Criminal psychiatric abuse of political prisoners

Under Mao, psychiatry in any form was written off as the invention of bourgeois capitalism. But a report in The Columbia Journal of Asian Law authored by Robin Munro, a British researcher (cited in a New York Times article of February 18, 2001) condemned China's practice of imprisoning dissenters in psychiatric hospitals. The Times article mentions that previously "China has not been known for the systematic abuses of psychiatry that occurred in the Soviet Union, where hundreds of dissidents were spuriously diagnosed as schizophrenic and locked away. But Mr. Munro's article reported that at least 3,000 people who were arrested for some kind of "political" crime were referred for psychiatric evaluation, with many of them deemed mentally ill and subsequently imprisoned.

Besides labor activists like Cao Maobing, mentioned earlier, and Wang Wanzing (diagnosed as "paranoid psychotic" for unfurling a pro-democracy banner in Tiananmen Square), the latest victims of this criminal abuse of psychiatry are members of the Falun Gong religious sect, whom the official press have openly branded as mentally disturbed and needing treatment. Hundreds of followers have been forcibly hospitalized and medicated according to reports from human rights monitors and many locked away.

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