Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (34 page)

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.

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.

S
EVEN 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.

The party’s investigation into Jiang’s letter dragged on for another eight months. The government never charged him with a crime, and he was finally released from house arrest in March 2005. Afterward, though, Jiang disappeared from public view. When I last visited him, he turned up the volume on his television set because he believed his apartment might be bugged and he whispered that he was trying to avoid provoking the government. He said he still wanted to visit his daughter and grandson in California, and he believed that if he behaved, the authorities would give him permission to go. As I listened to him speak, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of disappointment. The state had been unable to break Jiang, but it had succeeded in silencing him.

After I left his apartment, though, I decided it was unfair to expect the elderly doctor to continue standing up to the party. He had already achieved more than most and paid a price for it. I doubted the government would ever let him visit his daughter and grandson, but how could anyone expect him to give up that hope? There was only so much one man could do, and only so much a nation could ask of him.

D
uring that critical National People’s Congress session in 2003, when the party was still trying to keep the SARS epidemic under wraps, only one newspaper in China dared publish anything about the disease, a gutsy tabloid in Guangdong Province named the
Southern Metropolis Daily.
Like all newspapers in China, the
Daily
was owned by the state and the party appointed its editors, and like every major paper in Guangdong, it had been ordered to publish word for word the government’s statement before the Congress that the disease was under control. Like most journalists in the province with any experience, the paper’s editors knew when they put the story on the front page that it wasn’t true. It pained them to participate in such deceit, but that was not what set them apart from their peers in the propaganda apparatus. Many men and women in the nation’s newsrooms aspired to do more than repeat the party’s lies. What distinguished the editors of the
Southern Metropolis Daily
—a thick paper known for its populist style and color photos—was their refusal to drop the story, and their willingness to take matters a step further.

After reporting that SARS had been contained, the newspaper’s editors began looking for a way to publish a more truthful story about the outbreak that had originated in their circulation area. They wanted to make up for what they had done and get even with the bureaucrats who had forced them to lie. Their chance came a few weeks later. On the opening day of the Congress in Beijing, one of the paper’s reporters assigned to cover the session managed to stop a deputy health minister between meetings and ask a few questions. The minister’s answers, though carefully worded, gave the editors an opening. On the front page the next day, the paper broke the censors’ blackout on news about SARS with a headline noting that international experts had been invited to help conduct research into the epidemic. It was a minor development, chosen by the editors for the front page to soften the impact of their decision to defy the censors, but readers who opened to the article inside found a full page of coverage that directly challenged the government’s position on SARS. The deputy minister was quoted acknowledging that the illness could not be considered “under control” because no one knew what caused it or how best to treat it. The paper also quoted him saying officials should provide more information to the public about future outbreaks, to prevent the spread of rumors like those that had caused panicked hoarding of vinegar and other folk remedies in Guangdong.