April 8, 2003
Jianguomen Diplomatic Compound, Beijing, China
2,941 Infected, 293 Dead
AT TIME, WE HAD CONTINUED TO HEAR RUMORS OF MULTIPLE CASES in Beijing hospitals, yet the Chinese press had become maddeningly silent on SARS, with the coverage now constituting a crawl beneath TV shots of the fall of Saddam’s statue and reports on the deaths of Iraqi civilians: “Traditional Chinese Medicine Can Cure SARS.” The Chinese press was under orders not to report SARS; reporters were tersely reminded at every turn that there was no upside to breaking SARS news. When a Yangcheng Evening News reporter asked Huang Huahua, Guangdong’s governor, if there was any chance of SARS passing to people from domestic livestock, she was warned, “You will be held accountable for those words of yours!” And those websites that dared to post SARS-related news were quickly visited or phoned by propaganda officials and ordered to delete any references to the disease. On March 9, the Ministry of Health had held a meeting with the heads of Beijing hospitals to emphasize that they were not to report the spread of the new disease to any media outlets. “We did as we were told,” the president of Sino-Japan Friendship Hospital would later tell me. On March 15, when the WHO issued its first Global Alert about SARS, the Propaganda Ministry, by order of the Politburo—China’s supreme leadership council—did not pass on the warning. “[The Politburo] knew very clearly how fast SARS was spreading,” a Beijing newspaper editor would tell John Pomfret of the Washington Post. As late as March 26, Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan told reporters, “This isn’t a very serious disease.”
That the Chinese government wasn’t telling the truth didn’t strike anyone as far-fetched—most Chinese people I knew took that as a given—but that they would lie to people about a disease that might kill them seemed beyond the pale, even for a dictatorship. In this context of government prevarication and media cowardice, it was not surprising that Dr. Jiang Yanyong’s faxes to CCTV-4 and Phoenix TV had been ignored.
OUR BEIJING CORRESPONDENT SUSAN JAKES WAS DELEGATED TO create a file about the general state of the health care system for a story we were preparing about SARS in Guangdong. The WHO team’s brinkmanship with the Chinese government had succeeded, and rather than face the embarrassment of the team’s leaving Beijing publicly dissatisfied, the Chinese government had allowed them to fly south on April 3. Matt Forney, our Beijing bureau chief, had been with them, determined to file a definitive timeline story on the initial phases of the outbreak. (In phone conversations with me, he kept saying, “You know, like how in Hot Zone it starts with the guy touching the wall of the cave.”) In the meantime, as background, he needed Jakes to run the show in Beijing and do the assessment of the Chinese health care system.
Jakes had no contacts in the Ministry of Health. Trying to think of a way into the subject, she decided to call a political source. Before coming to China, Jakes had worked for Wei Jingsheng, a notable Chinese dissident in New York, interpreting for him and driving him around the city. It had been through that role that she had come to TIME’s attention, when a team of our reporters had gone from Hong Kong to New York to investigate a North Korean defector who turned out to be a fraud. Jakes’s connections in the dissident community had been useful in the past, and sometimes they gave us the inside track on some human rights stories in China. But those connections did not extend into the Chinese medical or scientific communities; hence Susan’s desperate call to one of her political connections, Harold, the relative of a party official.
She asked him if he knew anything about SARS in Beijing.
There was silence on the line. “Call me back from a safe phone.”
Often, in China, we suspected our landlines and even our cell phones were bugged. Our conversations, if they involved possible government scandals or could put our Chinese sources at risk, would be circumlocutions to the point where we would sometimes confuse ourselves. When we needed to address specifics, Matt or Susan would switch the SIM cards in their phones from a local Beijing number to an international exchange that was billed through a foreign phone company that we believed was far less likely to be tapped. (We took similar precautions in Malaysia, Pakistan, and other countries where we were afraid the government might be interested in speaking to our sources.) Or, even safer, the reporter would find a pay phone—still common in China—and call from there.
Jakes threw on her denim jacket, rode the elevator down, and stepped into the sunlight of a chilly early-spring morning. Just up the road from the bureau was a red pay phone at a cigarette kiosk, next to a furrier.
“I’m going to send you an e-mail,” Harold said when she had called him back. “In that e-mail, there will be a URL to a secure website. At that website, you’ll need a password. Type in your old Hong Kong phone number, and you will be able to download a Word file. Read that and call me back.”
Jakes bought a pack of cigarettes and ran back to the office. She felt it was risky using the office computers, but Harold hadn’t mentioned anything about making sure she was using a secure computer. And he was by nature very cautious. She checked her e-mail, copied the URL, pasted it into a Chinese browser window, and typed her old phone number into the dialogue box that appeared.
She downloaded the Word file. At the top, it read, “Jiang Yanyong, Doctor,” and said that Jiang was a longtime Chinese Communist Party member. It also gave his phone number. She read the note. There were a few Mandarin words she didn’t recognize, and she had the office assistant, Li Qin, help her translate. The letter began, “The number of patients infected with SARS may be significantly higher than statistics made public by China’s Ministry of Health indicate,” and went on to say there were at least sixty patients at one Beijing hospital. Most amazingly, the letter was signed by this doctor.
Jakes went back out to the kiosk and called Harold.
“Who is this guy?”
“He is who he says he is. A doctor. A party member.”
Jakes was nervous this letter would be difficult to verify. “Can I call this guy? Will he talk to me?”
“Call him,” Harold assured her. “He’s at home.”
Jakes knew what she now had. A big story about a big lie. This was what had fallen into her hands in the form of the doctor’s letter.
Still using the pay phone, she called the number on the letter. Dr. Jiang Yanyong answered.
When she identified herself, Dr. Jiang told her, “Everything I want to say is in the letter.”
“But I need to ask you some more questions,” Jakes pleaded, “to flesh this out a little bit.”
He paused for a moment, and then, speaking in a lower voice, he said, “Okay. Let’s meet at the teahouse at four o’clock in the Ruicheng Hotel, in the western part of Beijing, near the 301 Military Hospital.”
Jakes went back upstairs and e-mailed me that she thought she had something “scoopy” and that we shouldn’t wait to get it into the magazine; we should put it on the TIME website as soon as possible. I e-mailed her back, asking her to call me from a safe phone.
She briefed me on what she might have, and we both considered how to verify the contents of the letter. That she was meeting Dr. Jiang that afternoon was a good start; Jakes would get a quick read on whether he was reliable or a crank. (At that point, we had no way of being sure.) But with a story like this in a country like this, the reporter’s instincts, while being a very good starting point, would not be enough. Jakes, to her credit, repeatedly reminded me that we had to get this confirmed. I was going to wait and see how her meeting went. Also, I wanted to go back and speak with Huang Yong about his earlier hospital visits. Couldn’t we put a story together using both of these elements that would expose the cover-up? We decided we would have Huang Yong go out on another bombing run to the hospitals mentioned in Dr. Jiang’s letter, to see if he could verify some or all of the letter’s contents.
As soon as Jakes was off the phone with me, she received another call, this one from a lawyer whom she had called the day before asking if he knew anyone who knew anything about SARS.
“Why don’t you come to my office right now,” he suggested. “I think I might have something you want to hear about.”
She took a taxi to his office, on the fourth floor of a modern office building, and when she walked in, after he closed the door, he told her that he had a cousin who was a doctor at the Military Academy of Sciences.
“Will she talk to me?” Jakes asked.
“No,” the lawyer explained. “But I can call her, and you can listen while we speak.”
Jakes would later realize that this plan had been prearranged by the lawyer and his cousin in order to screen the cousin from any possible accusations of talking to a foreign reporter and violating the gag order that had been handed down on March 7. As for the veracity of the source, we had worked with this lawyer before on several stories for Time, and found him to be reliable and honest.
The lawyer dialed his cousin’s mobile.
“Tell me again what you told me before,” he said, and handed the phone to Jakes.
Jakes listened as the doctor spoke of a situation even more terrifying than that described in Dr. Jiang’s letter. She described the first case to come to Beijing—the woman who had driven from Shanxi and seeded the Beijing outbreak. To Jakes’s surprise, that had been back in early March, during the National People’s Congress. The hospital director at the Military Academy of Sciences had told his staff that there was SARS in Beijing but that no one was to mention a word of this outside the hospital in order that they not interfere with the National People’s Congress and the leadership transition. The doctors at the meeting were not allowed to take notes.
Since then, the woman went on, there were numerous cases at several hospitals. Number One and Number Two hospitals each had dozens of cases. “[The hospitals] are practically filled,” the woman said. And 309 Hospital, specifically mentioned in Dr. Jiang’s letter, had forty new cases in just the last week. Number 301 and 302 hospitals were also being overwhelmed. “Yuan yuan chao guo,” the woman doctor said.
The official numbers are lies.
After leaving the office, Jakes caught a taxi. She didn’t want to phone me because of worries that her phone might be bugged. Instead, in the back of the cab, she began to translate the contents of Jiang’s letter, confirming everyone’s worst fear: not only was SARS in Beijing, but there had also been a cover-up of that terrifying fact.
Jakes arrived at the Ruicheng Hotel in western Beijing at two forty-five that afternoon. The Ruicheng is a typical Chinese business hotel. The lobby is on the shabby side, and the registration desk tries to sell you various discounted tours of Beijing and dinner tickets for local restaurants. The foot traffic through the lobby tends to be Chinese businessmen carrying their male purses and talking on mobile phones on their way to meetings in one of the restaurants on the second and third floors. Jakes took a seat in the lobby, feeling slightly out of her element as she continued to translate Dr. Jiang’s letter with the aid of a Chinese-English dictionary.
With each Chinese businessman entering, Jakes would glance up, wondering if this was Dr. Jiang. When he finally walked in, he paused for a moment and then, seeing Jakes, the only foreigner, he gestured for her with a quick backhanded wave to follow him. She shoved the letter and dictionary into her purse and took off after him as he headed for a corner of the lobby. He led her through a service entrance, up an elevator, and down a hall, where he asked a hotel employee for directions. Jakes realized he didn’t know where he was going as he walked into a cafeteria, which, it being midafternoon, was closed. Finally, he found a teahouse and took a seat in a booth partitioned from the restaurant by wooden screens. Around them, they heard the clatter of mah-jongg tiles, which, besides clandestine business meetings, was the primary purpose for these little teahouse rooms.
Jakes’s first impression was that Jiang was nervous. But once they ordered and began to chat, he calmed down. He talked about his work as a surgeon, spoke in very clear Chinese, and gave the names of medical procedures in very good English. He was, Jakes quickly deduced, exactly who he said he was in his letter.
Finally, Jakes asked, “Why did you write this?”
He paused. “I live in a danwei in a military complex. My colleagues there are also doctors, public health officials, many of them retired. When we run into each other, we talk about what is going on. We had all seen Zhang Wenkang’s press conference. We talk about how he is lying. As a doctor, I cannot stand by while there is a terrible disease threatening the people and they are not hearing the truth about it.”
Dr. Jiang didn’t resemble the dissidents or malcontents whom Jakes had dealt with during her time associated with the dissident movement. Those fellows had had an agitated quality that came across almost as a twisted sense of entitlement. They had been through so much that they no longer felt it necessary to consider the feelings of others who hadn’t suffered as they had. If you questioned their reasoning, they would just dismiss you. This fellow gave off a completely different vibe. He was an elder, and like a teacher coming forward because he was disappointed at how his students were behaving. He emphasized that he was a party member, that he felt, as a member of the leadership, he had an obligation to state the truth. Jakes was enjoying his company, and as they pored through his letter sentence by sentence, she felt increasingly comfortable that the material was journalistically sound. Her listening in on the phone call from the female doctor had essentially confirmed everything Dr. Jiang had written.
“If I were an ordinary person in Beijing and came down with fever and a cough,” said Dr. Jiang, “then I would probably just go to bed instead of going to a hospital. I would never know that I had contracted a fatal disease because the leadership has not told the people.”
“Are you sure you want to sign your name to this?” Jakes asked him.
“Yes.”
“Aren’t you afraid this will get you into trouble?”
“Everything I have said is true.” He nodded. “I can prove it.”
“That doesn’t mean you won’t get in trouble.”
“I have constitutional protection.”
Jakes shook her head. She can take on an almost haughty demeanor when she feels someone is making a mistake. So far, she had maintained a deferential manner; Dr. Jiang was, after all, an elder accustomed to being treated respectfully. Now, however, she felt she needed to be understood clearly, to pierce Dr. Jiang’s naïve belief in China’s constitution. Jakes had worked with numerous Chinese who should have been protected by the constitution yet were sentenced to reeducation, put through the psychiatric hospital system that is often used in lieu of prison, or forced to flee. The truth provided no sanctuary.
“The constitution doesn’t protect everybody,” she said. “It will not protect you.”
He smiled. “I am seventy-two years old, and I have lived in this country a long time.” He knew exactly what was at stake.
Jakes thought about Dr. Jiang during her taxi ride home. He was taking a bold and groundbreaking step. There had been instances where a Chinese official might reveal something to a reporter anonymously. Yet Jakes could not think of another case in which a high-ranking Chinese official or military officer who was still living in the country would speak on the record about a government lie. Even in trail-blazing work like The Tiananmen Papers, edited by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link, the compiler of the government documents had remained anonymous. Jakes concluded that, like many heroes, Jiang was almost as misguided as he was courageous. Perhaps it took a combination of such attributes to come forward in a dictatorship.
Jakes called me from the taxi. I was impatient in Hong Kong. We seldom worked late on Tuesdays, and I had kept Tim Morrison, the editor of the website, at the office with me so we could get this story up quickly. Jakes said she had everything she needed and would start writing as soon as she got home. She got off the phone with me and called Huang Yong, asking him to come over and help with the translation.
Huang arrived at Susan’s apartment just after she did, with beer and cigarettes. He was wide-eyed. They were both almost giddy as they went over the translation of Jiang’s letter, and then Jakes wrote a quick story to go on top of excerpts from the letter.
She sent the story to me at 9:00 P.M. We had it up on our website an hour later.
“A physician at Beijing’s Chinese People’s Liberation Army General Hospital (No. 301) in a signed statement which he provided TIME, says that at one Beijing hospital alone, 60 SARS patients have been admitted, of whom seven have died,” Susan had written. (That day, the official China Daily had put the number of SARS infections in Beijing at nineteen.) Jakes’s story also detailed the Ministry of Health meeting at which hospital directors were told not to talk about the disease because of the National People’s Congress. “Officials were forbidden to publicize what they’d learned about SARS,” Dr. Jiang wrote.
Almost immediately, the story was picked up by media all over the world. In China, where our website was blocked, the story was translated and quickly disseminated through chat rooms and text messages. During the first quarter of 2003, Chinese sent 26.5 billion text messages to one another. It had become the preferred means of communication for many Chinese, their written pictograms being particularly suited to communicating efficiently via short messages. “Beijing Doctor: Government Is Lying About Number of Cases,” said a typical message. “Foreign reports: SARS has reached Beijing,” said another. Initially, with so many rumors flying about SARS, there was some speculation among Chinese about the reliability of the story. Yet Time’s name attached to the story added credibility. By the next morning, the sentiment of Henk Bekedam of the WHO—“There seems to be some question over when the central government knew about SARS in Beijing and what they actually knew”—would seem very generous. At the blog Peking Duck, a more typical sentiment was expressed: “The new regime was supposed to be ever so sensitive to the needs of the people. So what is its first accomplishment? It gives its citizens the finger, concealing a deadly health threat to make their meaningless People’s Congress look pretty.”
For Susan Jakes, the story was a signal achievement and made her reputation among the Beijing press corps—and around the world. She appeared on CNN and NPR and would spend the next day fielding calls from reporters asking how they could reach Dr. Jiang. Even John Pomfret of the Washington Post, whose reporting on SARS—as it was with almost everything China-related—had been the standard against which we measured our own coverage, called to ask for the number.
Disease, of course, is a common and familiar subject in literature. And even emerging viruses have their share of great accounts—Matt Forney had mentioned the Hot Zone repeatedly as he covered SARS; another colleague would mention And the Band Played On as we talked about what was happening in China. And as I thought about that account by Randy Shilts of the early years of AIDS, this did seem to have a similar arc: disease emerges, no one knows what it is, there is a heroic effort made to identify the agent, and now, to complete the similarities, there is a government cover-up that far exceeded even the Reagan administration’s indifference to AIDS. Only here, in Asia, the whole cycle seemed to have been speeded up, so that what had taken years to unfold in the case of AIDS—from emergence to epidemic had been five to ten years—was now occurring in what seemed like a matter of weeks. And perhaps there was an even more dramatic precedent, the writer Bryan Walsh suggested to me in Hong Kong: Jaws.
“How so?” I asked.
“The virus is the shark in the water,” he explained.
“And that mayor who keeps on insisting that the beach is safe?”
Bryan smiled. “That’s the Chinese government.”