ZHENGZHOU, China – The electric acupuncture needles stung her scalp, and the drugs bloated her weight, gave her heart palpitations and brought on premature menopause.
But Wu Chunxia consented to the treatments at the psychiatric hospital because if she didn’t, she knew she would be strapped to her bed and left vulnerable to assaults from violent inmates.
“It was worse than hell in there,” says Wu, 37, of the Henan provincial psychiatric hospital in Xinxiang. “I feared I would be strangled at night by other patients.”
Wu was not at the hospital for reasons of mental health. She was committed there in 2008 by the Chinese government for 132 days as punishment for protesting about local injustice to higher authorities.
The Communist Party does not acknowledge its mental facilities are used to silence critics, but according to numerous human rights groups and Chinese dissidents, China’s Communist-led government has for decades incarcerated healthy people in mental wards to suppress dissent. In the past two years, wrongful confinement cases have sharply increased, says Liu Feiyue of Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, a human-rights organization based in Suzhou.
The rise in confinements is greatest among petitioners — the ordinary people who complain about local problems, he says. Committing them to mental hospitals is a “quick, convenient and very effective” method for the government to silence criticism.
Now some Chinese officials are pushing back against the political confinements. Prodded by academics, activists and former patients, China’s National People’s Congress is discussing what would be the country’s first ever mental health law.
Minister of Health Chen Zhu told the standing committee of the Congress in October that the new law will curb the abuse of involuntary hospitalization and better protect the rights of the mentally ill. Chen blamed “procedural failings” for cases of forcible treatment that were challenged by victims and families.
Despite several shortcomings, the draft legislation represents both a legal and social milestone for the world’s most populous country, says Wang Yue, a psychiatry professor at Peking University.
“Only once a society develops to a certain level does it pay more attention to mental health and forced hospitalization,” says Wang, who alludes to wrongful confinements in mental wards in the U.S. in the early 1900s, though such cases were not attempts by the government to silence political opponents.
“In China, we have long had the principle of big government and small society, and only now are we moving toward judicial supervision and a society ruled by law,” he says. “We must solve the problem of treating those mental patients who need treatment and not hospitalizing people who don’t.”
Complaining to higher authorities
The number of wrongful confinements has risen because the number of Chinese who demand justice for personal matters has grown, Liu Feiyue says. They are reviving an ancient Chinese system of seeking redress by taking a complaint directly to higher authorities. They are determined, often desperate, he says, and thus troublesome to the authorities who are well aware their careers can be ruined by disquiet.
Xu Wu, 43, a former security guard, had grown suicidal after four years of incarceration, including electric shock treatment, for petitioning authorities about a wage dispute with his employer. In April, after watching a film in which kung fu star Jet Li escapes from jail, Xu copied Li’s moves by loosening his cell bars over three nights and escaped from the mental hospital in the Yangtze River port Wuhan.
