Jiang Yanyong, the military doctor who alerted the world to the real extent of the 2003 SARS outbreak, passed away in Beijing on March 11, 2023. Initially hailed as a national hero, Jiang was later imprisoned and then subject to intermittent surveillance and house arrest after publishing an open letter calling for a reappraisal of the 1989 Tiananmen student movement and the massacre that ended it. The state has continued to suppress memories of Jiang even after his death. Official media made no note of his death and his small funeral was monitored by plainclothes police. Those who attempted to commemorate him online found their works subject to censorship. At least four separate essays on Jiang’s life were removed from WeChat.
The South China Morning Post reported that Jiang died of pneumonia and complications from other illnesses and that he had contracted COVID-19 in January. The New York Times’ Amy Qin wrote an obituary that detailed Jiang’s remarkable life:
Growing up in Shanghai, he resolved to become a doctor after watching his aunt die of tuberculosis. In 1949, the year Mao Zedong’s Communists took power, he enrolled in Yenching University to study medicine and went on to train at Peking Union Medical College, the country’s most prestigious medical school.
Inspired by Norman Bethune, a Canadian doctor who died on the front lines of the Communist resistance to the Japanese occupation in 1939, he enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army and specialized in surgery. In...
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