The story of Gao Yaojie is a sad reminder of how hard it is for the CCP to give up its reliance on lying and coercion. 

     Dr. Gao is a courageous and sincere physician who works hard to address the burgeoning problem of AIDS in China.  She has been widely recognized for her good deeds – as this video shows (hat tip, CDT) , she received an award on Chinese television in 2003.  You would think that she is precisely the kind of hard-working, humane person that the PRC government would want to encourage and support because she is diligently attending to a serious national problem.

    But no.  Last week stories started to hit the internet reporting that Dr. Gao had been placed under house arrest to keep her from attending a ceremony and receiving an award for her work in the US.  Some party functionaries fear that her renown undermines their reputations.  And they are right!  Corruption and incompetence and negligence are fueling the expanding AIDS crisis in China.  Dr. Gao cares enough for the victims of the disease that she will call attention to the bureaucratic failings that obstruct better patient treatment.  The party apparatchiks care only for their power and perquisites, so they stifle her work and abandon the afflicted people. 

      When confronted with the reality of globally networked communications, which reveals to the world their detention of Dr. Gao, the party tyrants lie.  They deny she is under house arrest.  And then they push their dissembling to ever-more absurd levels – they hold a phony photo-op to try to convince the world media that she is not being detained:

The photograph and article in Tuesday’s Henan Daily could have been
headlined “Happy Holidays.” Three highranking Henan Province officials,
beaming and clapping as if presenting a lottery check, were making an
early Lunar New Year visit to the apartment of a renowned AIDS doctor, Gao Yaojie.      

They gave her flowers. Dr. Gao, 80, squinted toward the camera, surely
understanding that pictures can lie. She was under house arrest to
prevent her from getting a visa to accept an honor in Washington. Her
detention attracted international attention, and the photo op was a
sham, apparently intended to say, “Look, she’s fine and free as a
bird.”

On Thursday, Dr. Gao said in a telephone interview, a
handful of police officers remained stationed outside her apartment
building in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou.

“I just
can’t simply swallow it all,” she said. “I want to know two things.
First, who has made the decision? I am an 80-year-old lady, and what
crimes have I committed to deserve this? Second, they must find out who
has been slandering my name on the Internet.”

     What century are these guys living in?  Do they really think they can make us think that this woman voluntarily disengaged from her life’s work?  Do they think they can just hide the AIDS crisis – rather like the bureaucrats in Harbin in late 2005 thought they could hide the massive environmental disaster of the Songhua River?  Of course, they can’t.  The truth will out, and the internet will guaranteed that the outed truth will flow around the world and back into China. 

     Those of us outside of China know that the party is lying about Dr. Gao.  And we also know, regardless of the Herculean efforts of the party to control the movement of information, that Chinese bloggers and internet readers can also see the lies as well.  Even though there is a movement afoot to slander her on Chinese internet sites, the lies are too big and obvious to be ignored. 

     Ultimately, the perfidy destroys the legitimacy of the party, as the Tao Te Ching (passage 75) suggests:

The people are impossible to rule,
and it’s only because you leaders are masters of extenuation
that they’re impossible to rule.

 Free Gao Yaojie!