The EU is waking up about raw materials. China has been securing the resources it needs to fuel its economy for decades, while Europe has long relied on free market mechanisms. That is honorable, but it is no longer fitting, when other economic blocs use robust methods to gain access first.
Therefore, the Raw Materials Act draft is an important step. But as is always the case within the EU, there are many unresolved questions surrounding the actual implementation. For success, everyone would have to pull together, which member states are notoriously struggling with.
The search engine and AI company Baidu is also struggling a bit with its version of artificial intelligence for civilized conversations. What was announced as a big rival to the US marvel ChatGPT turned out not to be practical during the official presentation. Baidu boss Robin Li did not even dare to have a real-time conversation with his AI. ChatGPT would have easily mastered such a display. But the race for the best AI has only just begun, analyzes Joern Petring.
Earlier this week, Jiang Yanyong passed away, the chief surgeon who became the Party’s bad conscience incarnate. Our author Johnny Erling has known him for decades and retraces the life of a man who fought for the truth. His death under house arrest once again diminishes the chance of reappraising the events of 1989.
By 2030, the EU aims to have much larger quantities of important raw materials available for industry – in this way, Brussels wants to break free of its dependence on China in particular. The draft of the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) presented on Wednesday stipulates that by 2030
Europe.Table already reported last week on the contents of a leaked version of the draft. “After 18 months of work, it’s over with naivety, now it’s time for action,” said Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton at the presentation of the paper, referring to the EU’s rather passive raw materials policy so far.
The day before, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen again highlighted the EU’s dependence on important minerals: “We get 98 percent of our rare earth supply and 93 percent of our magnesium from China,” von der Leyen said, adding that “the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have taught us a bitter lesson” about the EU’s dependence on important minerals.
The EU Commission is expanding the current list of 30 critical raw materials to 34, with a particular focus on a smaller group. The published draft designates 16 raw materials as strategic. The criteria for this are their strategic importance, the ratio of future demand to current global production, and how difficult it is to increase production. Specific benchmarks for production capacity within the EU and import diversification are to apply to this group of 16. These are:
The Commission classifies these raw materials and 18 others (including bauxite, hafnium, helium and other rare earth minerals) as “critical”. These exceed certain thresholds for their economic importance and supply risk. The objectives of monitoring and mitigating supply risk and ensuring their free movement in the EU internal market, while ensuring a high level of environmental protection, apply to them.
The basic outlines of the draft were predictable: Europe can no longer afford the “not in my backyard” mentality and must do more to develop its own raw material deposits. To this end, the draft envisages all sorts of measures: Tapping deposits, sharing data, and speeding up approval procedures.
A paradigm shift very much in the interests of the mining industry: “The EU’s raw material potential is considerable, but we need more efficient permits to lift the EU’s treasure – an issue that is addressed in the CRM Act,” praises Rolf Kuby, CEO of the Euromines.
Raw material projects marked as “strategic” are said to be in the “public interest” as they contribute to the security of supply. This means: They could also be approved in Natura 2000 protected areas (for the conservation of endangered habitats and species) and justify a degradation of surface water quality.
Tobias Kind-Rieper, a raw materials expert at WWF, warns of a softening of important environmental legislation: “If mining projects are placed above environmental law as a public interest, this could have dramatic effects on protected areas and biodiversity hotspots in Europe, for example in Portugal and Sweden”.
Many raw material deposits in Europe are located in or near Natura 2000 protected areas. That’s why he also makes the following clear: Without mining projects in such protected areas, the goal of generating 10 percent of raw material requirements from domestic mining is unlikely to be achieved.
The CRMA provides for even more steps:
There was criticism above all for the targets for strengthening the circular economy: Although there is a target of covering at least 15 percent of the EU’s demand for strategic raw materials with local recycling capacities by 2030, the targets for member states are merely to strengthen collection and recycling and do not include any specific targets.
When it comes to developing a circular economy, the EU is leaving the member states too much leeway and is thus also jeopardizing the integrity of the single market, said Wolfgang Weber, CEO of the German Electrical and Digital Manufacturers’ Association (ZVEI). “We need an EU-wide, uniform market for secondary raw materials. Otherwise, the goal of obtaining 15 percent of critical raw materials from recycling by 2030 across Europe will be thwarted,” he explained.
The European Parliament and the EU Council must now take a position on the draft. A time frame for this has not yet been set.
Baidu presented its answer to ChatGPT in Beijing with the launch of Ernie (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration). But the presentation by company founder Robin Li turned out differently than the billionaire had probably hoped. With every minute he spoke, Baidu’s share price dropped on the Hong Kong stock exchange. In the end, the share price fell by more than six percent.
Investors obviously were not too pleased with what Li showed. Nor what he said. At least Li was honest: “I can’t say we are fully ready,” Li said. Ernie Bot was unveiled because the market demanded it. ChatGPT was a “high bar”. Tests with Ernie Bot had shown that it was “not perfect yet“.
While ChatGPT is not perfect either, its capabilities never cease to amaze in tests. The popular program by OpenAI still has many bugs and is considered a “work in progress”. Just on Tuesday, however, the US company presented GPT-4, a significantly improved version. It does make Baidu look bad.
What particularly annoyed viewers was that Li did not interact live with Ernie Bot. Instead, he presented application examples. Real-time tests are actually a normal part of an AI presentation today.
The interface of Ernie Bot looks almost identical to ChatGPT. In a kind of chat box, users can ask the program questions and receive answers. Work assignments are also possible. For example, Ernie Bot was shown summarizing the well-known Chinese science fiction novel Three-Body Problem. The tool was also asked for the author’s biographical data. However, a conventional search engine could also have easily pulled this off.
Another presented function, in which a text was read out in a southern Chinese dialect, was certainly entertaining. However, such a voice output is certainly not a technological quantum leap. According to Li, Ernie Bot is superior in generating Chinese speech. In English, however, there is certainly room for improvement.
Experts have so far expressed reservations to skepticism about the system’s capabilities. “There weren’t many things that were exciting from the launch,” Willer Chen of asset manager Forsyth Barr Asia told Bloomberg. Investors’ disappointment was evident from Baidu’s plunging share price, he said. Baidu also earned criticism and was even mocked on China’s social networks.
Of course, a short presentation is not enough to form a definitive verdict. Google did not fare much better a few weeks ago. When the US company presented its chatbot Bard as an answer to GhatGPT in early February, investors were also initially disappointed. Google shares lost more than seven percent.
Nevertheless, the race is not yet lost for both Google and Baidu: Both companies have been pouring billions into AI research for years. Whoever is ahead with a product like ChatGPT does not automatically dominate all future application areas. Ernie Bot, for example, is only one of many existing and future applications based on Baidu’s AI system Ernie.
What is certain is that AI breakthroughs will continue to come primarily from the USA and China. Both countries are in a close race in this field. However, Baidu founder Robin Li was adamant on Thursday not to unnecessarily politicize the issue. “Ernie Bot is not a tool of confrontation between China and the United States,” he said. Joern Petring
It came as a strange coincidence: At last Monday’s first live press conference in Beijing, China’s newly elected Premier Li Qiang pretended that the journalist had somehow asked a wrong question. He asked him whether foreign doubts about China’s long and extremely tough COVID-19 measures were justified. “Our strategies and methods were absolutely right,” Li proclaimed, not going into how he ordered the lockdown of 25 million people for two months in early 2022 as the then Party chief of Shanghai. Like Party leader Xi Jinping before him, the Premier praised the Party’s “great decisive victory” over the pandemic (取得重大决定性胜利). Because “for the past 3 years, we have always put the people and their lives above everything else.” (三年多来，我们始终坚持人民至上、生命至上.)
Simultaneously, state censors scoured China’s internet for any news regarding the death of legendary doctor Jiang Yanyong, who throughout his life placed the lives of his fellow human beings above all else – even against the will of the party. The former chief surgeon passed away on Saturday from pneumonia at the same Beijing Military and VIP Hospital 301 where he started working as a physician in 1957.
The first online news of his death spread on Weixin (WeChat) Monday morning at 6:23 a.m.: “China’s doctor Jiang Yanyong has died. He once saved the lives of countless Chinese with a sentence of truth. Everyone should mourn.” Censors deleted the message and replaced it with their typical ban symbol: a white exclamation mark inside a red sphere with a warning about banned content.
Anonymous bloggers protested the news blackout on Tuesday: “I mourn! Eternity for Doctor Jiang Yanyong! He died yesterday. But those who search the net cannot find this person.” (悼！蒋彦永医生千古！昨日去世，全网查无此人.) The censorship crackdown was so massive that no official media reported Jiang’s death until Thursday. His family was only allowed to pay their respects on Wednesday with a simple ceremony in the funeral hall of Hospital 301. All wreaths for Jiang had to be inspected in advance.
Leading civil rights activists took to the forbidden platform Twitter to express their grief. Like the courageous former lawyer Pu Zhijiang 浦志强, who had his medical license revoked and jailed by Beijing. Pu wrote: “Before Covid broke out, I could still meet with doctor Jiang every year. I had to register my car number at the apartment block to be let through. In recent years, neither I nor fellow lawyers Zhang Zuhua, Mo Shaoping and Shang Baojun were allowed to see him. I heard that even his students were subjected to strict controls if they wanted to visit the old man. There was nothing they could do. There are people who fear him.” (没办法, 有人怕他.)
This was referring to China’s party leaders of the past 20 years, who had him isolated after Jiang publicly revealed in March 2003 how Beijing attempted to cover up the SARS outbreak. But he became a persecuted troublemaker a year later when he broke his silence in 2004 about the former party-ordered “criminal army operation” against student protests that led to the Tiananmen massacre of 4 June 1989. In a harrowing letter, Jiang called on the party leadership to finally face up to its responsibility and reappraise the events.
With it, he not only provoked the rulers of the time, but also Xi Jinping, who had just been elected party leader in 2012. In several letters, Jiang urged him, first within the party and then publicly, to finally absolve the Tiananmen protests of the accusation of counterrevolution.
In his final letter to Xi, dated Oct. 10, 2018, and addressed to the People’s Congress in March 2019, he wrote that the party needs to overcome its fear that chaos will erupt in China as it reassesses events. By doing so, it will “absolutely not endanger China’s stability. On the contrary.” The 1989 army operation was its “worst crime”.
In the letter, Jiang reminded Xi about his father and politician Xi Zhongxun during China’s reform era. He said that Xi’s father himself had dared to protest Deng Xiaoping when the latter deposed the former party leader Hu Yaobang for being too liberal for his liking. His father, he said, rushed into Deng’s room, and he “banged on the table and insulted him.” But how do son Xi and today’s leaders behave? “Do they also have that much courage to stand up for a just cause?”
When I had the opportunity to meet Jiang on several occasions in Beijing in early summer 2019, he told me, “I have written five such letters to Xi. I have not received replies to any of them.” His last letter was particularly explosive. That was because Jiang, who held the rank of major general and was a Party veteran who had been a member of the CP since July 1952, knew many Chinese leaders personally. He revealed how controversial the bloody June 4 crackdown commanded by Deng Xiaoping was within the party leadership. Then-incumbent President Yang Shangkun, under Deng’s orders, had declared a state of emergency over Beijing in May 1989, along with Premier Li Peng. This allowed the military troops to enter the capital. Ten years later, when military doctor Jiang went to see Yang Shangkun at his home, he confessed: “June Fourth was the most serious mistake in our party history.” It was not correctable now, he said but would be in the future. Jiang also heard such late insights from other influential figures.
He once told me that his first letter about the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, which he sent to the then-Beijing leadership in February 2004, was the first time he dared to publicly address Beijing’s biggest taboo. All these years, he was tormented by what he witnessed as chief surgeon on the night of June 4. Jiang’s 301 Military Hospital was on the invasion route of the rampaging troops advancing toward the student-occupied Tiananmen Square. By midnight, 89 wounded people with horrific wounds had been brought there. The soldiers had fired internationally banned lead ammunition, which splintered on impact.
He said that the night changed him and inspired his one-man crusade, first against the lies about SARS and then for the rehabilitation of the events and victims of June 4. After Jiang’s letter became public, authorities detained him and his wife for 45 days on June 1, 2004, and then placed them under house arrest for eight months. China’s party leadership insisted in 2004, as it does today under Xi Jinping, that the 1989 crackdown on the democracy movement was justified. It would never re-open this past.
A loyal patriot, Jiang, who came from a distinguished Hangzhou banking family and had relatives in Taiwan, had always adhered to CP discipline. He kept silent about what he had endured during the Cultural Revolution. He was brutally persecuted as a counterrevolutionary and spent five years as a horse herder in an army penal camp on the Tibetan plateau of Qinghai until 1971. Then his services as a surgeon required him to return.
But as a doctor, he became furious when he watched on television on April 3, 2003, how then Minister of Health, Zhang Wenkang, played down and lied about the mysterious SARS epidemic that had spread from Guangdong to Beijing: Except for a few isolated cases, the situation was “under control,” he said.
Jiang had followed with concern how more and more newly infected people were being brought in every day and secretly divided between Beijing military hospitals. He sent urgent letters to the state broadcaster CCTV and the pro-Chinese Hong Kong cable channel Phoenix TV. Both ignored him. He then dared to inform Beijing correspondent Susan Jakes of the US Time magazine on April 8. Together with Karl Greenfeld, the editor-in-chief of the magazine’s Asia branch, who years later published a book on the matter (China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century’s First Great Epidemic), the journalists wrote a report that alarmed the World Health Organization (WTO). On April 20, the Beijing leadership held a press conference admitting to 339 SARS cases and many deaths in Beijing alone. This resulted in the firing of the Minister of Health and another senior official.
Beijing then mobilized the country against SARS. By mid-August, the pandemic threat had been averted. Thanks to cooperation with China, the WHO counted only 8,422 infected individuals and 919 deaths worldwide. More than 800 people died in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Jiang was hailed as a hero for three months. China’s government enacted new rules for transparency and full disclosure of medical information in high-risk cases. It introduced mandatory reporting of epidemics and emergencies in 2006.
15 years later, with the Covid outbreak in Wuhan in early 2020, everything was again forgotten, covered up, lied about and manipulated. The former whistleblower Jiang sat with his wife Hua Zhongwei under house arrest and could only watch helplessly.
Fighting snowdrifts with leaf blowers: At a train station in Heilongjiang Province, high up in China’s north, employees use an unconventional method to clear a switch. While the trees are already blooming in Beijing, the north still experiences deep sub-zero temperatures. The regional railroad company issued an emergency plan on Wednesday to ensure working train traffic despite the snow chaos.
The EU is waking up about raw materials. China has been securing the resources it needs to fuel its economy for decades, while Europe has long relied on free market mechanisms. That is honorable, but it is no longer fitting, when other economic blocs use robust methods to gain access first.
Therefore, the Raw Materials Act draft is an important step. But as is always the case within the EU, there are many unresolved questions surrounding the actual implementation. For success, everyone would have to pull together, which member states are notoriously struggling with.
The search engine and AI company Baidu is also struggling a bit with its version of artificial intelligence for civilized conversations. What was announced as a big rival to the US marvel ChatGPT turned out not to be practical during the official presentation. Baidu boss Robin Li did not even dare to have a real-time conversation with his AI. ChatGPT would have easily mastered such a display. But the race for the best AI has only just begun, analyzes Joern Petring.
Earlier this week, Jiang Yanyong passed away, the chief surgeon who became the Party’s bad conscience incarnate. Our author Johnny Erling has known him for decades and retraces the life of a man who fought for the truth. His death under house arrest once again diminishes the chance of reappraising the events of 1989.
By 2030, the EU aims to have much larger quantities of important raw materials available for industry – in this way, Brussels wants to break free of its dependence on China in particular. The draft of the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) presented on Wednesday stipulates that by 2030
Europe.Table already reported last week on the contents of a leaked version of the draft. “After 18 months of work, it’s over with naivety, now it’s time for action,” said Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton at the presentation of the paper, referring to the EU’s rather passive raw materials policy so far.
The day before, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen again highlighted the EU’s dependence on important minerals: “We get 98 percent of our rare earth supply and 93 percent of our magnesium from China,” von der Leyen said, adding that “the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have taught us a bitter lesson” about the EU’s dependence on important minerals.
The EU Commission is expanding the current list of 30 critical raw materials to 34, with a particular focus on a smaller group. The published draft designates 16 raw materials as strategic. The criteria for this are their strategic importance, the ratio of future demand to current global production, and how difficult it is to increase production. Specific benchmarks for production capacity within the EU and import diversification are to apply to this group of 16. These are:
The Commission classifies these raw materials and 18 others (including bauxite, hafnium, helium and other rare earth minerals) as “critical”. These exceed certain thresholds for their economic importance and supply risk. The objectives of monitoring and mitigating supply risk and ensuring their free movement in the EU internal market, while ensuring a high level of environmental protection, apply to them.
The basic outlines of the draft were predictable: Europe can no longer afford the “not in my backyard” mentality and must do more to develop its own raw material deposits. To this end, the draft envisages all sorts of measures: Tapping deposits, sharing data, and speeding up approval procedures.
A paradigm shift very much in the interests of the mining industry: “The EU’s raw material potential is considerable, but we need more efficient permits to lift the EU’s treasure – an issue that is addressed in the CRM Act,” praises Rolf Kuby, CEO of the Euromines.
Raw material projects marked as “strategic” are said to be in the “public interest” as they contribute to the security of supply. This means: They could also be approved in Natura 2000 protected areas (for the conservation of endangered habitats and species) and justify a degradation of surface water quality.
Tobias Kind-Rieper, a raw materials expert at WWF, warns of a softening of important environmental legislation: “If mining projects are placed above environmental law as a public interest, this could have dramatic effects on protected areas and biodiversity hotspots in Europe, for example in Portugal and Sweden”.
Many raw material deposits in Europe are located in or near Natura 2000 protected areas. That’s why he also makes the following clear: Without mining projects in such protected areas, the goal of generating 10 percent of raw material requirements from domestic mining is unlikely to be achieved.
The CRMA provides for even more steps:
There was criticism above all for the targets for strengthening the circular economy: Although there is a target of covering at least 15 percent of the EU’s demand for strategic raw materials with local recycling capacities by 2030, the targets for member states are merely to strengthen collection and recycling and do not include any specific targets.
When it comes to developing a circular economy, the EU is leaving the member states too much leeway and is thus also jeopardizing the integrity of the single market, said Wolfgang Weber, CEO of the German Electrical and Digital Manufacturers’ Association (ZVEI). “We need an EU-wide, uniform market for secondary raw materials. Otherwise, the goal of obtaining 15 percent of critical raw materials from recycling by 2030 across Europe will be thwarted,” he explained.
The European Parliament and the EU Council must now take a position on the draft. A time frame for this has not yet been set.
Baidu presented its answer to ChatGPT in Beijing with the launch of Ernie (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration). But the presentation by company founder Robin Li turned out differently than the billionaire had probably hoped. With every minute he spoke, Baidu’s share price dropped on the Hong Kong stock exchange. In the end, the share price fell by more than six percent.
Investors obviously were not too pleased with what Li showed. Nor what he said. At least Li was honest: “I can’t say we are fully ready,” Li said. Ernie Bot was unveiled because the market demanded it. ChatGPT was a “high bar”. Tests with Ernie Bot had shown that it was “not perfect yet“.
While ChatGPT is not perfect either, its capabilities never cease to amaze in tests. The popular program by OpenAI still has many bugs and is considered a “work in progress”. Just on Tuesday, however, the US company presented GPT-4, a significantly improved version. It does make Baidu look bad.
What particularly annoyed viewers was that Li did not interact live with Ernie Bot. Instead, he presented application examples. Real-time tests are actually a normal part of an AI presentation today.
The interface of Ernie Bot looks almost identical to ChatGPT. In a kind of chat box, users can ask the program questions and receive answers. Work assignments are also possible. For example, Ernie Bot was shown summarizing the well-known Chinese science fiction novel Three-Body Problem. The tool was also asked for the author’s biographical data. However, a conventional search engine could also have easily pulled this off.
Another presented function, in which a text was read out in a southern Chinese dialect, was certainly entertaining. However, such a voice output is certainly not a technological quantum leap. According to Li, Ernie Bot is superior in generating Chinese speech. In English, however, there is certainly room for improvement.
Experts have so far expressed reservations to skepticism about the system’s capabilities. “There weren’t many things that were exciting from the launch,” Willer Chen of asset manager Forsyth Barr Asia told Bloomberg. Investors’ disappointment was evident from Baidu’s plunging share price, he said. Baidu also earned criticism and was even mocked on China’s social networks.
Of course, a short presentation is not enough to form a definitive verdict. Google did not fare much better a few weeks ago. When the US company presented its chatbot Bard as an answer to GhatGPT in early February, investors were also initially disappointed. Google shares lost more than seven percent.
Nevertheless, the race is not yet lost for both Google and Baidu: Both companies have been pouring billions into AI research for years. Whoever is ahead with a product like ChatGPT does not automatically dominate all future application areas. Ernie Bot, for example, is only one of many existing and future applications based on Baidu’s AI system Ernie.
What is certain is that AI breakthroughs will continue to come primarily from the USA and China. Both countries are in a close race in this field. However, Baidu founder Robin Li was adamant on Thursday not to unnecessarily politicize the issue. “Ernie Bot is not a tool of confrontation between China and the United States,” he said. Joern Petring
It came as a strange coincidence: At last Monday’s first live press conference in Beijing, China’s newly elected Premier Li Qiang pretended that the journalist had somehow asked a wrong question. He asked him whether foreign doubts about China’s long and extremely tough COVID-19 measures were justified. “Our strategies and methods were absolutely right,” Li proclaimed, not going into how he ordered the lockdown of 25 million people for two months in early 2022 as the then Party chief of Shanghai. Like Party leader Xi Jinping before him, the Premier praised the Party’s “great decisive victory” over the pandemic (取得重大决定性胜利). Because “for the past 3 years, we have always put the people and their lives above everything else.” (三年多来，我们始终坚持人民至上、生命至上.)
Simultaneously, state censors scoured China’s internet for any news regarding the death of legendary doctor Jiang Yanyong, who throughout his life placed the lives of his fellow human beings above all else – even against the will of the party. The former chief surgeon passed away on Saturday from pneumonia at the same Beijing Military and VIP Hospital 301 where he started working as a physician in 1957.
The first online news of his death spread on Weixin (WeChat) Monday morning at 6:23 a.m.: “China’s doctor Jiang Yanyong has died. He once saved the lives of countless Chinese with a sentence of truth. Everyone should mourn.” Censors deleted the message and replaced it with their typical ban symbol: a white exclamation mark inside a red sphere with a warning about banned content.
Anonymous bloggers protested the news blackout on Tuesday: “I mourn! Eternity for Doctor Jiang Yanyong! He died yesterday. But those who search the net cannot find this person.” (悼！蒋彦永医生千古！昨日去世，全网查无此人.) The censorship crackdown was so massive that no official media reported Jiang’s death until Thursday. His family was only allowed to pay their respects on Wednesday with a simple ceremony in the funeral hall of Hospital 301. All wreaths for Jiang had to be inspected in advance.
Leading civil rights activists took to the forbidden platform Twitter to express their grief. Like the courageous former lawyer Pu Zhijiang 浦志强, who had his medical license revoked and jailed by Beijing. Pu wrote: “Before Covid broke out, I could still meet with doctor Jiang every year. I had to register my car number at the apartment block to be let through. In recent years, neither I nor fellow lawyers Zhang Zuhua, Mo Shaoping and Shang Baojun were allowed to see him. I heard that even his students were subjected to strict controls if they wanted to visit the old man. There was nothing they could do. There are people who fear him.” (没办法, 有人怕他.)
This was referring to China’s party leaders of the past 20 years, who had him isolated after Jiang publicly revealed in March 2003 how Beijing attempted to cover up the SARS outbreak. But he became a persecuted troublemaker a year later when he broke his silence in 2004 about the former party-ordered “criminal army operation” against student protests that led to the Tiananmen massacre of 4 June 1989. In a harrowing letter, Jiang called on the party leadership to finally face up to its responsibility and reappraise the events.
With it, he not only provoked the rulers of the time, but also Xi Jinping, who had just been elected party leader in 2012. In several letters, Jiang urged him, first within the party and then publicly, to finally absolve the Tiananmen protests of the accusation of counterrevolution.
In his final letter to Xi, dated Oct. 10, 2018, and addressed to the People’s Congress in March 2019, he wrote that the party needs to overcome its fear that chaos will erupt in China as it reassesses events. By doing so, it will “absolutely not endanger China’s stability. On the contrary.” The 1989 army operation was its “worst crime”.
In the letter, Jiang reminded Xi about his father and politician Xi Zhongxun during China’s reform era. He said that Xi’s father himself had dared to protest Deng Xiaoping when the latter deposed the former party leader Hu Yaobang for being too liberal for his liking. His father, he said, rushed into Deng’s room, and he “banged on the table and insulted him.” But how do son Xi and today’s leaders behave? “Do they also have that much courage to stand up for a just cause?”
When I had the opportunity to meet Jiang on several occasions in Beijing in early summer 2019, he told me, “I have written five such letters to Xi. I have not received replies to any of them.” His last letter was particularly explosive. That was because Jiang, who held the rank of major general and was a Party veteran who had been a member of the CP since July 1952, knew many Chinese leaders personally. He revealed how controversial the bloody June 4 crackdown commanded by Deng Xiaoping was within the party leadership. Then-incumbent President Yang Shangkun, under Deng’s orders, had declared a state of emergency over Beijing in May 1989, along with Premier Li Peng. This allowed the military troops to enter the capital. Ten years later, when military doctor Jiang went to see Yang Shangkun at his home, he confessed: “June Fourth was the most serious mistake in our party history.” It was not correctable now, he said but would be in the future. Jiang also heard such late insights from other influential figures.
He once told me that his first letter about the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, which he sent to the then-Beijing leadership in February 2004, was the first time he dared to publicly address Beijing’s biggest taboo. All these years, he was tormented by what he witnessed as chief surgeon on the night of June 4. Jiang’s 301 Military Hospital was on the invasion route of the rampaging troops advancing toward the student-occupied Tiananmen Square. By midnight, 89 wounded people with horrific wounds had been brought there. The soldiers had fired internationally banned lead ammunition, which splintered on impact.
He said that the night changed him and inspired his one-man crusade, first against the lies about SARS and then for the rehabilitation of the events and victims of June 4. After Jiang’s letter became public, authorities detained him and his wife for 45 days on June 1, 2004, and then placed them under house arrest for eight months. China’s party leadership insisted in 2004, as it does today under Xi Jinping, that the 1989 crackdown on the democracy movement was justified. It would never re-open this past.
A loyal patriot, Jiang, who came from a distinguished Hangzhou banking family and had relatives in Taiwan, had always adhered to CP discipline. He kept silent about what he had endured during the Cultural Revolution. He was brutally persecuted as a counterrevolutionary and spent five years as a horse herder in an army penal camp on the Tibetan plateau of Qinghai until 1971. Then his services as a surgeon required him to return.
But as a doctor, he became furious when he watched on television on April 3, 2003, how then Minister of Health, Zhang Wenkang, played down and lied about the mysterious SARS epidemic that had spread from Guangdong to Beijing: Except for a few isolated cases, the situation was “under control,” he said.
Jiang had followed with concern how more and more newly infected people were being brought in every day and secretly divided between Beijing military hospitals. He sent urgent letters to the state broadcaster CCTV and the pro-Chinese Hong Kong cable channel Phoenix TV. Both ignored him. He then dared to inform Beijing correspondent Susan Jakes of the US Time magazine on April 8. Together with Karl Greenfeld, the editor-in-chief of the magazine’s Asia branch, who years later published a book on the matter (China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century’s First Great Epidemic), the journalists wrote a report that alarmed the World Health Organization (WTO). On April 20, the Beijing leadership held a press conference admitting to 339 SARS cases and many deaths in Beijing alone. This resulted in the firing of the Minister of Health and another senior official.
Beijing then mobilized the country against SARS. By mid-August, the pandemic threat had been averted. Thanks to cooperation with China, the WHO counted only 8,422 infected individuals and 919 deaths worldwide. More than 800 people died in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Jiang was hailed as a hero for three months. China’s government enacted new rules for transparency and full disclosure of medical information in high-risk cases. It introduced mandatory reporting of epidemics and emergencies in 2006.
15 years later, with the Covid outbreak in Wuhan in early 2020, everything was again forgotten, covered up, lied about and manipulated. The former whistleblower Jiang sat with his wife Hua Zhongwei under house arrest and could only watch helplessly.
Fighting snowdrifts with leaf blowers: At a train station in Heilongjiang Province, high up in China’s north, employees use an unconventional method to clear a switch. While the trees are already blooming in Beijing, the north still experiences deep sub-zero temperatures. The regional railroad company issued an emergency plan on Wednesday to ensure working train traffic despite the snow chaos.
