The Beijing News
December 8, 2008

Petitioners in Xintai, Shandong Province who tried to go to Beijing and appeal their grievances to the central government were put in a mental hospital by local authorities, reports The Beijing News.

57-year-old Sun Fawu retired last year from a coal mine in Shandong and now lives in a nearby village. Because the ground around the village has been collapsing due to the coal pit, the mining company has been paying moderate compensation to affected villagers since 1988.

However, Sun and 300 other families say that they have never seen the money. The village officials have a document with Sun's signature and say that he has already received the money. Sun argues that the document is counterfeit.

Sun started petitioning in 2001 in the hopes that he would find redress from the higher levels of government, but the only results he has seen so far have been his family getting roughed up by thugs, death threats, and jail terms for himself.

In 2004, Sun was detained to 14 days for "disrupting social order." The following year, he was sentenced to one year and nine months of "labor education" for "being loud and disrupting government work." In 2007, Sun was caught once again, this time with a ticket to Beijing.

He was sent to a mental hospital where he was force-fed drugs and received intravenous treatment. Sun was discharged about three months later after promising that he would never petition again.

Another veteran petitioner, an 84-year-old man identified by the newspaper as Shi, had been petitioning for local government's mishandling over his property dispute.

Shi was put in the same mental institution in 2006 and has been there for two years and five months. Unlike Sun, Shi refused to be discharged and insists that he will not leave until he is given an official diagnosis from higher authorities.

"We are not allowed to talk to each other... Every time I talked back to the doctors and nurses, other patients would beat me or squeeze my neck. They're definitely working under the doctors' instructions."

Wu Yuzhu, the head of the mental hospital, told the newspaper that he is aware that many petitioners are not mentally ill, but they were sent by the police, sometimes with a legal diagnosis, so he feels he can do nothing about it. He had his own complaints too: the government usually defaults on bills for the treatment of the petitioners it sends over.

Town leaders don't think it's fair for them to take the blame, either. They say that every time these petitioners went to Beijing, they'd receive phone calls from their superiors to get them back. "Every time we had to send three to five people to Beijing, and their accommodations cost money...we spent over 100,000 yuan on two petioners in recent years," Chen Jianfa, a local government official, complained. Also, according to evaluation methods currently in use, local government leaders will be punished if petitioners from their jurisdictions are caught.

So far it seems that the Xintai government's tough measures have paid off: the city, which once received a warning for having too many petitioners, has just been named an "advanced city in building a safe Shandong."

Sohu blogger Zhao Mu posted a government document issued by the Wuxi Bureau for Letters and Calls in 2003 which complains about the expenses involved in institutionalizing problem petitioners.

For more on past abuses of psychiatry and psychology, download this PDF of Robin Munro's paper Political Psychiatry in Post-Mao China and its Origins in the Cultural Revolution, or see this Jonathan Mirsky review of the book of the same name.