In Maoist China, the opponents sent by the state to a psychiatric hospital had a name: “those who are made mentally ill”. The system had even been institutionalized in 1988 with the creation of “ankang”, psychiatric hospitals directly managed by the Ministry of Public Security. However, laws enacted in 2012 and 2013 on the rights of patients were supposed to have put an end to these arbitrary detentions. It is not so.
A report by the NGO Safeguard Defenders, published on August 16, shows not only that these confinements of opponents outside of any legal procedure still exist, but that a number of psychiatric hospitals managed by the Ministry of Health participate in this system which is contrary to Chinese and international law. The NGO, based in Madrid, has identified 99 victims, hospitalized against their will between 2013 and 2021 in 109 hospitals in more than 20 provinces. They are only “the tip of the iceberg”says the NGO.
Among the identified victims, 14 are political activists and 80 simple petitioners: Chinese without political commitment, but who have one day dared to complain about an injustice or an act of corruption. Seventy underwent only one hospitalization and, in the majority of cases, it lasted less than six months. But some are “multi-hospitalized” and remain locked up for several years. Thus, Jiang Tianlu’s nightmare began in 2004, when this man denounced the officials who had beaten his father to death – and in public – after he exposed their corruption. Since then, Jiang Tianlu does not even know exactly how many hospitalizations he has undergone. Probably seven. The last came in January 2021. He was arrested while accompanying his 7-year-old daughter to school. Jiang Tianlu claims to have been tied to his bed, beaten and drugged without his knowledge.
“No release date”
The record for hospitalizations undoubtedly goes to Gu Xianghong, a woman interned twenty times since 1999 after being beaten by the police. Several testimonies refer to electroshocks and other forms of torture. This is what Dong Yaoqiong would have suffered; this young girl living in Shanghai, in July 2018, threw ink on a portrait of President Xi Jinping and denounced the “dictatorship” Chinese on social media. Arrested, she will remain locked up in a psychiatric hospital until November 2019. According to her father, she came out suffering from a form of dementia due to antipsychotic drugs prescribed by the hospital. Hospitalized again in May 2020, she came out two months later, even sicker, having lost control of her urinary system and suffering from night terrors. According to Safeguard Defenders, her father indicated in February 2021 that the young woman was again hospitalized and would still be today.
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