[Marxism] Whistle-Blowers in Chinese City Sent to Mental Hospital

[Dbachmozart@xxxxxxx]

_http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/world/asia/09china.html?em_ 
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/world/asia/09china.html?em) 
 
 
By _ANDREW JACOBS_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/andrew_jacobs/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
 
Published: December 8, 2008 - NY Times
 
BEIJING â Local officials in Shandong Province have apparently found a  
cost-effective way to deal with gadflies, whistle-blowers and all manner of  
muckraking citizens who dare to challenge the authorities: dispatch them to the 
 
local psychiatric hospital.  
In an investigative report published Monday by a state-owned newspaper,  
public security officials in the city of Xintai in Shandong Province were said  
to 
have been institutionalizing residents who persist in their personal  
campaigns to expose corruption or the unfair seizure of their property. Some  
people 
said they were committed for up to two years, and several of those  
interviewed said they were forcibly medicated.  
The article, in The Beijing News, said most inmates were released after they  
agreed to give up their causes.  
Sun Fawu, 57, a farmer seeking compensation for land spoiled by a coal-mining 
 operation, said he was seized by local authorities on his way to petition 
the  central government in Beijing and taken to the Xintai Mental Health Center 
in  October.  
During a 20-day stay, he said, he was lashed to a bed, forced to take pills  
and given injections that made him numb and woozy. According to the paper, 
when  he told the doctor he was a petitioner, not mentally ill, the doctor 
said: â
I  donât care if youâre sick or not. As long as you are sent by the 
township 
 government, Iâll treat you as a mental patient.â  
In an interview with the newspaper, the hospitalâs director, Wu Yuzhu,  
acknowledged that some of the 18 patients brought there by the police in recent 
 
years were not deranged, but he said that he had no choice but to take them in. 
 
âThe hospital also had its misgivings,â he said.  
Xintai officials do not see any shame in the tactic, and they boasted that  
hospitalizing people they characterized as troublemakers saved money that would 
 have been spent chasing them to Beijing. There is another reason to stop  
petitioners who seek redress from higher levels of government: they can prove  
embarrassing to local officials, especially if they make it to Beijing.  
The Xintai government Web site noted that provincial authorities had recently 
 referred to Xintai as âan advanced city in building a safe Shandong.â They 
said  that from January to May this year, the number of petitioners who went 
over the  heads of local authorities was 274, a 4 percent drop from the same 
period in  2007. Although _China_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/china/index.html?inline=nyt-geo)
  is not known for 
the kind of systematic abuse of  psychiatry that occurred in the Soviet 
Union, human rights advocates say forced  institutionalizations are not 
uncommon in 
smaller cities. Robin Munro, the  research director of _China Labor  
Bulletin_ (http://www.china-labour.org.hk/en/) , a rights organization in Hong 
Kong, 
said such âan kangâ  wards â Chinese for peace and health â were a 
convenient 
and effective means of  dealing with pesky dissidents.  
âOnce a detainee has been officially diagnosed as dangerously mentally ill,  
theyâre immediately taken out of the criminal justice system and they lose 
all 
 legal rights,â said Mr. Munro, who has researched Chinaâs practice of  
psychiatric detention.  
In recent years practitioners of _Falun Gong_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/falun_gong/index.html?inline=nyt-org)
 , 
the banned spiritual movement, have  complained of what they call coerced 
hospitalizations. One of Chinaâs best-known  dissidents, Wang Wanxing, spent 
13 
years in a police-run psychiatric institution  under conditions he later 
described as abusive.  
In one recent, well-publicized case, Wang Jingmei, the mother of a man  
convicted of killing six policemen in Shanghai, was held incommunicado at a  
mental 
hospital for five months and released only days before her son was  executed 
in late November.  
The article in The Beijing News about the hospitalizations in Xintai was  
notable for the attention it gained in Chinaâs constrained state-run media. 
Such  
Communist Party stalwarts as Peopleâs Daily and the Xinhua news agency  
republished the article, and it was picked up by scores of Web sites. At 
_Sina.com_ 
(http://www.sina.com/) , the countryâs most popular portal, the report  
ranked as the fifth most-viewed news headline, and readers posted more than  
23,000 
comments by evening. The indignation expressed was universal, with many  
clamoring for the dismissal of those involved. âTheyâre no different from  
animals,â read one post. âNo, theyâre worse.â  
By Monday evening, the Xintai city government was rejecting the report by The 
 Beijing News as reckless and slanted. In a telephone interview broadcast on  
Shandong provincial television, an unidentified municipal official suggested  
that those confined to the mental hospital had gone mad from their 
single-minded  quest for justice. âThere are some people who have been 
petitioning for 
years  and become mentally aggravated,â the official said.  
Reached by phone on Monday, a hospital employee said Mr. Wu, the hospital  
director who voiced his misgivings to The Beijing News, was unavailable. The  
employee, Hu Peng, said that officials from the local government had taken him  
away for âa meetingâ earlier in the day. 
Although he would not provide a reporter with contact information for the  
former patients, Mr. Hu defended the hospitalizations, saying that all those  
delivered by the Public Security Bureau were sick. He added that the hospital  
was not authorized to provide a diagnosis to the patients, only to treat them.  
âWe definitely would not accept those without mental problems,â he  said.

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