesong intersection, they were strafed by gunfire. The young woman turned and ran, and she yelled at her boyfriend to run too. She had not gone far when she realized he hadn’t followed her, so she went back. After a short while, she found him lying on the side of the road in a pool of blood. She screamed at him, but he didn’t respond. She tugged him, but he didn’t move. People nearby quickly gathered around, and four or five of them pulled him up and dragged him to our emergency room. The nurses tried to take his blood pressure and found none. They hooked him to a cardiograph, and it showed a flat line….
His girlfriend begged us to save him, but there was really nothing we could do, because the flat line meant his heart had stopped beating. I believe the bullet struck his heart. The girl sobbed frantically, but quickly ran home to get her boyfriend’s mother. After arriving, the mother stood over his body, checking it over again and again, but she found only one bullet wound. Then she came over and threw herself at my feet, clasping my legs in her arms and crying out for me to save her son. My face was wet with tears; there was nothing I could say. I squatted down next to this grief-stricken mother, and told her the facts, that her son’s heart had been shattered, that there was no way to save him. Then, after calming down a bit, this mother wept and cursed: “I joined the military when I was very young. I joined the party, and fought with the Communist Party against Japan and Chiang Kai-shek. Now, our People’s Liberation Army has killed my dearest son….”
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 eld
erly 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.
The party worried that acknowledging the massacre would cause “instability,” he argued, but its obsession with stability only stirred greater resentment and disaffection. Every spring, as the anniversary of the massacre approached, the party became nervous and mobilized to prevent any attempt to memorialize the victims. It wanted people to forget about Tiananmen and move on. It spun the massacre into a “political disturbance” and then just an “incident,” and it hoped the truth of what happened would fade with time. But people had not forgotten, Jiang wrote. They had been bullied into silence, but with each passing year, their anger and frustration grew—and the party’s anxiety climbed, too. Jiang urged the new leaders to take a new approach. They should admit the party was wrong to send troops into the square and order them to fire on unarmed civilians. They should address the pain of those who lost their loved ones in the massacre, and acknowledge, at long last, that the protesters were not “thugs” or “counterrevolutionaries” but patriots calling for a better and more honest government. Simply put, Jiang asked them to end the lies. Only if the party corrected its mistakes, he argued, could it count on the support of the people—the source of real stability.
It was February 2004 by the time Jiang finished showing drafts of his letter to friends and making the final changes to the document. Nearly a year had passed since he exposed the SARS cover-up, and the National People’s Congress was preparing to convene again. The fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre was just months away. From Jiang’s perspective, the timing was perfect. “I have considered the various consequences I might encounter after writing this letter, but I have decided nevertheless to tell you my views truthfully,” he wrote. “If the leadership feels it is necessary, please make time to speak with me.” Jiang made eighty copies of the letter and prepared a list of the nation’s top officials, including the leaders of the National People’s Congress. He sent most of the letters by express mail from his local post office. He asked a few well-connected friends to hand-deliver others. Finally, he gave several copies to his superiors at the hospital and asked them to pass them up through official channels. Then he went home to wait for a response.
THE HOSPITAL’S PRESIDENT, Zhu Shijun, and its political commissar, Guo Xuheng, visited Jiang at home two days later. They were career military officials, loyal party men who had won promotions after the Tiananmen massacre and climbed the ranks by never questioning orders. Zhu, a self-important official in his early sixties with narrow eyes and pale lips, spoke first. All citizens had the right to send a letter to the National People’s Congress, he told Jiang, but the party’s position on the “June 4th Incident” was decided long ago, and as a party member, he must “maintain consistency” with that position. “I hope you can improve your understanding,” he said, “and recognize that what you did was not right.” Guo was less polite. “By doing this, you have committed a serious political mistake!” he declared. Jiang argued with the men for a while, but when they warned him not to give his letter to the media, he promised he wouldn’t. He reminded them that he had distributed his letter through proper channels, and said he would neither contact reporters nor post the letter on the Internet. It was an easy promise to make. Jiang had sent the letter to so many people, he knew it was only a matter of time before a copy leaked out.
Four days later, it did. The National People’s Congress had just opened its annual session, but the foreign journalists gathered in the capital ended up writing and asking questions about Jiang’s letter instead. It was a dramatic story: the elderly surgeon who exposed the SARS cover-up was now challenging the party to come clean on the Tiananmen massacre. The full text of the letter was published on Internet sites overseas, and copies circulated throughout Beijing, where some people began selling them in the city’s underground book markets. Jiang was inundated with phone calls again, from reporters but also ordinary citizens who had seen his letter. He was careful to refer the journalists to his superiors, but he told everyone who called that yes, he had written a letter to the leadership about the Tiananmen massacre. He added that he had not posted it online, and did not know how it had gotten out.
Once again, Jiang had put the authorities in a difficult position, and at first they responded with restraint. No one came to put him under house arrest, or drag him to prison in handcuffs, as the police sometimes did to those who spoke out about the Tiananmen massacre. Instead, the military sent a party historian to speak to Jiang; the middle-aged man lectured the doctor about how Mao had overcome internal rivals with “incorrect thoughts,” united the party, and led it to victory in the Communist Revolution. Deng Xiaoping, he argued, had done the
same in 1989 with the Tiananmen crackdown, triumphing against officials with “incorrect thoughts” and leading the party into a new era of stability and prosperity. But when the historian finished speaking, Jiang peppered him with questions—about Mao’s persecution of the Rightists; about the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward; about the violence of the Cultural Revolution. Jiang asked, Why didn’t anyone stand up to Mao? What kind of lessons should we draw from such a painful history? The historian mumbled something about continuing the discussion another time and left. He never came back.
Instead, the party sent others. Zhu and Guo returned, and more senior officials from the military’s general logistics department also visited Jiang or summoned him to meetings at the hospital. They urged him again and again to admit he was wrong to send the letter, but he refused. Gradually, they stepped up the pressure. Zhu denounced Jiang at a hospital staff meeting, saying the foreign media had made a big deal of his letter and that he had caused great harm to the nation, the party, the military, and the hospital. “We must repudiate his mistake,” he said. But Jiang stood and challenged him, telling everyone that he had only written the truth and that he had sent the letter to the leadership through proper channels. If Zhu really believed it should be condemned, he added, he should distribute copies to the hospital staff so they could see what he had written. The room erupted, with some doctors and nurses cheering him and others trying to shout him down.
Out of Mao's Shadow Page 27
