5/17//2001
For a long time, psychiatry as a means of political repression played a small role in China. The [party' name omitted] banked on open repression, police terror and revolutionary justice. Dissidents were sent to jail, prison or into forced labor camps. Within the framework of fighting the Falun Gong movement, however, unfortunately the treatment with psychiatric methods has increased many-fold.
Those who criticize [party' name omitted] must be insane. Don't the mass media affirm daily that the Chinese live a prosperous life; that their lives are worth living and the prognosis for even a better life in the future looks rosy? Don't the most important foreign visitors and business tycoons shake hands with the Beijing leadership? Don't new houses spring out of the ground like mushrooms? Aren't the old, the yesterday, the embarrassing made to disappear overnight? Those who opt to lend a deaf ear to the propaganda-messages sounding from loudspeakers in the park, who are blind to the slogan banners being waved by colorfully clad people, those who ignore all those so-called blessings coming from the plethora from the [party' name omitted] cornucopia, being showered onto the average citizen, must indeed harbor ill will - or must be insane. So at least is the view of those individuals who define the normalcy of Chinese life and they therefore formulate suitable laws. Human beings who recite anti-government speeches, write "reactionary" letters or hold opinions against the party line on internal or external topics will increasingly be declared "political mental patients." The police are ordered to take them into psychiatric custody.
Example from the Soviet Union
To classify political dissenters as mental patients is not new to China, but the trend has increased lately, so say leading experts. Robin Munro, research assistant at London University, recently published a sensational article in which he states that the [party' name omitted] leadership is in the process of building a network of psychiatric clinics across China for criminally ill mental patients. The clinics have the designation "Ankang," which means "peace and health," and will be administered and controlled by the Ministry of Public Security. Munro is of the opinion that the abuse of using psychiatric treatment methods by the Chinese leadership is on the increase, especially against the Falun Gong movement since it was outlawed over 1 ? years ago. The Chinese leadership, says Munro, utilizes this method of control to assert its power. He bolsters his thesis by citing numerous concrete examples, which are occurrences well known to human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The technique is well known to the Chinese. Shortly after the founding of the modern Chinese state, using the example of the Soviet Union, authorities began to incarcerate those critical to the system in mental hospitals. During the Cultural Revolution, this practice reached its excess. In those eventful years between 1966 and 1976, everyone who refused to comply was declared mentally ill. Human psychology was publicly shunned; psychic health was equated with correct political thinking. In certain clinics at that time, up to 70 percent of the cases were classified as "naturally not politically correct." Millions of mentally healthy democrats and dissidents found themselves in the mental hospitals or re-education-through-forced-labor-camps.
In the 1980s, the era of Deng Xiaoping, the authorities returned to a more restrained use of punishment by psychiatric methods. The time for tyrannical, unchecked, rampant social realignment was over. The excesses of Mao were recognized as such and were branded as such. Those who were incarcerated after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre were, for the most part, classified as political dissidents and treated accordingly. Finally, the 90s at first showed a remarkable decline in the use of politically motivated psychiatry, and the West began to hope. But by and by, however, the reports began to mount, telling of dissidents being held in psychiatric clinics. At the end of the decade, when the government felt challenged by the Falun Gong movement, the authorities decided once more to incarcerate and render useless large numbers of opponents to the regime, those lobbying for independent trade unions and members of underground churches, in mental hospitals. So much have the numbers increased that Robin Munro surmises that the Chinese bureaucrats eliminate and terrorize people in larger numbers and in more ways than was ever done by the enforcers of the Soviet [party' name omitted] party who sent people to the rubber-lined cells of the Gulags.
Search for more subtle forms
At first, the increase in psychiatric punishment for dissidents right now looks at first glance somewhat odd. Why should the [party' name omitted] party utilize this old and relatively expensive method, when it would be less complicated and cheaper to simply execute or at least declare as "criminals" those who refuse to toe the party line? It would be cheaper to send them to prison or re-education camps or forced labor camps. China is as usual opposed to and balks at all well-intended Western efforts to modernize her judicial system. The police system does not follow the rule of law, but obeys directives "from above." This classical way of dealing with problems avoids all problems posed by dissidents. One can make the assumption that the Chinese government is seeking for a formula, less tyrannical, brutal and crude, which will better integrate economic liberalization with the current situation and also allow for a better way of dealing with non-compliance than was used the first generation of [party' name omitted] -- Stalin and Mao. In an increasingly complicated meshing of the society, where free enterprise exists and where the influence of the state is seen as harmful in certain circles, discrete forms of dissidence have become more efficient. Yet, the [party' name omitted] party thinks pragmatically. Even now, though, there is hardly a more effective way to discourage dissidence than the threat of removal from society and incarceration in mental institutions. People who have been made "examples" are commonly more dramatically stigmatized than those who have the privileged label of "political dissident only."
Presumably, the encouragement of use of political psychiatry includes the desire to stand out as little as possible internationally. The [party' name omitted] insist on China's inclusion in the international community. China wants to join worldwide trade organizations and present the Olympic games in Beijing. Those ambitions must not be endangered by protest efforts from human rights organizations. Naked, brutal repression usually provokes a loud echo. Even when the [party' name omitted] regime protests her actions, it is nevertheless embarrassing. That is when the medical version of repression comes in handy. Ultimately, psychiatric treatment primarily is for healing and helping. When one insists that one helps in this way those who suffer and are confused, than one does not create such a fuss as if a regime resorts to hard brutality and tyranny. What is curious, however, is that in the heat of battle, the lines are not so cleanly drawn. Falun Gong members are often classified as those in need of help and are moved as mentally ill persons to psychiatric hospitals. According to the movement's claims, 600 of their members have already experienced this treatment. But the method of their arrests by such abuses as blows, kicking in the stomach and genitals, brutal yanking of hair reminds one more of methods in dealing with criminals.
Suspicious absence of instincts
It is difficult to ascertain how many people in China are under forced mental incarceration these days and who are being treated with psycho-pharmaceuticals. According to Munro, during the last twenty years, at least 3,000 individuals critical of the regime have been disposed of in this manner, and this number does not include the thousands of arrested Falun Gong members. In comparison to the legions who are stewing [literal meaning of the German word; translator] in jails, prisons and forced labor camps, that number seems rather modest. But the real numbers are probably much higher. It is difficult to discern, though, because there are incidents involved which are extremely hard to bring to light, even by the best-informed human rights organizations. The danger is great that in the coming months this form of repression will increase in scope and size. It might some day even replace the more overt and simpler method of criminalization of dissidents of any sort. Munro further believes that three categories of people are in especial danger: those who constantly barrage the regime with requests and petitions; those who always write anti-[party' name omitted] treatises, and those who don't display any kind of self-defense when authorities beat and arrest them without displaying any resistance.
Whether the Chinese denials given in those instances are weighty is troublesome to judge. The arguments they present are lean and lame. "It does not preclude that some cases exist where criminals were handed over for psychiatric evaluation without proper screening," so says Tian Zuen, chief of the forensic department of the Psychiatric Hospital in Anding, "but that phenomenon must not become artificially inflated." The biggest problem with Chinese psychiatry is not that normal persons are classified as psychiatric patients, but rather that those really ill will not receive the correct designation and treatments necessary for their case. One must note that with his explanation, Tian simply glosses over the problem of eliminating political dissidents.
Electro-shock against activism
Cao Maobing was a worker in a state-owned silk factory in the Jiangsu Province. Last year, he began to protest against widespread corruption in his company. According to family and friends, in December of 2000, one day after he had spoken about his goals with a foreign journalist, the police came and transported him to a mental institution where he had to suffer electro-shock therapy and forced psychotropic injections. His family and friends insist that Cao is completely normal. The director of the institution, however, says that a 17-member expert commission has determined that Cao suffers from paranoid psychosis. Another case, that of Mr. Zhu, created a stir in the nineties. He was a pensioned worker who suddenly began to spout his theories about politics and economics to anyone who would listen, including to the leadership in Beijing. He had the misfortune to publicly declare that he opposes the central principals of Deng Xiaoping and displayed other, non-Marxist conforming ideas. One of his ideas was that according to scientific interpretations of socialism, the economic understructure does not determine the superstructure, but the superstructure determines the underpinnings, the political determines the production, not the other way around. Perhaps the [party' name omitted], who were at that moment busy with the sanction of the state, to perfect their own brand of capitalism felt caught in the act by Zhu, maybe he only went on their nerves. In any event, they declared that his views and pronouncements were not compatible with his station in life, his status and position, and this disparity constitutes his connection with reality.
A meeting with consequences
In December of 1999, Xue Jifeng was arrested in the capital of Henan Province, the City of Zhengzhou, and subsequently sent to a psychiatric clinic, where he remained until July of 2000. Xue was a pioneer in the effort for independent labor unions. His crime was to associate with other labor activists who attempted to hold a meeting. According to researcher Munro, against his will, Xue was injected with psycho-pharmaceuticals and placed into a cell with genuine mental patients who tormented him during the day time and prevented him from sleeping at night. This treatment, however, was not new to Xue. For his political activities he had once before been placed into a psychiatric institution.
[Robert Munro, Judicial Psychiatry in China and Its Political Abuses; Columbia Journal of Asian Law, 2001].
