EWTN News Brief: Falun Gong Followers Confined In Chinese Asylums

27-Feb-2001

LONDON, (CWNews.com/Fides) - The Chinese government is waging a campaign to discredit and eliminate the Falun Gong spiritualist movement, interring obstinate members in mental asylums, according to Robin Munro, a senior research fellow at the Law Department and Center for Chinese Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, in a 130-page study entitled Judicial Psychiatry in China and its Political Abuses.

Munro states that the Ministry of Public Security in China runs a network of special hospitals to house the criminally insane and in which political opponents are incarcerated, and now the members of the banned Falun Gong movement are being treated in the same way. Munro adds that this system was copied from the former Soviet Union.

In his study, published in the Columbia Journal of Asian Law, Munro notes that before Falun Gong was banned in July 1999, China's political use of psychiatric confinement had declined significantly.

Observers say the institutes are examples of the worst abuse and violence. Human rights activists have called on the World Psychiatric Association to censure or suspend China at next year's meeting of the World Psychological Association.

The system of confining political dissidents in asylums was used in the last decade of Mao Tse Tung's regime (1966-76) and then put aside by the Communist authorities. With the explosion of Falun Gong it has been exhumed. Munro mentions the case of Cao Maobing, a silk worker in Jiangsu province who protested against corruption of public officials and tried to organize an independent trade union. He was taken to a mental asylum and given electric-shock treatment. The report says that hundreds of Falun Gong followers are being treated in the same way. "Sane or insane, these people have committed no criminal offenses by international standards," Munro says.

Recently Bishop Joseph Zen, coadjutor of Hong Kong, said what is happening to Falun Gong could easily extend to Christians. "If they identify criticism of the government with evil, then the unofficial Catholic Church in China could be in danger of being called an evil cult." Along with Bishop Zen, five Catholic organizations and seven Protestant groups have expressed concern for the violent repression of Falun Gong followers.