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Focus Shifts to China Rights as World Mourns Coronavirus, SARS
Doctor-Whistleblowers

Verna Yu

   HONG KONG - While the world mourned the recent death of the young
   Chinese doctor who was detained by police for exposing the coronavirus,
   news of another whistle blowing doctor, who exposed the severe acute
   respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic 17 years ago, being under house
   arrest in Beijing has shocked the world.

   Since April of last year, authorities have restricted the movements of
   Jiang Yanyong -- the 88-year-old Chinese military surgeon who exposed
   the government's cover-up of the the SARS epidemic in 2003 -- and they
   have cut off his contact with the outside world. The Chinese government
   took the steps after Jiang wrote to top leadership asking for a
   reassessment of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement,
   according to a close friend who spoke on condition of anonymity.

   Dr. Li Wenliang, 34, an ophthalmologist who worked at the Wuhan Central
   Hospital in central China, died last Friday after he was infected
   during the battle against the coronavirus outbreak. His death prompted
   anger and grief across the nation because he was detained by police in
   early January after telling his medical school alumni group on social
   media that seven patients diagnosed with an illness similar to SARS had
   been quarantined in his hospital.

   The mysterious virus was what would become the coronavirus epidemic
   that so far has killed at least 1,110 and infected more than 45,000
   people around the world, mostly in China.

   The tragic fate of the two whistleblower doctors, 17 years apart, is a
   sobering reminder that, despite China's stellar economic progress,
   Chinese citizens are still bereft of basic rights, analysts say. And
   when they are punished for exposing truths that officials want to
   conceal, it can have disastrous consequences not only in China, but on
   a global scale, they say.

   Kenneth Chan, a political scientist at Baptist University of Hong Kong,
   noted that in China and former communist regimes, where human rights
   are routinely suppressed as a result of censorship and self-censorship,
   "People are rewarded to lie and to cover up, but punished for telling
   the truth."

   "The former communist regimes were all known as crisis-ridden nations
   and ...the rest of the world suffered from the externalization of the
   crises in terms of environmental, health, and humanitarian disasters,"
   he said.

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