Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (31 page)

“Through the hard work of the central and local health departments, the number of people infected has fallen sharply,” he declared. “Mainland China is stable, and people are going about their lives and work as usual.” Zhang said 1,190 cases of SARS had been reported in China, but almost all of them were in Guangdong Province, and nearly 80 percent of those patients had recovered. In Beijing, he said there were only twelve cases. Addressing a journalist wearing a surgical mask, Zhang added, “I can tell you all responsibly that it is safe to work, live, and travel in China. Each one of you seated here, I believe you are safe, whether you are wearing a mask or not.”

As he watched Zhang’s performance on television, Jiang grew furious, and the intensity of his outrage surprised him a bit. He had been a party member long enough to understand how common it was for government officials to lie to the public. But this was somehow worse. Jiang knew that SARS was a dangerous disease, and that a major epidemic could be in the works in Beijing. He had watched enough of his colleagues get sick to understand that doctors and nurses in the city were unprepared. Beijing’s long winter was giving way to spring, and tourists from around the world, reassured by Zhang’s pronouncements, would soon converge on the ancient capital. Jiang worried that if just a few of them contracted SARS, they could infect fellow airline passengers and carry the virus to their home countries. The consequences could be catastrophic. Perhaps what upset him most, though, was the fact that it was a fellow doctor—a man who had taken an oath to his patients—who was trying to conceal the outbreak. A doctor, he thought, should know better.

Jiang was just one surgeon, at one hospital, but he had already seen enough patients to know that Zhang’s claim that there were only twelve cases of SARS in Beijing was untrue. After the news conference, he called colleagues at the No. 302 and No. 309 hospitals to discuss the situation—and to gather hard numbers. One of the doctors whom Jiang contacted recalled that he sounded extremely agitated on the phone. Jiang urged him to tell the hospital president that the health minister’s numbers were wrong, and demanded the president’s home phone number so he could call him, too. But the doctor was worried that Jiang “was getting himself into trouble” and refused to give him the number. Another colleague recalled the urgency with which Jiang tried to gather information about the outbreak. “I would tell him what I knew, and he would tell me what he knew,” he said. “We were quite worried at the time, because there had already been large-scale outbreaks in Guangdong and Hong Kong. If it wasn’t handled well, it would explode in Beijing as well. We thought some of what was being done was wrong, but we were frustrated and could only talk about it privately. At the time, I had no idea what Jiang was going to do.”

Jiang himself wasn’t sure, either, but he kept collecting information. He quickly discovered there were forty patients diagnosed with SARS at the No. 302 Hospital and sixty patients at the No. 309 Hospital. The health minister had said that only three people had died of SARS in all of Beijing, but Jiang was told that nine had died in those two hospitals alone. The next morning, he learned there were forty-six more SARS cases in his own hospital. He sought out hospital officials, and asked them to report to their superiors that Zhang’s figures were incorrect. “But they told me their superiors had issued regulations,” Jiang recalled. “As members of the military, we couldn’t report this problem.” In the afternoon, Jiang ran into two of the army’s former health chiefs, and he asked them what they thought of Zhang’s news conference. Both said they believed that what he had said was wrong. One told Jiang he had heard there were already more than forty SARS cases in the army’s general logistics department. The health minister had served as a deputy to one of the men, and Jiang asked him sarcastically how he could have trained a liar.

It was possible the health minister didn’t have accurate data about SARS. Party bureaucrats often tried to hide bad news from senior officials to avoid blame. But it seemed more likely to Jiang that the minister was fully informed and simply concealing the truth from the public. He could be following orders from the party leadership, of course, but even if Hu Jintao himself had approved the cover-up, Jiang believed it was wrong. Sitting in front of his computer that night, he began writing an indignant e-mail.

The health minister, he wrote, appeared to be a student of Lin Biao, the military leader who was Mao’s second-in-command during the Cultural Revolution and who once declared that “without telling lies, one cannot accomplish great things.”

“Today, I went to the hospital wards,” Jiang continued, “and all the doctors and nurses who saw yesterday’s news conference were very angry.” He explained how the parents of the woman from Taiyuan had died, and how ten doctors and nurses at the No. 302 Hospital were infected while treating them. He described how SARS had spread through his hospital, and how some departments were forced to shut down. Finally, he said he had called colleagues at the No. 309 Hospital, which had been designated by the military to handle its SARS cases. “They said that Zhang was just talking nonsense,” he wrote, “that the No. 309 Hospital had already admitted close to 40 SARS patients. As of yesterday, six had already died.

“The material I am providing has been verified, and I accept full responsibility for it,” he concluded. After signing his name, Jiang looked up two e-mail addresses and typed them in—one for the international news channel of the national broadcaster, China Central Television, and the other for the newsroom of Phoenix Satellite Television, a government-friendly station in Hong Kong with permission to broadcast in the mainland. Then he hit the send button.

Years later, when I asked him why he decided to speak out, Jiang said it wasn’t an easy decision. He knew the cover-up depended on the silence of countless people like himself, and he knew the cost of breaking ranks could be severe. He knew he could be accused of violating military discipline or disclosing state secrets. He knew he could lose his pension or even face arrest. But Jiang said he also reminded himself that he really wasn’t doing anything wrong. He was just telling the truth and expressing his opinion, and those were rights guaranteed to all citizens by the constitution. “Of course, it was possible, very possible, that it would mean trouble,” he told me. “I was prepared for that.” In the end, he said, he was driven to act by a sense of responsibility as a doctor. “This disease wasn’t something invincible,” he said. “As long as you confronted it properly, it could be contained. But if there was incorrect information out there, then it would be difficult. If everyone believed it was already under control, then people would relax, they wouldn’t work hard at it, and that would lead to a disaster, not just for China but also for the world. So as a doctor, I felt I had a duty to tell the truth. I felt I should tell the public everything I knew about the situation. If doctors didn’t tell the truth, more people would die, and the nation would suffer.”

J
IANG WAITED ANXIOUSLY
for a response to his e-mail. At first, nothing happened. There was no reply, no phone call, not even a knock on the door. Instead, the government’s denials continued. A pamphlet titled “Atypical Pneumonia Is Nothing to Be Afraid Of” was published and the national tourism bureau convened a meeting of foreign airline and travel agents to reassure them the epidemic was over. “A well-organized holiday, with millions of people traveling around this vast country, will show the world that tourism in China is safe and healthy,” one official, Sun Gang, told the
People’s Daily
of the upcoming May Day vacation. A few days later, the government held a news conference to disclose that a Finnish diplomat employed by the International Labor Organization in Beijing had died of SARS. But a city official claimed he had been infected overseas, and reiterated that “the problem of SARS spreading in Beijing does not exist.”

Jiang didn’t know whether his e-mail had been lost or ignored, but he grew impatient. Every day that passed with the epidemic hidden from the public was a day the virus was moving unchecked through the city and its hospitals. Frustrated, Jiang forwarded his e-mail to a few friends, hoping one of them could get it to someone in the leadership, or perhaps the foreign media. Soon the
Wall Street Journal
was calling him, and then
Time
magazine. It was one thing to send a letter to the state-owned China Central Television or to reporters at the party-sanctioned Phoenix Satellite Television, but it would be quite another to give an interview to an American journalist. Throughout Chinese officialdom, there is a taboo about speaking to foreign reporters, who are regarded as hostile elements determined to weaken China. The unspoken rule is that loyal Chinese should never say anything to an outsider that would make the motherland look bad. In the military especially, doing so would be seen as an act of betrayal or even treason. But Jiang had tried going through official channels, and he had tried going to the domestic press, and nothing had changed. So he told the American reporters what he knew.

The
Journal
was the first to obtain a copy of Jiang’s e-mail, but the correspondent from
Time,
Susan Jakes, moved on it faster. She arranged to meet with Jiang, and she offered to withhold his name from her article to protect him. But Jiang insisted that she identify him. Information from an anonymous source, he said, would be much less credible.

Jiang was far from the only doctor to recognize that a cover-up was under way, but he was the first to muster the courage to challenge it openly. In a political system that relied on self-censorship, the impact of his disclosure was breathtaking. Almost immediately, the fiction that the party had sustained began to come apart. The international media seized on the
Time
article as soon as it was published on the magazine’s Web site, and reporters from around the world flooded Jiang with calls. He answered as many as he could before his stunned superiors at the hospital figured out what to do. The hospital’s party chief and its political commissar visited Jiang at home that evening and asked him to stop talking, saying he was violating military regulations that prohibited contact with the foreign press without permission. Jiang agreed but also chastised the men for remaining silent when the health minister lied to the press. “Our nation has suffered enough in the past because of lying,” he told them. “I hope from now on you will try your best to tell the truth.” Later, Jiang sent a letter through internal channels offering to accept punishment if the numbers he had made public were incorrect. But if he was right, he said, the health minister should resign and the government should move quickly to implement infection-control measures.

For several days, the party struggled to maintain the cover-up, but it seemed to move in slow motion as news of Jiang’s e-mail raced across China on Internet bulletin boards and in cell phone text messages. Party officials couldn’t even keep their lies straight. Beijing health officials held another news conference, saying there were twenty-seven cases of SARS in the city, but the same day, the city’s mayor told a visiting dignitary that there were just twenty-two. It really didn’t matter, though, because by then no one believed the government anymore—not the press, not the team from the World Health Organization that had arrived in Beijing to examine the situation, not the people of the city. Soon the party’s efforts to deny the truth began to reflect its desperation. Several hospitals were ordered to hide SARS cases from the WHO team by physically moving frail patients into different wards or even into hotels. At one hospital, doctors and nurses loaded patients into ambulances and rode around in circles with them until the WHO team left. Word of such outrages quickly filtered back to Jiang, whose classmates, students, and friends worked in hospitals across the city. Infuriated, he defied his superiors by writing a letter describing the hide-and-seek tactics and arranging for it to be delivered to
Time
and the WHO team. Another wave of damaging headlines followed.

And then, almost without warning, the party caved. One day it was saying there were only thirty-seven cases of SARS in Beijing. The next, it was suddenly acknowledging 339 confirmed cases and 402 suspected ones. One day health minister Zhang and his deputies were assuring the world it was safe to travel in China. The next, the health minister was abruptly dismissed, along with the mayor of Beijing, Meng Xuenong. And all this was less than two weeks after Jiang stepped forward with the truth. Faced with condemnation abroad and growing skepticism at home, not to mention an epidemic that showed no signs of slowing, the new president and party leader, Hu Jintao, had decided the cover-up was no longer tenable and ordered an end to the lies. It was a remarkable turnaround and political gamble, and in the highest ranks of the party it was greeted with caution. For several days, Hu and the new premier, Wen Jiabao, appeared alone on state television, promising honest and open government and calling for an all-out campaign against SARS. Their colleagues on the Politburo Standing Committee—many of them allies of the former president, Jiang Zemin—were nowhere to be found. They seemed wary of the new strategy, for it went against the party’s instincts to admit wrongdoing. After all, the health minister and the Beijing mayor had hardly been alone in approving the cover-up. Could the leadership really get away with pinning the blame on them alone? And what if SARS could not be contained? Would an angry and panicked populace demand more dismissals, a full accounting of the government’s blunders, or worse yet, fundamental political reforms? The safe move was to let Hu and Wen take the lead in the SARS fight, because if their approach failed and caused problems for the party, the political error would be theirs alone.