https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/03/18/1163657374/military-surgeon-jiang-yanyong-the-doctor-who-spoke-the-truth-about-sars

meeting with Jiang Yanyong, the Chinese doctor who dared to speak the truth about SARS

March 18, 2023

To get by in China, a citizen learns to adjust to the gulf between the truth and the official truth.

Officially, China is a 'People's Republic' that puts the worker first. Officially, China respects human rights. Officially, China's media report the news freely.

Those who call attention to the gulf between these official truths and the unhappy reality are labeled confused, unpatriotic or evil — because, officially, no gulf exists."

This was how I began Time magazine's 2003 "Asian Newsmaker of the Year" citation for Dr. Jiang Yanyong, a Chinese military surgeon, who died March 11 at the age of 91.

The news Jiang made that year was exposing the Chinese government's cover-up of Beijing's outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Just as COVID-19 would be in 2020, SARS was a deadly respiratory illness caused by a then-novel coronavirus.

To Jiang, his act simply upheld "the most rudimentary standards" of his profession. It forced a collision of fact with official lies and created the space for other officials and doctors to tell the truth. This led to the ouster of China's health minister and Beijing's mayor — an unprecedented if tacit concession of error on the part of China's leaders — and saved an untold number of lives.

The article continues .... please refer to link:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/24/980838151/gun-violence-deaths-how-the-u-s-compares-to-the-rest-of-the-world


We last met in December of 2015 at what by that point was "our hotel." As usual, he'd ridden his bike to our meeting. He brought along a small laptop and spent much of our time together showing me, with evident pride, pictures of recent surgeries he had performed. At the age of 84, he still loved being a doctor.

I can only imagine what it must have felt like for him to witness the outbreak and spread of COVID, the history repeating itself in the early days during the cover-up, the silencing of the whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang in Wuhan or the chaos that attended the end of China's "zero-COVID" policy that led to his own infection and likely to his death. I found myself wondering what might have happened if someone of his seniority had spoken out earlier in Wuhan. I wondered what he made of how badly the U.S. had handled its own outbreak.

Two decades since SARS and three long years into COVID, with the walls of secrecy and silence Jiang pierced now rebuilt, his funeral on March 15 was small and closed to the public. I have seen no mention of his death in China's official media. During the height of his celebrity in 2003 when people around China called him a hero, Jiang was fond of saying he'd be content to be remembered as a doctor who told the truth. We'll have to try.