Chinese authorities free SARS whistleblower

BEIJING--Chinese authorities on Monday released the dissident physician who became a national hero for exposing the government's cover-up of the SARS epidemic, sending him home after 49 days of detention aimed at pressuring him to disavow a letter in which he denounced the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Jiang Yanyong, 72, the semi-retired surgeon in the People's Liberation Army who had briefly become China's most famous political prisoner, returned to his apartment in western Beijing about 11 p.m. and was in good health, his wife, Hua Zhongwei, said by telephone Tuesday.

She said she and her husband had been ordered by the Chinese military not to speak to reporters, and she declined to discuss the circumstances of his release. But asked how she felt, she laughed and said: "You can guess by how I sound."

A person close to the family said Jiang succeeded in resisting the demands of his jailors and refused to back down during seven weeks of intense indoctrination sessions. The closest he came to expressing regret was a statement in which he conceded that others might have used his letter for their own purposes, but Jiang also wrote that he should not be held responsible for their actions, the person said.

The doctor's release, which came amid rising international and domestic criticism, represented a remarkable retreat by the most senior leaders of China's ruling Communist Party, and a victory of personal will for a man who had already challenged this nation's authoritarian political system and forced it to back down once.

There was no immediate comment from the Chinese government. Jiang was never charged with a crime, and the government had said only that the military was "helping and educating him" because he had violated military discipline.

In late February, Jiang sent a letter to the leadership urging them to admit the party's 1989 military assault on student-led, pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square was wrong. The letter, in which he recalled treating scores of wounded civilians, was leaked to foreign media during the annual meeting of China's legislature.

While the party has acknowledged other errors, including Mao Tse-tung's destructive Cultural Revolution, it has refused to admit any mistake in handling the Tiananmen protests, in part because doing so might prompt new demands for democratic reform.

China's military chief and former president, Jiang Zemin, rose to power in the political purge that followed the Tiananmen crackdown, and a source familiar with the party's decision-making process said the Central Military Commission, which Jiang chairs, gave the order to detain the doctor. His successor, President Hu Jintao, serves as one of the commission's vice-chairman.

Jiang Yanyong was detained June 1 while on his way to the U.S. Embassy to apply for a visa to visit his daughter in California, and he was then transported by armored car to a remote military facility on the western outskirts of Beijing. Officials there threatened to keep him in custody until he changed his thinking about the Tiananmen crackdown, according to sources familiar with the situation, and they ordered him to write daily "thought reports" as part of the indoctrination process.

When Hua was allowed to visit her husband on June 30, he told her he had been writing the same statement every day for the past month and would not change his view of the Tiananmen massacre, a person close to the family said. Earlier, in a note delivered to his family, Jiang had vowed to continue "seeking truth from facts."

But on July 7, two officials with the military's General Logistics Department visited Hua and told her the investigation of her husband was nearing an end, sources close to the family said. The visit came two days after a front-page report about Jiang's detention was published in The Washington Post and shown on Phoenix Television, a Hong Kong station that enjoys close ties to Beijing and is available in many mainland offices and homes. China's state media have not reported Jiang's detention.

During the visit, the military officials described Jiang as politically naive but a good, honest man, indicated he had finally made progress in his thought reports, and showed Hua a seven-page document in Jiang's handwriting, the sources said.

But Jiang did not disavow his Tiananmen letter in the statement, the sources said. Instead, he acknowledged that his jailors had helped him realize that the Chinese Communist Party in 1989 was "like a patient with complicated colorectal cancer" who faced imminent death without emergency surgery, one person close to the family said.

Jiang, a longtime party member, wrote that surgery might prolong the patient's life, and he discussed the condition and the consequences of surgery in great detail in the statement. But he never said whether the patient--in this case, the party--deserved to live, and he never condoned the military crackdown, the person said.

"It was a very calculated, measured statement," the person said. "He was very precise."