Meet the “Peace and Health” asylums, the Chinese version of the old Soviet mental hospitals where those who criticized the regime disappeared.
by Ruth Ingram
“I hope there is a media outlet that will document my tragic experience, otherwise no one will know my story after I have died,” pleaded activist Tu Qiang, whose “crime” of criticizing Mao Zedong earned him involuntary psychiatric detention.
China’s alarming record of locking up activists in mental hospitals for “misdemeanors” such as speaking against injustice, protesting evictions and standing up for workers’ rights, has been exposed in the latest Safeguard Defenders report, “Drugged and detained: China’s psychiatric prisons.” Documenting the widespread political abuse of psychiatry in the Superpower including disappearances, beatings, forced medication, electro-convulsive therapy, and repeated incarceration, Safeguard Defenders traced the fate of 99 people, between 2015–2021, a small fraction of the total, in the system of “Ankang” asylums, euphemistically known as “peace and health” facilities, run by the Ministry of Public Health for the “criminally insane.”
Quoting a police officer saying it was easier to get into than out of an Ankang, the report graphically describes police collusion, physical and mental abuse, and the day-to-day regime of tying patients to their beds, sometimes for hours on end, enforced drug regimes, beatings and severance of contact with families and lawyers.
Under the guise of Xi Jinping’s “stability maintenance,” policy, whose budget at $217 billion exceeded his entire official military budget in 2019, Safeguard Defenders describes not only the Ankang system, but also the treatment of those who dare to speak against the system, imprisoned against their will in the wider network of 1,600 general psychiatric facilities across China. One of the “most frightening and stigmatizing” of Xi’s gagging measures, “where victims are trapped in a nightmare; without a court-issued sentence or judicial procedure with deadlines, they have no idea when it will end.”
Of the 144 incidents examined, only four took place in an Ankang hospital. Some are incarcerated for years, some simply disappear but all are sucked into the secretive, unaccountable web, their cases only coming to light through the courage of China-based NGOs that dare to speak up.
Despite China’s own 2012 Mental Health Law and Criminal Procedure laws, designed to prevent abuse, police and government agents act with impunity to detain “troublemakers” and “routinely order hospitals and doctors to authorize compulsory treatment.” Doctors are pressurized into making false psychiatric evaluations, zealously diagnosing psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenic psychosis, paranoid psychosis, and paranoia, in order to punish and remove activists and petitioners from society without the trouble of going through a trial.
Wang Wanxing was held for 13 years for his one-man demonstration commemorating the Tiananmen massacre. Hunan farmer and petitioner He Fangwu was forcibly hospitalized multiple times, and diagnosed with paranoid psychosis. Petitioner Jiang Tianlu was tied to a bed and beaten on his face and head by government agents, and set upon by gangsters within the ward. Petitioner Luo Guilian from Inner Mongolia was tied up and forced to take unknown drugs and injections with painful and distressing side effects.
Distributing political leaflets was Feng Xiaoyan’s “crime” for which a three-month detention followed a mystery drug regime usually reserved for schizophrenic disorders. It caused her excessive weight gain and back pain. Her tongue swelled, her thinking became sluggish and her movements stiffened. Yang Zhixiang was told by her Ankang doctor not to repeat the “dark things that happened there.”
The stories told are distressing in the extreme. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is routinely given without anesthesia. “For victims of China’s political abuse of psychiatry, ECT is more a torture than a therapy,” claims the report, detailing the extreme pain and side effects the patients are forced to endure.
Safeguard Defenders urges the international community to wake up to the grave human rights abuses inflicted on those who dare to demur, and Beijing’s continued flouting of its own laws in abusing those who dare to stand up for their rights. “China must take immediate steps to put a stop to the political abuse of psychiatry and release all those unjustly imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals,” say the authors. Victims must be alerted to their recourse to compensation and provided with medical assistance to deal with the psychological and physical consequences of their ordeal.
When a man dared to protest the requisitioning of their family land in 2005, and was beaten to death by a local official, his son Jiang Tianlu, now in his forties, had the temerity to ask for justice. For his “crime” he has been sent to Ankang countless times and is currently still a prisoner.
The human rights catastrophe for those who simply ask for justice, must stop, insists Safeguard Defenders. Beijing must be compelled to obey its own laws and open channels of legitimate protest and redress for those with legitimate grievances.
Ruth Ingram is a researcher who has written extensively for the Central Asia-Caucasus publication, Institute of War and Peace Reporting, the Guardian Weekly newspaper, The Diplomat, and other publications.
