Index on Censorship: Is Falun Gong going crazy?

April, 2001

China gives a new lease of life to the old Soviet practice of silencing dissidents by certifying them

Throughout the history of protest and resistance movements, people in power have denigrated their opponents with hostile language and repressive reactions that demonised their image, damaged their credibility and misrepresented their motives. In the USSR, they first declared their dissidents 'insane' and then locked them up in asylums to silence their voices.

China is currently reinstating the practice. Falun Gong practitioners are being castigated as crazy and tossed into mental hospitals. Borrowing the old Soviet practice, Beijing is upping the ante with a far higher number of people falsely diagnosed as mentally ill. There were protests worldwide when the USSR resorted to this attack on its dissidents, largely because prominent writers and well-known critics were involved, and some were released (p92) .

The Falun Gong practitioners are less well known and any intervention on their behalf is conditioned by the West's policy towards China; this is driven by economic issues, not ideological divisions. As a result, governments have said little about China's treatment of the Falun Gong out of a desire not to antagonise China at a time when its economy is growing while that of the US' and Europe is contracting. US secretary of state Colin Powell did not raise the issue during his 29 July visit to Beijing.

One reason for the lack of protest is undoubtedly the lack of media attention. While Falun Gong protests get more coverage now than earlier, there is a lack of investigative reporting by Western media organisations. One journalist who did such work, Ian Johnson of the Wall Street Journal, won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for his efforts but he was quickly transferred out of Beijing. Few if any of his colleagues took up his muckraking interest in the story.

In the US, besides the practitioners themselves, there is only one lonely but credible voice being raised in protest. Dr Abraham Halpern, a professor emeritus at New York Medical College and one-time civil rights worker who worked with Martin Luther King in Alabama in 1965, has taken the lead. He told me he believes 'the [Chinese] government needs to hospitalise wrongfully dissidents who are not mentally ill because this will help them in their effort to paint the Falun Gong practitioners as not being against government policy but as mentally ill. Even if they were to hospitalise only a small number, word would soon spread that Falun Gong practitioners were crazy.

'Deliberate hospitalisation, wrongful hospitalisation, is only part of the problem. They then make it very difficult for the practitioners to get out of the hospital by demanding that their families pay exorbitant amounts of money for their "treatment" in the hospital. There's no question that this government-sanctioned conduct is a serious violation of human rights. And we'd like to stop it before large numbers of dissidents are incarcerated in hospitals as they were in the Soviet Union.'

Halpern is lobbying professional organisations. The Committee on Misuse and Abuse in Psychiatry passed a resolution asking the American Psychiatric Association leadership to ask the World Psychiatric Association to investigate this problem as it did in the USSR in the 1970s and 80s.

China has denied all accusations and continues to insist that Falun Gong, which they also condemn as an '[Jiang Zemin government's slanderous term omitted]', encourages its members to commit suicide, a charge that Falun Gong denies.

The cases that follow are selected from those compiled in a report published by the Falun Gong Information Center on 27 April 2001 covering cases from September 1999 to April 2001

Case I: Zhang Yonghong, female, 39, from Pingdu City, Shandong Province, a former college-educated accountant in a company forced to resign because she appealed her case.

LOCATION OF INCIDENT: Number Six Hospital Pingdu City (a mental hospital) in Shandong Province.

DATE OF HOSPITALISATION: 6June 2000.

STATE OF HEALTH: healthy.

HISTORY OF MENTAL ILLNESS: none.

UNIT(S)/PEOPLE RRESPONSIBLE FOR MISTREATING PRACTITIONERS: Pingdu local police department; Dr Jing (first name not clear), female, over 40 years old, of Number Six Hospital.

COURSE OF EVENTS: after Zhang and two other practitioners rode bicycles more than 900km to Beijing to appeal their cases, the local police and several of her co-workers escorted her back and held her in an office on the first floor of her workplace. An hour later, a car from the hospital arrived with a man and woman who tried to take Zhang away. When Zhang refused to get into the car, the driver and the nurse grabbed her hair, pulled her to the ground and then pushed her into the car and took her to the hospital. There was no written agreement for her hospitalisation; her incarceration was forced. The doctor responsible for her treatment, Dr Jing, conducted no diagnosis and did not record any result of her examination.

TREATMENT: Zhang was mainly given medicine, injections and sometimes shocks with electric needles. The director of the hospital, the doctor and the police talked with her and asked her to give up Falun Gong, which she refused to do. She was forbidden to read Falun Gong books or practise the exercises. If she did she was tied to the bed and forced to have treatment without her consent. She was not informed of the diagnosis or given any information about the medicine that was being used. At no time was the nature of Zhang's 'illness' revealed to her but, from listening to the doctor's conversation, Zhang learned that they wanted to induce her to forget about Falun Gong by giving her medication.

She was given up to five types of medicine three times a day. In addition, she was given an injection every night. Punishment for refusing medication was that she was held down by male mental patients or hospital security staff and the medicine forcefully administered through her nose. They sometimes used electric needles to punish her. In addition, they increased the amount of medication and forced her to take yet another type of unknown medication.

As a result of the medication, Zhang's thought processes became slow and she lost her memory. Her eyes became inactive and her face yellowish. Her reaction time slowed down and she would often feel sad, unable to control her tears.

She was discharged from hospital after 60 days with no discharge certificate and no follow-up treatments.

Zhang's health was restored three months after she had resumed her practice of Falun Gong.

Case 2: Li Li, female, 30, Junior High School education, a former cashier in a grocery store forced to resign because she appealed for Falun Gong.

STATE OF HEALTH: healthy.

HISTORY OF MENTAL ILLNESS: none.

UNITS/PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE FOR MISTREATMENT: Pingdu local police department; Dr Jing.

COURSE OF EVENTS: after Li went to Beijing to appeal, the Pingdu local police department told her family members and workplace that three methods could be used to deal with Li's appeal. They could:

1. continue to detain her in her workplace; 2. send her to a labour camp; 3. put her in a mental hospital.

Her workplace said they did not want to retain her any longer since she had been detained so many times. With no choices left, her family members agreed to send Li to a mental hospital. They told her that they were going to take her to the Political Law Committee but sent her to a mental hospital, where she was admitted to Number Six Hospital in Pingdu City on 8 June 2000. Li did not consent to her hospitalisation and there does not appear to have been any written authorisation. There is no evidence of a diagnosis and no Written diagnostic report.

TREATMENT: Li was mainly given medicine and injections. She was sometimes shocked with electric needles. The doctors prohibited her from practising the exercises and asked her to give up Falun Gong. In addition, the local police asked her to sign material denouncing Falun Dafa. They promised to let her go if she signed the agreement; if not, they said, she would stay in the hospital indefinitely. She was not informed of her diagnosis or given any information about her medication. No aspects of her illness were explained to her; she was not told of the side effects of the medication.

She was given a handful of drugs each time. Punishment for refusing to take this was that doctors and nurses held her down, grabbing her arms and legs. Some held her head and body, others forcefully administered the medication through her nose. Two people held her down on a bench and tied her arms to the back. They force-fed her one bowl of medicine after another through her nose almost causing her to choke to death. The first time she refused to take the medicine she was tied to a bed and force-fed with an unknown medication.

The medication and injections made her overweight and weak; she felt sleepy all day. She couldn't stop salivating. Li lost control of her arms and legs and stumbled when she went to the bathroom. She could not stand up once she squatted. She couldn't open her mouth when she wanted to eat.

After being discharged from hospital 123 days later, she suffered from terrible headaches and could not sleep since her eyes remained open all night. Her health was gradually restored once she resumed her practice.

Case 3: practitioners from Wuhan, Hubei Province, including Xu Jiangong, a retired university worker.

Xu Jiangong went to Beijing to appeal his case in early December 2000. After he had been arrested and brought back to Wuhan, Xu was detained and then transferred to Yatai Mental Hospital at Wuhan University. More than two months later he was still being held there.

Case 4: Huang Lilan, female, 68, a retired official from of Meteorology, Guangdong Province.

LOCATION: a mental hospital in the Baiyun District, Guangdong Province.

UNIT(S)/PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE FOR MISTREATMENT: XuJubo and Fang Guohui, officers from the first section of the Guangzhou Dongshan Police Substation.

COURSE OF EVENTS: Huang Lilan is an honest person who abides by the law and behaves herself in all aspects of her life. Because she practised Falun Gong, however, a group of plain-clothes police officers broke into her home on 11 October 2000 to take her to the local police department. Thinking the police would follow the correct legal procedure to arrest her, Huang asked the police to show their identification. The police said they had nothing to show her. Instead, they forced her down the stairs and pushed her into a police vehicle waiting for them. Huang was sent to the mental hospital in Baiyun District. The only person present during her arrest was her house guest. The police sent her to the mental institution without informing her family. In order to keep the news from the public, the police detained Huang's guest in a place near Luogang Station in Guangzhou; the guest was forced to pay 600 yuan (approx. US$75) to be released.

Police told the hospital officials that Huang's personality became extremely abnormal after she began practising Falun Gong. She was sent there, they said, for disturbing the stability of society. Huang Lilan was badly tortured in the mental hospital. Her first day in the hospital, Huang was tied in a chair for the whole afternoon. She was also given unspecified medication by injection. The hospital began to give her large amounts of medicine twice a day. Huang said the medicine made her constantly sleepy at the beginning, and she felt dazed. After the injections, Huang's appearance began to deteriorate. As the injections continued, the side effects became increasingly strong; her mouth was dry and had very little saliva. To keep her mouth wet, she drank large amounts of water that caused her abdomen to swell. Even then, Huang's mouth was still too dry. Because of the large amount of water she was drinking, Huang needed to use the lavatory frequently throughout the night. In addition, Huang began to develop insomnia. She understood that she could die and the public would never know the truth.

Huang's workplace talked with the local police department and, with their help, Huang was able to go home. At that time, she had been in the hospital for three months.

Meanwhile, the police had ransacked Huang's home and removed any paper with the three characters of Falun Gong written on it. They also associated Huang's telephone and yellow clothes with Falun Gong and removed them.

Danny Schechter is executive editor of Globalvisions Mediachannel.org and the author of the recently published News Dissector (Akashic Books) and the revised edition of Falun Gong's Challenge to China. The full version of Falun Gong practitioners who are detained and tortured in mental hospitals is available at WWW.faluninfo.net INDEX ON CENSORSHIP 4/2001