China Is Torturing Critics in Psychiatric Hospitals
by Gordon G. Chang • August 31, 2022 at 5:00 am
In the ankang—"peace and health"—system, detainees are strapped onto beds, pumped full of drugs, receive electric-shock therapy, and left to lie in their own excrement.
Researchers Chi Yin and Jerome Cohen, writing on the Diplomat site, report that some Chinese are confined for their lifetimes.
The system also appears to be grounded in the Chinese Communist Party's optimistic totalitarian notion that medical treatment can make people obedient.
Chinese medical personnel administered drugs that damaged the central nervous system of adherents of that faith, intentionally overdosed them, applied extreme-strength electroacupuncture, and brutally force-fed them.
The abuse of psychiatry has continued for seven decades in the People's Republic of China. The Chinese Communist Party has changed the organizational structures and the methods of how it destroys people in psychiatric institutions, but the destruction of life continues.
Safeguard Defenders—and the international community—must finally acknowledge that the Party is inherently murderous. The only way to end the abuse of psychiatry in China as well as the Party's other horrific crimes is to end its rule of China.
China's regime is torturing and killing critics, petitioners, activists, dissidents, and religious adherents in psychiatric hospitals, thereby bypassing its horribly misdescribed criminal justice system. The "barbaric practice," as a Madrid-based NGO termed it this month, is still widespread.
Safeguard Defenders, in "Drugged and Detained: China's Psychiatric Prisons," details how police and government agents are sending Chinese citizens "for medically unnecessary involuntary hospitalizations" in the police-run ankang system, which was established in the 1980s.
The new report updates work by leading researcher Robin Munro, the author of "Dangerous Minds: Political Psychiatry in China Today and Its Origins in the Mao Era" and the groundbreaking 2000 article "Judicial Psychiatry in China and Its Political Abuses."
