Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (33 page)

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.

T
HE 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.

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.

T
HE 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?”