Sunday, 11-Aug-2002 8:40PM

BEIJING, Aug 12 (AFP) - China incarcerates political dissidents in mental hospitals with a frequency and on a scale reminiscent of the former Soviet Union, a rights group said in a report released Monday.

Even in an era of widespread reforms, authorities have locked up hundreds if not thousands in mental asylums to quell dissent, New York-based Human Rights Watch said.

"Official psychiatric theory in China condones the involuntary treatment in custodial mental asylums of dissidents and nonconformists," the group said in a statement.

"(These include) Falun Gong [practitioners], independent labor organizers, whistle blowers and individuals who complain about political persecution or official misconduct," it said.

While political use of psychiatry is not as widespread as during the reign of Mao Zedong, it has been retained as an optional tool, said the report, co-authored with the Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry.

"China's forensic psychiatrists continued to diagnose certain categories of dissident-type individuals as being 'dangerously mentally ill' and to send them to long-term custody in special mental asylums," the report said.

It cited the example of Wang Wanxing, a political activist, who was first arrested in the mid-1970s and has spent much of the ensuing time in an institution for the criminally insane.

He remains in detention and is being treated for "political monomania", the report said, citing government officials.

Psychiatry has also emerged as a weapon in the government's fight against the Falun Gong spiritual group, which was banned in 1999, according to the report.

It cited accounts that detained practitioners were being subject to various forms of often painful treatment, including electro-convulsive therapy or electrical acupuncture.

Despite the large amount of anecdotal evidence, it is virtually impossible to gain an overall picture of the extent of political psychiatry in today's China, the report said.

Based on various sets of available data, it reached the conclusion that somewhere in excess of 3,000 "political cases" had been dealt with by Chinese forensic psychiatric examiners over the past two decades.

"It is reasonable to estimate ... that the great majority of these were subjected, as a result, to some form and duration of forced psychiatric custody and treatment," the report said.

"This conjectural 'ballpark' figure is almost certainly inaccurate, but it probably errs on the conservative side," it said.

By comparison, estimates of the number of political dissidents sent to mental hospitals in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s range from a couple of hundred to several thousands, it noted.

The report tallied with previous claims by a British academic that the Chinese practice of locking up dissidents in mental hospitals was much more prevalent than previously believed.

The "scope and intensity" of China's abuse of psychiatry may well have exceeded that in the old Soviet Union, Robin Munro said in the article, published in the Columbia Journal of Asian Law early last year.

"A substantial amount of documentary evidence (indicates) that the Chinese authorities have, in fact, a longstanding record of the misuse of psychiatry for politically repressive purposes," Munro said.

Mike Jendrzejczyk, Washington director of Human Rights Watch's Asia Division, urged the world medical community to speak out against the practice and help bolster those inside China who oppose it.

"The Chinese psychiatrists who bravely refuse to participate in state repression need to feel they have support from abroad," he said in a statement.

Human Rights Watch's 298-page report appears ahead of a congress of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) in Yokohama, Japan in late August.

"The WPA delegates should adopt a strong resolution in Yokohama calling on China to cease these abuses and to fully cooperate with a WPA investigation," said Robert van Voren, general secretary of the Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry.

"A WPA-led delegation should visit the asylums, carry out independent medical examinations, and monitor conditions and treatment, especially in the police-run asylums," he said.

http://www.ptd.net/webnews/wed/di/Qchina-rights-health.RCkW_CaC.html