Washington Post : The Silent Treatment From Beijing

By Philip P. Pan

Foreign Service
Monday, August 26, 2002

BEIJING -- The police officer was on the run. Like others in the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, Fang Lihong had been fired, imprisoned and forced to attend months of intense "deprogramming" classes. Unlike most, he was then committed to a psychiatric hospital -- but he escaped.

"I was terrified," Fang said last year during an interview at a seedy tavern in central China. "I' m not mentally ill, but I was trapped with the other patients for 16 months."

At first, he said, doctors at the Kangning Psychiatric Hospital in the northern city of Anshan forced him to take medication. Later, they let him take the pills to his room and discard them, Fang said. The doctors told him they knew he was sane but were under orders from his superiors in the police department to "treat" him anyway, he said.

During the 45-minute interview, Fang spoke clearly and appeared rational. Afterward, he slipped out a side door and went back into hiding. In February, according to Falun Gong officials in the United States, police caught him in southern Fujian province and he died in their custody, apparently from physical abuse. A doctor at Kangning confirmed the mental hospital had treated Fang and had been informed of his death, but he declined to discuss the case further.

Stories such as Fang' s and others alleging psychiatric abuse of dissidents have prompted an increasingly contentious debate over whether the Chinese government is systematically confining people in mental hospitals for political reasons as the Soviet Union did in the 1970s and ?.

The issue is high on the agenda of this week' s congress of the World Psychiatric Association in the Japanese city of Yokohama, where delegates are expected to vote today on a resolution demanding that China open its mental hospitals to an independent investigation. If a probe found evidence of abuse, China could be expelled from the world body.

That would be an embarrassing defeat for China' s ruling Communist Party, which has denied the allegations of psychiatric abuse and labored to defend its human rights record in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. No major member of the World Psychiatric Association has been forced out since the Soviet Union, which withdrew in 1983 under threat of expulsion. [..]

The campaign to expose psychiatric abuse in China began last year with the publication of a detailed report on the subject by Robin Munro, a British academic who served as the chief China researcher for Human Rights Watch during the 1990s.

The report relied primarily on articles discovered in Chinese psychiatric textbooks and medical journals that describe a system in which forensic psychiatrists diagnose "political criminals" with mental illnesses just as routinely as they do other criminals. These criminals are spared prison terms or execution and instead are sent to police-run institutes for the criminally insane, known as Ankang hospitals.

Based on statistics reported in the Chinese documents, Munro estimated that at least 3,000 people charged with some kind of political crime in the past
two decades were referred for psychiatric evaluation by police, and that most of them were deemed mentally ill and confined in the Ankang system.

The finding was startling because China was widely believed to have abandoned the systematic abuse of psychiatry after the end of Mao Zedong' s destructive Cultural Revolution in 1976, and many Western experts had praised Chinese psychiatrists for making significant advances toward international standards.

In addition, Munro' s estimate exceeds the number of political dissidents confirmed to have been wrongly diagnosed and locked up in Soviet mental hospitals during the 1970s and ?.

"There were only ever about 200 to 300 named cases of Soviet dissidents and others who were sent to mental asylums, though there are unconfirmed ballpark estimates that the numbers may have run into the several thousands," Munro said. "In China' s case, by contrast, we have a wealth of official statistics showing that the absolute minimum number of political
psychiatric detentions since the early 1980s is about 3,000."

But the evidence available against China is different in important ways from what critics mustered against the Soviet Union.

In the Soviet case, there were two types of victims of psychiatric abuse, a group of political dissidents who criticized the government, and a larger group of people -- deemed "troublemakers" -- with grievances against their employers or local officials. The West focused its attention on the political dissidents.

But the only evidence against Soviet psychiatrists at the time were numerous anecdotal reports about individual cases, said Richard J. Bonnie, a law professor at the University of Virginia who participated in two investigations of psychiatric abuse in the Soviet Union.

"We had allegations, and we had names," Bonnie said. "There was no documentation or any systematic statistical information of the kind that Robin has identified in China."

On the other hand, Munro has been unable to put names behind the numbers. He said the Ankang system is highly secretive, and the authorities generally use it against lesser-known "political criminals."

Only two political dissidents inside the Ankang system are known to the outside world. One is Wang Miaogen, who helped found the Shanghai Workers Autonomous Federation in May 1989 and reportedly was committed to the Shanghai Ankang Hospital in 1993.

The other is Wang Wanxing, a worker who unfurled a banner in Tiananmen Square in 1992 to commemorate the third anniversary of the military crackdown on student-led protests there. His wife, Wang Junying, said police at the time tricked her into signing papers indicating her husband was mentally ill by saying he would be released in a few months.

But 10 years later, at the age of 52, he remains confined in the Beijing Ankang Hospital on the outskirts of the city.

Wang said she has never been given an official diagnosis of her husband' s illness. In 1997, in response to a State Department report that mentioned the case, the Chinese government said doctors had found Wang to be "suffering from paranoid delusions."

A few months ago, Wang said, authorities offered to release her husband into her custody if she agreed that he is mentally ill and took responsibility for his actions. She said she and her husband refused, and in response the hospital moved him to a ward holding violent inmates.

"How can they do this to a healthy person?" she said. "They couldn' t charge him with a crime, so they put him in a hospital. It' s just an excuse to persecute him."

Besides the two cases in the Ankang system, there have been many reports of individuals -- including labor activists -- who have been committed to other psychiatric hospitals for shorter periods, often without being charged with a crime and usually by order of local officials who consider them troublemakers.

In the past year, state-run newspapers have reported on at least six cases of people who were unjustly committed to mental hospitals, including a 60-year-old teacher who was confined for 300 days after repeatedly complaining about housing, and a 42-year-old peasant confined for more than 200 days after a land dispute with local officials.

"They took an innocent, normal person who challenged authority and illegally forced me into a mental hospital," said Zhong Huayuan, 63, a professor in Guangzhou who was committed four times between 1972 and 1992 in disputes with his bosses. "Some of the doctors don' t realize what is happening, and they make you take medicine or get electroshock therapy."

Chinese legal scholars and psychiatrists blame the problem on poor training of psychiatrists and a weak legal system that does not protect patients' rights. There is no clear standard for when a person who has not committed a crime can be forcibly hospitalized, nor is it clear whether courts or doctors should make that decision. [..]

[Munro] emphasized that most Chinese psychiatrists are ethical, and noted that official statistics show a steady decline in political psychiatric cases during the 1980s and ?. But he said that progress was threatened when the government declared war in 1999 against Falun Gong, […]

Falun Gong says 1,000 of its members have been forcibly committed. But Fang and three other Falun Gong members who asked not to be identified said they were placed in mental hospitals only because they refused to renounce their beliefs. "They couldn' t change my mind in the brainwashing classes," Fang said, "so they came up with a more vicious method."