The New York Times

Tuesday, November 30, 1999

A China Dissident's Ordeal: Back to the Mental Hospital

By ERIK ECKHOLM

BEIJING -- A Chinese political dissident who was held for more than seven years in a psychiatric hospital after he unfurled a protest banner in Tiananmen Square in 1992 has been reincarcerated, prompting human rights advocates to call for a United Nations investigation.

The case is an unusual but alarming example of the misuse of psychiatric facilities by Chinese authorities to silence a political opponent, human rights advocates say.

After his arrest in June 1992 for his protest, Wang Wanxing was placed in the Ankang psychiatric hospital near Beijing, which is operated by the Public Security Bureau for those deemed criminally insane or a threat to society.

His wife says she has never been given any official diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder. In early 1997, in response to international concern about the case, a government report said Wang had been determined to be "suffering from paranoid delusions" that caused "his attempt to disturb the social order."

Without any open legal process, Wang was held in the hospital continuously from 1992 until last Aug. 19, when he was given a three-month trial release.

But last Tuesday, the police took Wang, who is now 50, back to the Ankang hospital for "further observation."

Wang's wife, and others who have met or spoke with Wang, say he is rational, organized and restrained in his behavior. They believe he was confined again last week because he had declared his intention to hold a news conference to describe his experience as an unwilling psychiatric patient.

"What I feel now is just an indescribable sense of pain and injustice," his wife, Wang Junying, said Monday in an emotional interview. "I feel that the government has totally betrayed its promises.

"I don't feel they had any basis at all for sending him to a psychiatric hospital," said Ms. Wang, 50, who teaches at a local college and is a Communist Party member. "He has no family history of mental illness and he never showed extreme behavior.

"It was because of his call for justice that they sent him to the hospital," she said, referring to a public letter and banner Wang carried in Tiananmen Square on June 3, 1992, calling for redress for the violent crackdown on the student-led demonstrations there in 1989. Wang's short-lived 1992 protest received considerable attention in the foreign press, angering government leaders.

The use of psychiatric pretexts to imprison dissidents is rare in China, especially by comparison with the former Soviet Union, where they were frequently used, corrupting the mental health profession. But a few other cases are known, said Liu Qing, president of the New York-based Human Rights in China, which is starting a new appeal on Wang's behalf.

In Shanghai, a labor activist named Wang Miaogen, 46, has been confined in another psychiatric facility of the Public Security Bureau since 1993, though his wife insists he is mentally stable, Liu said.

Liu, himself an exiled dissident, said it was important to expose such cases so similar methods would not be used against other political and religious dissidents.

"We're calling for the United Nations Human Rights Commission to send doctors to carry out an independent examination of Wang Wanxing's condition," Liu said Monday.

The case throws a spotlight on a secretive system of psychiatric hospitals around the country that are affiliated with local public security bureaus and not answerable to the government's mainstream medical and psychiatric hospitals.

Their main purpose is apparently to care for the criminally insane. But without accountability even to the health ministry, which has worked to improve the country's mental health system, let alone to the public, such facilities can easily be misused by the police.

"In China, there is no evidence of the kind of systematic abuse through psychiatry that was seen in the former Soviet Union," said Arthur Kleinman, a medical professor and specialist in Chinese mental health at Harvard University. In the Soviet Union, he noted, a nonsensical diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia" was officially applied to the politically deviant, whereas such phony diagnoses are not an official part of recent Chinese psychiatry.

"But we know nothing about the operations of the Public Security Bureau's psychiatric hospitals," Kleinman said. Many Chinese psychiatrists, he said, believe that the standard of training inside such hospitals is low.

During Wang's three months at home, Liu of the rights group in New York spoke with him three times by telephone. He said he found Wang "sane, rational and entirely in control of himself."

In one lengthy talk, which Liu taped, Wang said of the democracy movement, "I believe it is possible for us to slowly move forward." But he also said, "I see myself as living under a threat."

His schooling disrupted by the turmoil of the 1960s, Wang never finished high school, and he later worked as a laborer. His family and acquaintances say he is definitely sane, but he does have a record of stubbornness when he thinks he is right.

As early as 1976, still living in northeastern China where he had been sent to work during the Cultural Revolution, and where he met his wife, he was jailed for a month for criticizing Mao. The following year he was sent to prison for 17 months for his outspoken support for protests in Beijing in 1976 that took place in Tiananmen Square.

After he and his wife moved to Beijing, Wang was active in the Democracy Wall movement of 1979. A decade later, he aided the student-led democracy demonstrations that culminated in the military crackdown of June 4, 1989. Three years after that, his brief protest in Tiananmen Square on the eve of the anniversary of that crackdown led to his psychiatric confinement.

Ms. Wang said Monday that when she first tried to check on her husband after his detention in June 1992, police officers shouted at her to agree that he was mentally ill, but she refused. What she did eventually sign, she said, was not a release for his commitment to a hospital, but rather a transcript of her interrogation.

She had told the police that her husband was intensely interested in politics and monopolized the family television, always watching news and public affairs programs. She had once, jokingly, told her husband, "Don't watch that stuff all the time, you're sick," she recalls telling the police.

When she signed the record of the interview, she said Monday, she again insisted that her husband was not mentally ill. Officials told her that Wang would be sent to a hospital for half a month, a full month at the most, for evaluation, she said.

"After two months passed, then half a year, I started visiting different government offices to inquire," she said Monday. "I was never able to get an answer out of them."

Wang's release in August was accompanied by a series of rules the couple had to follow, including no contacts with the press. Ms. Wang said they had carefully followed the conditions, although her husband did say he planned later on to hold a news conference.

The hoped-for hospital discharge papers never came and, last Tuesday, Wang was taken back to the Ankang hospital.

Monday, Ms. Wang was still reeling from her husband's renewed incarceration. "I've never wanted to bring any trouble to the government or the party or the country, but now I don't know what to do," she said. "I no longer feel I can believe them. This is something that's very difficult to explain to my relatives and my daughter."

The couple has an 18-year-old daughter who recently graduated from high school.

Sunday was the Ankang hospital's monthly visiting day, but Ms. Wang said she was so distraught that she did not go. "I just didn't know what I would say to my husband, or what I would say to the hospital officials," she said. "They've forced me to make impossible choices."