By Joseph Kahn
Published: July 13, 2007
BEIJING: A Chinese doctor who exposed the cover-up of the SARS outbreak on mainland China in 2003 has been barred from traveling to the United States to collect a human rights award, a friend of the doctor and a human rights group said.
The doctor, Jiang Yanyong, a retired surgeon in the People’s Liberation Army, was awarded the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award by the New York Academy of Sciences. His army-affiliated work unit, Hospital 301 in Beijing, denied him permission to travel to the award ceremony in September, Hu Jia, a Chinese rights promoter who is a friend of Jiang’s, said Thursday.
The Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, based in Hong Kong, also issued a statement reporting the rejection of the travel request. The doctor could not be reached at his home for comment, and a person who answered the phone in the director’s office of Hospital 301 said the situation was unclear, declining to provide further details.
Jiang rose to international prominence in 2003, when he disclosed in a letter circulated to international news organizations that at least 100 people were being treated in Beijing hospitals for SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. At the time, the Chinese medical authorities were acknowledging only a small number of cases on the mainland and maintaining that the disease was under control there.
The revelation prompted top Chinese leaders to concede that they had provided false information about the epidemic. The health minister and the mayor of Beijing were removed from their posts.
SARS eventually killed more than 800 people worldwide, and the Chinese government came under international scrutiny for failing to provide timely information that medical experts said might have saved lives.
Jiang was initially hailed as a hero in Chinese and foreign news media. He used his new prestige in 2004 to press the ruling Chinese Politburo Standing Committee to say that the leadership had erred in ordering the military to shoot unarmed civilians staging pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in June 1989.
Jiang, who treated Beijing residents wounded in the 1989 assault, contended that the official line that the crackdown had been necessary to suppress a rebellion was false. His statement antagonized party leaders, who consider the crackdown a matter of enormous political sensitivity.
Jiang Zemin, then the leader of the military, ordered the detention of Jiang, who spent several months in custody, people involved in his defense say.
Jiang Yanyong was eventually allowed to return to his home but remained under constant watch. He has not been allowed to accept press requests for interviews or to visit family members who live in the United States, friends and human rights groups say.
Hu said that Jiang’s superiors at Hospital 301 had told him that he could not travel to New York to collect his award because the Communist Party was seeking to maintain an atmosphere of social and political stability in the period leading up to the 17th Party Congress in the fall, when party officials will select new leaders.
“There is always some big political event they can use as an excuse to put pressure on human rights defenders,” Hu said. “The real reason is that they want to keep him under house arrest so he has no opportunity to speak the truth to the outside world.”
A veteran Chinese democracy activist, Zhu Yufu, was sentenced to two years in prison following an altercation with the police in which he and his son were allegedly beaten, the man’s lawyer said Friday, The Associated Press reported from Shanghai.
Zhu, 54, was sentenced Tuesday by the Shangcheng District court in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou on charges of attacking the police and interfering in public duties, said Mo Shaoping, his lawyer.
Zhu’s son, Zhu Ang, was given a suspended one-year sentence on the same charges, Mo said.
The father and son were arrested on May 18, a month after an incident in which the police stopped them outside their apartment, demanding to know the whereabouts of another activist the police suspected was staying at Zhu’s home, according to Mo and the China Human Rights Defenders, a network of activists and rights monitoring groups outside of the mainland.
A participant in decades of pro-democracy campaigning, Zhu’s most recent prior arrest came in June 1999 following attempts to register a would-be opposition group, the China Democracy Party.
