How the sane are locked up in Chinese asylums
January 15, 2006
By Luke Harding/THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
It was as a small boy growing up in communist China that Wang Wanxing first had his doubts about the system. At school his teacher, Mr Li, extolled the virtues of Chairman Mao. Privately, however, Wang disliked Mao and disagreed with his criticism of Khrushchev.
While he was at a middle school in Beijing, his antipathy grew when his grandmother starved to death in one of China’s rural famines. It was from these early beginnings that Wang eventually became one of China’s most famous dissidents — and shed rare light on one of the darkest aspects of the present regime: its systematic misuse of mental hospitals for political prisoners.
After a lifetime of dissent, Wang achieved international prominence in 1992 when he unfurled a banner in Tiananmen Square on the third anniversary of the 1989 student protests. The reaction was swift. He was arrested and dumped in a psychiatric hospital near Beijing, where he was to spend, apart from a short break, the next 13 years.
Human rights campaigners believe some 3,000 “political” inmates are currently kept in the hospitals, though the precise figure isn’t known.
On Aug. 16 this year, the authorities released him and unexpectedly deported the 56-year-old Wang to Germany, where he was reunited with his wife and daughter, who had been living there as political refugees.
Wang’s testimony is unique. He is the first high-profile dissident to be sent to Europe (rather than the US) since the late 1980s, and the only inmate of China’s notorious Ankang system of police-run psychiatric hospitals to be expelled to the West.
Sitting in his sixth-floor flat in Frankfurt, Wang — a spry figure who has recently taken up jogging — says he had never intended to become a dissident or political prisoner. His struggle against the Chinese authorities had happened pretty much by accident.
“I don’t really consider myself a hero. I think my conscience and intuition are not much different from other people’s in China. My struggle came out of an attempt to help others,” he says.
Wang’s parents — a laborer and an office worker — shared his doubts about Mao but said nothing. Wang was less circumspect. In 1968, with China gripped by the Cultural Revolution, the communist authorities sent him to a collective farm in a remote northern town in Heilongjiang Province next to the river border with Russia. Here, he heaved rocks down from the mountains.
“It was extremely hard work. There were young men and women there from across China. My pay was 32 yuan a month,” he says.
While in exile, Wang began a one-man epistolary campaign against the might of the Chinese state, writing a personal letter to Mao urging him to reinstate the then disgraced Deng Xiaoping who had been the general secretary of the Communist Party. The answer was swift: a week later three police cars turned up in the middle of the night and took him away.
“I knew I was going to be arrested. But I also knew I was right,” he says.
He spent the next month in jail. When he got out his colleagues were unimpressed by his letter: “Most regarded me as stupid. All they could think about was getting back to Beijing.”
In 1976, with mass popular demonstrations taking place in Tiananmen Square following the death of Zhou Enlai, Wang wrote another letter, this time to premier Hua Guofeng, urging him to rehabilitate Deng. This time he was jailed for 17 months and branded a “reactionary.” In February 1979, once Deng had returned to power, Wang was allowed to go back to Beijing, where he took a job in a vegetable warehouse. But his pro-democracy activities continued.
In 1989 he met the student leaders at Beijing University who were organizing the Tiananmen protests. Wang, however, did not agree with their methods. During a furious argument a group of students tipped him off his chair; others, he says, supported his belief that confrontation was wrong.
“The massacres were very sad,” he says.
Three years later, on June 4, 1992, Wang went back to Tiananmen Square and unfolded a banner calling for greater human rights and democracy. The police jumped on him and beat up journalists who captured his arrest on camera.
“Many people grabbed me. I gave my banner to the police. I also gave them a cassette of a 24-page letter I’d written,” Wang says. “They took me to the police station and took my photo. I spent three or four hours crouched on the floor, my head between my arms.”
It was at this point that Wang was transferred into the Ankang system, a secret network of special psychiatric hospitals in which people who have committed no crime other than failing to agree with the government can be confined indefinitely without trial. As in the old Soviet Union, China classifies dissidents as being “mentally ill,” arguing that their activities against the state are a form of madness.
Human rights campaigners believe some 3,000 “political” inmates are currently kept in the hospitals, though the precise figure isn’t known. The numbers have been swelled in recent years with the jailing of numerous practitioners belonging to the Falun Gong dissident movement, as well as local activists who have complained about corruption or poor working conditions.
There are around 25 Ankang institutes — the name means “peace and health” — for the criminally insane in China; the government’s eventual plan is to build one Ankang for every city with a population of 1 million or more.
After his arrest, meanwhile, Wang was “diagnosed” as suffering from “political monomania” — a condition that doesn’t exist. Over cups of raspberry tea in his Frankfurt flat, and while his wife fries dumplings next door, Wang produces photographs of his hospital-prison — an old, brown-brick complex in Fangshan, some 70km outside Beijing. One photo is particularly striking. It shows Wang in 1994 wearing striped prison clothes in the hospital canteen. The canteen’s peeling walls are a lurid turquoise; it looks as if Wang is drowning at the bottom of a terrible green sea.
The majority of inmates in the hospital really were mentally ill, Wang says, with he and one other political prisoner the exceptions.
“It was terrible. The hospital was terrible,” he continues. “There were very many crazy people. The inmates would beat each other up. There was no safety.”
Two nurses at the hospital struggled to cope with up to 70 patients, he said; it was a regime of mismanagement and anarchy. The treatment meted out to inmates included electric shocks, insulin shocks and forced injections.
“One prisoner, Huang Youliang, went on hunger strike. After he tore up his blanket the nurses let the other patients jump on him and force food down his throat. He choked. I watched him die. Another farmer, who was slightly wrong in the head, was given an electroshock during acupuncture treatment. He also died,” Wang says.
“The days were the same. We were woken at 6am and had breakfast at 7am. There was a roll call. There was lunch, a nap and dinner. The rules were don’t run away and don’t kill anybody,” he says.
Wang avoided confrontation with staff. At first the nurses forced him to take anti-psychotic drugs, which left him tired and dizzy; later the drugs stopped (often, he would hide the tablets in his mouth and spit them out).
Wang’s fame abroad meant that he led a relatively privileged existence. He was allowed to listen to the BBC and to have monthly visits from his wife, Junying.
“We got one hour only. Sometimes people were watching,” Junying says.
In 1999, seven years after he was first admitted, the authorities discharged him — under pressure from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Three months later, however, he was readmitted. Wang had informed the hospital director that he intended to hold a press conference about his ordeal; she tipped off the Public Security Bureau (PSB) which runs the Ankang. He was rearrested.
The reasons for Wang’s abrupt expulsion to Germany this summer remain mysterious. Brad Adams, the executive director of Human Rights Watch in Asia, is not convinced Wang’s release is part of a trend.
“It’s good news for Wang. But there is a whole warehouse full of people like him still kept in police-run mental hospitals,” he says.
“There is no real evidence that China is rethinking its policy of using psychiatry against dissidents,” Adams says.
Wang, however, believes he got out because of power struggles within the Communist Party following the death of Deng and the loss of influence of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.
During a four-hour interview at Wang’s new home, he shows no sign of illness. He is alert, lucid and compelling. Ironically, his political demands are not even especially revolutionary. He merely wants a division of powers within China so that the government, army and Communist Party are separated. He would like rival political parties to exist. And having spent 13 years in it, he wants the Chinese government to reform the mental health system.
Since arriving in Frankfurt, he has spent time with his 25-year-old daughter Meiqian, a student. He is thinking about writing his autobiography and learning German. His wife, who arrived in Germany in 2003, is still struggling with the language: helpful words and phrases are posted on the door. The flat echoes with her laughter as she tries to make herself understood.
Will he ever go back to China?
“Not at the moment. But I expect there will be changes in China by 2008. It might be possible then.”
posting date: Jan 15, 2006
original article date: Saturday, Dec 24, 2005