Out of Mao's Shadow

by Philip P. Pan

  Jiang thought the men trying to silence him were a nervous bunch. He knew he had angered the old guard in power, and he expected he would eventually be made to suffer the consequences. But these men behaved as if they were the ones in trouble. When Jiang arranged to travel to western China to oversee an operation on an old patient, they assigned an official to accompany him, and then at the airport, they suddenly tried to stop him from leaving before he boarded the plane. When he made plans to attend a literary conference in Beijing, a half dozen of them showed up at his home and tried to persuade him not to go, and when he insisted, they told him he couldn’t use the hospital’s car service. He hailed a cab and went anyway. These men were nervous not just because Jiang’s actions reflected poorly on their ability to keep subordinates in line. They were also worried, Jiang realized, because the Tiananmen massacre was a subject that could still divide the party, and because his letter had come amid uncertainty caused by the leadership transition. Hu Jintao was the new president and party chief, but his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, retained influence and remained head of the People’s Liberation Army. Jiang Zemin owed his job to the Tiananmen massacre; Deng had appointed him party chief after Zhao Ziyang was purged. Hu Jintao’s career, on the other hand, had not been tarnished by the massacre, and some held out hope that the new general secretary, who had moved so boldly to end the SARS cover-up, might actually consider the doctor’s appeal.

  In late March, three senior officials in the military’s discipline department began meeting with Jiang Yanyong and questioning him at length about his letter. They focused first on a passage in which he described a meeting with Yang Shangkun, the military leader who had served as Deng’s deputy and China’s president when Deng ordered the assault on the Tiananmen protesters. The encounter took place in 1998. Jiang had just returned from a visit to Taiwan, where he had met with a distant relative who worked in the government there, and he had been given a chance to brief Yang about the meeting. Afterward, the doctor asked the retired party leader if he would be interested in hearing him describe what he saw at his hospital on the night of the massacre, and Yang agreed. Jiang spoke for several minutes, he recalled, and when he finished, Yang sighed and told him that Tiananmen was the biggest mistake the party had ever made. The former president said there was nothing he could do to correct it, but added that he believed the party would eventually have to make amends. It was a remarkable admission, and Jiang included it in his letter because it strengthened his case for a reevaluation of the events of June 4. If someone as high-ranking and deeply involved in the crackdown as Yang could acknowledge the massacre was wrong, certainly the party’s new leaders could do so as well. But the discipline officials challenged Jiang’s account, asking him how he could prove the conversation took place as he described it, given that Yang passed away later that year. Jiang replied that he had told several people about it at the time. When the officials asked him to identify them, he demurred, saying he didn’t think that was necessary.

  The officials challenged Jiang to prove other parts of the letter, too—his estimate that hundreds of people were killed in the massacre, his claim that soldiers fired bullets that fragmented and shredded organs. The doctor told them that if the number of deaths was in question, they could check with city hospitals and come up with a more accurate figure. As for the bullets, he acknowledged he was not a weapons specialist, and he offered to issue a clarification saying that he could only confirm that tiny metal fragments were discovered in the wounds of several patients, and that photos and X-rays taken at the time would back him up. The officials also pressed Jiang for names. They wanted to know if anyone had helped him write the letter and who had seen drafts of it in advance. They wanted to know what he did with every copy he made of it. Jiang answered carefully, to avoid inadvertently implicating friends, and he went out of his way to point out that everyone he consulted urged him not to send the letter, including his own wife. The questioning continued for six or seven sessions, as the officials picked over the letter sentence by sentence and reviewed Jiang’s answers again and again. Finally, after about two weeks, the men showed Jiang a lengthy printout of their interview notes. He read through it carefully, made a few corrections, and signed his name.

  THE NEXT SEVERAL weeks passed uneventfully, and Jiang began to wonder if the party had decided not to take action against him after all. Every summer, he and his wife traveled to the United States to visit their daughter and grandson in California, and he applied to his military superiors for permission to go again as usual. The officials at the hospital were noncommittal, and told him they would pass his request up the chain of command. Jiang told them he would make travel arrangements, and they voiced no objections as he reserved tickets on a flight in mid-June and applied for a visa at the U.S. Embassy. Then, in late May, as the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre approached, his nervous superiors began trying to persuade him to leave Beijing and “recuperate” outside the city somewhere. Every year, the police forced prominent dissidents to leave the capital and spend the anniversary of the massacre elsewhere, and Jiang assumed that he had now made that list of “troublemakers.” He told his superiors there was no need for them to worry about him. He guaranteed he would do nothing to embarrass them on June 4. He felt he had already done enough by sending the letter, and he didn’t want to risk being denied the chance to visit his daughter. At the same time, he told his superiors that if the leadership didn’t want him to make the trip, he wouldn’t go. They told him they had heard nothing to indicate that was the case. On May 31, though, they summoned Jiang again and urged him once more to leave Beijing to “recuperate,” arguing that “anti-China forces at home and abroad” might try to “take advantage” of him. He insisted there was no need for him to leave, adding that there would be plenty of time for him to “recuperate” in California.

  Jiang and his wife were scheduled to visit the U.S. Embassy the next morning for their visa interviews. The first sign something was wrong came when the young soldier assigned by the hospital to drive them showed up with a small van instead of the regular car, which he said was being repaired. Then, after they boarded the van, he drove toward a rear gate of their apartment compound, telling them there was too much traffic at the main gate. Suddenly, he stopped short, the doors flung open, and eight large soldiers rushed in and pinned Jiang and his wife to their seats. Jiang shouted, demanding to know what was happening and why he was being abducted. His wife was terrified and shouting, too. The hospital’s propaganda chief climbed into the front passenger seat, and he eventually told the soldiers to ease up. Then he told the couple that they would reach their destination shortly, and their questions would be answered then.

  A half hour later, the van arrived at a military guesthouse on the western outskirts of Beijing, and the soldiers escorted Jiang and his wife to a conference room on the third floor. Several officials were waiting there, including Zhu, the hospital president, and Guo, the political commissar. This time, Guo spoke first. “We have invited you here for your own safety,” he said. “June fourth is approaching, and there will be various people outside looking for you, which would be harmful for your security. Here, you can rest, study, and improve your understanding.”

  Jiang was furious. “After abducting us like this, how can you say that we were invited?” he asked. His wife, Hua Zhongwei, a medical researcher, also challenged the men. “This is clearly a kidnapping!” she said. “Why are you calling it an invitation? How can you invite somebody this way?”

  Wen Degong, an official with the army’s general logistics department, tried to calm them. “We hope you can understand that the leadership is concerned for you. It is very disorderly outside. Here, you can rest and study in peace.”

  “The leadership is doing this for your own good,” Zhu added. “This arrangement is for you to rest. We hope you can understand.”

  Jiang demanded to see a formal document approving his detention. The officials said they did not have one
but promised to show him one soon. “You haven’t even received formal approval, but you can arrest people?” Jiang asked. “What’s the use of the constitution then?” He demanded pen and paper, and quickly scribbled out two letters. The first was a letter of protest addressed to Hu Jintao, accusing the men who had detained him of acting without regard to the law or the party’s policies. The second was a letter expressing his desire to resign from the military. When he finished writing, he asked the men to pass both letters up the chain of command. They agreed, and then they left.

  Jiang and his wife waited in the conference room, and when they were offered food, they refused to eat, in protest. At about 1 A.M., they were taken to a guest room on the first floor and told to rest. Four burly soldiers stood guard in the room and wouldn’t leave. Whenever Jiang or his wife used the bathroom, the soldiers insisted the bathroom door remain open. The couple complained they couldn’t sleep under such conditions, but the soldiers ignored them. “They claimed that we had been invited to rest,” Jiang recalled, “but in reality, we had been illegally imprisoned.”

  The next morning, doctors were summoned to examine Jiang and his wife. The stress, the sleepless night, the refusal to eat—it had clearly taken a toll on the elderly couple. Both recorded a spike in blood pressure, and Hua’s heartbeat also showed some irregularities. A decision was made to transfer them to a hospital. Jiang asked which hospital, and a colonel promised they were going back to the No. 301 Hospital. But Jiang sensed the man was lying, and he refused to go unless he put it in writing. The colonel wouldn’t do it, and he instead ordered soldiers to force Jiang and his wife into a car. As the car headed to the northwest, away from the No. 301 Hospital, Jiang and his wife huddled in the backseat, whispering about where they might be going. At first they worried the soldiers were taking them to be committed to a mental hospital they knew was in that direction. Later, they realized their destination was the army’s No. 309 Hospital, where the majority of the military’s SARS cases had been sent a year earlier. Jiang and his wife were taken under armed guard into a special ward and placed in separate rooms. Eight soldiers were assigned to watch each room.

  The next night, Guo and several other officials visited Jiang and read him a military order placing him under “administrative detention” until June 7. Jiang asked to see the regulations governing such detentions, and the officials promised to bring them to him the next day. Jiang argued that his wife should be allowed to go home, since the order didn’t cover her, but the officials told him not to worry about her. Over the next few days, the couple studied the volumes of military regulations that the officials provided them. They learned that “administrative detention” could be imposed on soldiers who disobeyed orders, created a public disturbance, engaged in drunken behavior, or threatened superiors with guns, as well as those suspected of planning to desert, murder someone, or commit suicide—none of the conditions applied to them. They also read that the detention of any military official of Jiang’s rank required the approval of the chairman of the Central Military Commission. In other words, Jiang Zemin himself must have approved the arrest.

  The doctor assumed at first that he had been detained as part of the government’s regular security sweep before the June 4 anniversary and that he would be released soon afterward. But as the anniversary came and went and he remained in custody, Jiang realized something else was happening. His days were divided into “rest time” and “study time,” and during the “study sessions,” military officials grilled him about his letter and tried to pressure him into retracting it and admitting he had been wrong to call for a reevaluation of the Tiananmen massacre. Jiang resisted, and he continued his hunger strike, refusing solid foods until June 6, the night before he was supposed to be released. The next day, Guo and Wen announced that his detention had been extended another week. Guo told Jiang that his hunger strike was an act of “serious resistance against the organization,” and as punishment barred him from seeing his wife. Later, after Jiang made it clear he would eat, he was allowed to see her during meals.

  After Jiang spent another week under “administrative detention,” Guo and Wen returned and told him he was now being detained under party regulations that allowed him to be held indefinitely. His wife could go home, they said, but he would have to stay until he “changed his thinking” and “improved his understanding.” Soldiers moved him to another military facility where he remained under twenty-four-hour guard, and the “study sessions” continued. Jiang had survived the Cultural Revolution, so he was familiar with the party’s indoctrination methods—the lengthy interrogations, the ideological harangues, the daily requests for him to think about what he had done and submit written statements so officials could scrutinize them for errors and push him to admit he was wrong. The pressure was intense, but Jiang refused to acquiesce. Day after day, he stood by his letter. Some of the officials berated him and tried to scare him into backing down. Others adopted a softer approach, gently urging him to consider the party’s point of view. He was even forced to watch a long film that blamed the Tiananmen protests on a handful of intellectuals who wanted to overthrow the party and a rift in the leadership caused by the fallen party chief, Zhao Ziyang. Deng was hailed in the film as a hero, the man who decided that no sacrifice would be too great to save the party from collapse, who ensured that the Communist martyrs who fought the Japanese and the imperialists to establish the People’s Republic of China had not died in vain.

  The process, Jiang knew, was aimed at breaking his will and extracting a confession that could be used to undermine his public standing. At the same time, the officials wanted information that could be used to implicate others. They wanted to know how his letter had leaked, and they wanted Jiang to accept that it was a “serious political mistake” for him to write it in the first place. Jiang, of course, refused to play along. He told them he had sent the letter to so many officials, that any of their secretaries, relatives, or friends might have posted it online. He didn’t know who leaked it, he said, so it was pointless for them to keep asking him. When Deng Xiaoping passed away in 1997, he reminded them, the BBC broadcast the news before Xinhua could, and no one ever figured out how it leaked. The officials, though, insisted Jiang accept the blame for the letter getting out. If he had not written it, they said, it couldn’t have been leaked, so he must take responsibility for the “losses” suffered by the nation as a result. Jiang generally kept his cool in the face of such circular reasoning, but the questioning sometimes tried his patience. One senior military official asked him where he bought the paper he printed the letters on, how many pieces he purchased, and what he paid for it, and then followed up by also asking where he bought the envelopes and how much he paid for those. Jiang blew up, stormed out of the room, and refused to speak to him. “They never asked me questions like that again,” he said.

  As the weeks passed, Jiang began searching for a way to persuade the authorities to release him. In late June, he wrote a forty-page letter to Hu Jintao urging him to allow him to return home and continue his “study sessions” under house arrest. His indefinite detention, he argued, could be used against the party by prodemocracy forces abroad. He also considered using more agreeable language in the statements he wrote. Jiang could never bring himself to condone the Tiananmen massacre, but he wanted to go home, and he needed to write something to appease the men who had imprisoned him. Finally, while insisting that he shouldn’t be held responsible for the actions of others, he conceded that some people might have used his letter to attack the party. He also settled on a medical metaphor to illustrate his “improved understanding” of the Tiananmen massacre. There were costs and benefits to using troops to suppress the student protests, he wrote. If the benefits outweighed the costs, then one might take such action. “The situation could be likened to that of a patient with rectal cancer,” he continued.

  With surgery, he might live and that would be a benefit, but the colostomy would make life inconvenient and that would be
a cost. Comparing the major benefit of living with the minor cost of a colostomy, the benefits still outweigh the costs, so the surgery should take place. We often talk things over with patients like this, to persuade them to undergo surgery. On June 4th, hundreds of students and ordinary people were killed. This was an extremely high cost to pay. But in the end, the Communist Party was not toppled, the People’s Republic was not overthrown, and this was also a significant benefit. I should improve my understanding in this way.

  That was as far as Jiang was willing to go. He hoped the authorities would focus on his conciliatory tone instead of his refusal to endorse the massacre. He hoped they would overlook the fact that he had just compared the party to a dying cancer patient who could no longer have normal bowel movements and was likely to suffer impotence and incontinence. He knew that even with surgery, the survival rates for rectal cancer were very low. But he didn’t think the men deciding his fate knew that.

  SEVEN WEEKS AFTER Jiang was detained, the authorities suddenly sent him home. He had to stay in his apartment, accept restrictions on his ability to see and talk to people, stop using e-mail, and disconnect his Internet line. But at least he was home. Jiang never learned why he was released. His more conciliatory statement might have been a factor. The officials assigned to reeducate him might have concluded that that was the closest they would ever get to an admission of guilt from such a stubborn old man. Or maybe the party’s leaders recognized the risk they were taking by arresting a man who had become a hero at home and abroad for exposing the SARS cover-up. If they had not released him, he would have become the nation’s most famous political prisoner. The case would have drawn attention again to the Tiananmen massacre, and it could have triggered a public backlash or divided the party. The Washington Post had published my article about Jiang’s detention as the lead story on the front page, and a commentator on Hong Kong’s Phoenix television had discussed the article on a show broadcast into millions of homes in China. Jiang and the soldiers guarding him saw the show, too. Within days, the authorities agreed to discuss his proposal to be held under house arrest, and less than two weeks later, they took him home.