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Deputy director of the Asia Division for Human Rights Watch Sophie Richardson said that in the early 1990s, when the Chinese government decided it could no longer charge people with being counter-revolutionaries, they began to lock them away in mental institutions for the criminally insane called Ankangs as a means of silencing them. According to Richardson, “This is where the Charles Mansons as well as the Nelson Mandelas of China go,” Richardson said.
She said most people in Ankangs are indeed criminally insane so those innocent dissidents who are locked up with them have a tough time in there. The average sentence to an Ankang is from five to as much as 20 years where they have no access to family or lawyers, have no idea of what medications they are taking and are incarcerated with violent criminals.
“There are plenty of ways to challenge these cases of wrongful confinement. We as human rights organizations research individual cases and publicize them to make people aware of them and to exert public pressure points on countries that violate human rights,” Richardson said.
According to Professor Michael Perlin, the director of the Mental Disability Law Program who leads the International Mental Disability Law Reform Project at the Justice Action Center at New York Law School, placing dissidents in psychiatric hospitals rather than prisons serves three points: it avoids the already limited procedural safeguards of a criminal trial, stigmatizes people in order to subordinate them, and confines dissenters indefinitely. Perlin said tools of coercive psychiatry still were used in what some call the “criminalization of dissent.”
Perlin said there have been changes in international law regarding the rights of the mentally ill, yet human rights violations are still going on in China and in the former Soviet block.
Leading China expert Robin Munro studied 222 cases involving schizophrenia in China and found that 55 of the cases were political in nature and 48 others were for disturbances of the social order.
“There is no question China is violating international human rights laws. For example, the Falun Gong have been sent to mental institutions for reeducation,” Perlin said.
Robin Munro, research director for China Labour Bulletin of Hong Kong and author of the article titled, “Dangerous Minds: Political Psychiatry in China Today and Its Origins in the Mao Era” (Human Rights Watch, 2002), said that the numbers of Falun Gong practitioners who've been forcibly sent to mental asylums seems to have dwindled rapidly over the past year or so, as compared to the first few years after 1999, when well over 1,000 of them were treated in this way.
“Basically, the fall-off in psychiatric detainee numbers is because the government has by now largely succeeded in its aim of crushing the Falun Gong movement inside China, so there are fewer active campaigners who need to be intimidated by psychiatric incarceration,” Munro said.
Munro said the current main focus of politically abusive psychiatry in China is the petitioners and complainants (shangfangzhe). “There have been more and more reports of these types of people being forcibly held in mental hospitals in recent years, while at the same time the numbers of more classic-style political dissidents dealt with in this way have continued to fall,” he said. For example, Human Rights in China (HRIC) has learned that Shanghai petitioner Liu Xinjuan has been forcibly admitted to a mental hospital for the fifth time in three years following her latest attempt to petition the government in Beijing over forced evictions for urban redevelopment.
In one of the best documented cases, Wang Wanxing was incarcerated in a mental hospital for 13 years after unfurling a banner calling for greater human rights and democracy on June 3, 1992. Following his release earlier this year, Wang was examined by psychiatric experts in Germany and found to be free of mental illness.
New laws have been passed by nations as well as by international governing organizations to protect basic human rights. The United Nations adopted the Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and for the Improvement of Mental Health Care, called the MI principles, which provide basic international guidelines. Perlin said the MI principles do not speak specifically to the issue of state psychiatry as used for political suppression.
Meanwhile, organizations continue to condemn the long history of misuse of the Chinese mental health system to incarcerate dissidents and other citizens. Forcibly admitting Liu Xinjuan and others into psychiatric institutions for speaking out against government policies as punishment is a form of arbitrary detention and a human rights violation.