Chinese security forces on Friday stopped and detained dozens of protesters who tried to storm a university to confront a professor who said nearly all petitioners are mentally ill and should be put away.
Law professor Sun Dongdong’s (孫東東) comments, published in a March issue of China Newsweek magazine, triggered outrage among petitioners who routinely flock to Beijing by the thousands to air complaints after their local governments ignore them.
About 40 people gathered outside the elite Peking University gates on Friday morning, scattering leaflets and shouting for the professor to come out to talk to them. They tried to pass through the gates, but dozens of security forces stopped them. They were then put into buses and taken away.
PHOTO: AP
The incident capped more than a week of demonstrations outside the university. So far, dozens of protesters have been sent away on buses or taken away by police, other protesters and state media said.
The situation has drawn fresh attention to the plight of petitioners — mostly from China’s vast and poor countryside — who have come to symbolize the country’s failure to build a justice system that ordinary Chinese consider fair.
More than a case of hurt feelings, petitioners and their supporters worry that Sun’s essay will be used to further lend a professional gloss to the practice of placing petitioners in mental institutions.
“There’s very good reason behind these worries,” said activist lawyer Li Heping (李和平), who has taken on many rights cases.
“Nowadays, there is an overflow of cases involving petitioners being forced into mental hospitals,” he said. “After being labeled as a mental health patient, one loses all rights.”
The system has its roots in China’s imperial past, when people petitioned the emperor. It survived after the Communists took power with “letters and visits” to offices at every level of government to handle grievances. The number of people flooding into the capital in recent years has ballooned, as awareness of legal rights and their infringement by local officials has grown.
But local officials have resorted to various methods outside of the law to stop them, including sending thugs or police that place them in illegal detention centers in Beijing or force them to return home, fearing the grievances will reflect badly on them.
Late last year, the state-run Beijing News newspaper reported on the plight of petitioners placed in mental institutions in eastern Shandong Province, with some forced to take psychiatric drugs and told they would not be released until they signed pledges to drop their complaints.
The government says it receives between 3 million and 4 million letters and visits from petitioners each year, but rights groups put the figure in the tens of millions.
Sun is an associate professor at the law department and head of the university’s forensics department, which also helps court authorities evaluate the mental health of defendants. A well-known adviser to the Ministry of Health, he is also involved in drafting China’s first mental health law, state media said.
He quickly issued a public apology, but his critics have dismissed it as insincere. His department said he was not available for an interview on Friday.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
SUPERFAN: The Japanese PM played keyboard in a Deep Purple tribute band in middle school and then switched to drums at university, she told the British rock band Legendary British rock band Deep Purple yesterday made Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s day with a brief visit to their high-profile superfan as they returned to the nation they first toured more than half a century ago. Takaichi’s reputation as an amateur drummer, and a fan of hard rock and heavy metal has been well documented, and she has referred to Deep Purple as one of her favorite bands along with the likes of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. “You are my god,” a giddy Takaichi said in English to Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice, presenting him with a set of made-in-Japan
RSS