China’s use of psychiatric hospitals to imprison political advocates without due process remains routine, a rights group has said, accusing doctors and the healthcare system of colluding with authorities in punishing dissidents.
Beijing authorities for decades used the country’s system of psychiatric hospitals, known as ankang (安康), to punish political prisoners.
A report released on Tuesday by Madrid-based non-governmental organization Safeguard Defenders said the practice continues, despite reforms in the early 2010s that required medical assent and increased judicial oversight over China’s psychiatric care system.
Photo: AFP
The majority of the data in the report come from interviews with victims and their families posted online by Chinese non-governmental organization Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, an organization founded by advocate and citizen journalist Liu Feiyue (劉飛躍).
The data analyze the cases of 99 Chinese people forced into psychiatric hospitalization for political reasons between 2015 and last year.
“In 2022, the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] is still routinely locking up political targets in psychiatric hospitals despite implementing legal changes to stop this barbaric practice more than a decade ago,” the group said.
“The CCP is able to remove petitioners and activists entirely out of the justice system, with no hope of seeing a lawyer or going to trial, while ‘diagnosing’ them with mental illness so that they are socially isolated even after release,” it added. “Doctors and hospitals collude with the CCP to subject victims to medically unnecessary involuntary hospitalizations and forced medication.”
Most of the victims were petitioners, “people who often struggle on the lowest rungs of the social ladder in China and are thus powerless and easy targets,” it said.
“Such numbers indicate that sending political prisoners to psychiatric wards is widespread and routine in China,” it added.
Detainees were often subject to physical and mental abuse, the report said, citing claims by prisoners that they had been subject to beatings, electroshock therapy and solitary confinement.
Among those detained were a young girl who had live-streamed herself splashing paint on a portrait of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), a man who had petitioned Beijing for medical compensation for an injury sustained serving in the army and longtime pro-democracy advocate Song Zaimin (宋再民), it added.
The Chinese Ministry of Health did not respond to a request for comment.
China is a global leader in locking up political opponents, a practice critics say has intensified under Xi. Beyond dissidents and petitioners, rights groups say at least 1 million people, mostly members of Muslim minorities, have been incarcerated in “re-education camps” in the western Xinjiang region and face widespread abuses, including forced sterilization and forced labor.
China says it is running vocational training centers in the region designed to counter extremism.
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