LAST year, Jiang Yanyong, a 72-year-old army doctor, exposed the Chinese government鈥檚 cover-up of the SARS epidemic in Beijing, an act of courage that saved lives and helped defeat the disease. Last month, Jiang was imprisoned.
His crime? Months earlier, he had used his public standing to call on the country鈥檚 Communist Party, of which he is a member, to admit its mistake in suppressing the student protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989, when he was among the doctors treating bullet-riddled victims. Reports have now emerged that his jailers are using brainwashing techniques to try and make him recant.
SARS and Tiananmen Square may seem unconnected, but they are not. The students 15 years ago were demanding a society based on verifiable fact, accountability and transparency, rather than ideology, hierarchy and cover-ups. The Chinese government still considers such demands for openness to be a threat 鈥� so much so that it has acquired a system for monitoring the text messages its citizens send each other on their cellphones, to help it root out dissidents (see 鈥淐hina steps up text control鈥�).
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Still, some in China are changing. When this magazine reported that this year鈥檚 bird flu outbreak probably started in China, Beijing denounced the article. Yet a day later it admitted it did have the epidemic, and this week Chinese scientists have published the impeccably Chinese genetic lineage of the virus (see 鈥淪uper-fit bird flu鈥�).
It is clear that the battle between dogma and science is raging in China, as it is elsewhere in the world 鈥� even in the west. In a message released to the press, Jiang has vowed to continue to 鈥渟eek the truth through facts鈥�. For that he should be applauded. And set free.