Vol. 14, Spring 2000, No. 1 Judicial Psychiatry in China
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COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW VOL. 14, SPRING 2000, NO. 1 JUDICIAL PSYCHIATRY IN CHINA AND ITS POLITICAL ABUSES * ROBIN MUNRO I. INTRODUCTION.........................................................................................................................1 II. INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS ON ETHICAL PSYCHIATRY.......................................6 III. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW ..................................................................................................10 A. LAW AND PSYCHIATRY PRIOR TO 1949 .......................................................................10 B. THE EARLY YEARS OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC ..........................................................13 C. THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION .....................................................................................22 D. PSYCHIATRIC ABUSE IN THE POST-MAO ERA ..............................................................34 IV. A SHORT GUIDE TO POLITICAL PSYCHOSIS ...............................................................38 A. MANIFESTATIONS OF COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY BEHAVIOR BY THE MENTALLY ILL ...38 B. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A PARANOIAC AND A POLITICAL DISSIDENT?......40 V. THE LEGAL CONTEXT.......................................................................................................42 A. LEGAL NORMS AND JUDICIAL PROCESS.......................................................................42 B. COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY CRIMES IN CHINA .............................................................50 VI. THE ANKANG: CHINA’S SPECIAL PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITALS.................................56 VII. THE MATRIX OF THEORY AND PRACTICE: READINGS FROM THE LEGAL- MEDICAL LITERATURE .................................................................................................................64 A. THE DANGEROUSNESS CRITERION ..............................................................................64 B. OFFICIAL STATISTICS ON POLITICAL PSYCHIATRY .......................................................67 C. DIAGNOSTIC CONCERNS .............................................................................................74 D. AN ILLUSTRATIVE CASE .............................................................................................80 VIII. THE FALUN GONG: NEW TARGETS OF PSYCHIATRIC ABUSE ................................83 IX. CONCLUSIONS .....................................................................................................................95 * At the time of writing, the author was a Senior Research Fellow at the Law Department and Centre of Chinese Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and member of the School’s Law and Public Health in Developing Countries Research Group. The author gratefully acknowledges the kind assistance of Dr. James Birley, former President of the U.K. Royal College of Psychiatrists; Professor Donald C. Clarke of the University of Washington School of Law; Dr. Frank Dikötter, Director of the Contemporary China Institute, SOAS; John Gunn CBE, Professor of Forensic Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London; Professor Michael Palmer, Head of the Law Department, SOAS; Leonard S. Rubenstein J.D., Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights, Boston; and Robert van Voren, General Secretary of the Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry, Hilversum; all of whom provided valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. The author also gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance of Sir Joseph Hotung, member of the Governing Body of SOAS, in providing financial support for the research fellowship that produced this article. The initial phase of the research was done by the author in his former capacity as China Researcher and Director of the Hong Kong office of Human Rights Watch. The responsibility for any errors or shortcomings in the article is the author’s alone. (NB: Although the cover date is Spring 2000, this issue of the Columbia Journal of Asian Law was in fact published in January 2001.) I. INTRODUCTION In the Soviet Union today, whoever takes a proletarian standpoint, upholds Marxism-Leninism, and dares to speak out and resist is…arrested and imprisoned, or declared ‘mentally ill’ and thrown into ‘lunatic asylums.’ — People’s Daily, 19641 The content of Zhu’s “theories” was conceptually chaotic… [They were] a form of “political delusion,” a pathological mental disorder… — Chinese forensic-psychiatric case report, March 1987 Without a correct political standpoint, one has no soul. — Mao Zedong During the 1970s and 1980s, reports that the security authorities in the Soviet Union were incarcerating substantial numbers of dissidents in mental asylums aroused widespread concern in the West. As the quantity and reliability of the documentary evidence and victim testimonies steadily increased, the issue of politically directed psychiatry in the Soviet Union quickly became, along with political imprisonment and the refusal of the authorities to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate, a third principal item of human rights contention in Soviet-Western relations. By January 1983, a protracted campaign by Western psychiatric professional bodies and international human rights organizations led to a decision by the Soviet All-Union Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists to withdraw from the World Psychiatric Association in order to avoid almost certain expulsion.2 It was not readmitted to the body until 1989, after several years of perestroika and the preliminary establishment of direct access by Western psychiatric delegations to Soviet forensic-psychiatric institutions and their alleged mentally ill political inmates.3 1 See “On Khrushchev’s Phony Communism and its World Historical Lessons” (Ninth Letter to the Soviets), RENMIN RIBAO [PEOPLE’S DAILY], July 14, 1964. This important article, a fifty-page “Open Letter” sent by the Chinese Communist Party leadership to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, signaled the final stages of the Sino-Soviet split. The passage quoted above is said to have been written by Wang Li and Wu Lengxi, but Mao Zedong almost certainly edited and approved the article as a whole. 2 Some historical context: “Twelve years ago, during the World Congress of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) in Honolulu, the Soviet All-Union Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists was condemned by the General Assembly of the WPA for abusing psychiatry for political purposes. Six years later, at the beginning of 1983, it was almost certain that later that year a majority of the WPA General Assembly would vote in favor of either expulsion from the WPA or suspension of membership of the Soviet All-Union Society. Keeping the honor to themselves, the Soviets withdrew from the WPA.” See ROBERT VAN VOREN (ED.), SOVIET PSYCHIATRIC ABUSE IN THE GORBACHEV ERA 10, International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry (IAPUP) (1989). 3 For full and detailed accounts of the political abuse of psychiatry in the former Soviet Union, see Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, Soviet Psychiatric Abuse: The Shadow Over World Psychiatry (1984); Theresa C. Smith and Thomas A. Olesczuk, No Asylum: State Psychiatric Repression in the Former USSR (1996); van Voren (ed.), supra note 2. 1 The subject of forensic psychiatry in China has thus far received little academic attention outside of China. A number of very detailed and informative studies of China’s general psychiatric and mental healthcare system have been written,4 but these have rarely addressed the legal or forensic dimension of the topic in significant depth.5 In particular, very little documentary or other evidence has hitherto come to light suggesting that abusive practices similar to those that occurred in the former Soviet Union might also have existed, or might even still be found, in China. The general assumption has therefore been that the Chinese authorities, despite their poor record in many other areas of human rights concern, have at least never engaged in the political misuse of psychiatry. This article seeks to challenge and correct that assumption. From the early 1990s onwards, scattered reports from China began to indicate that individual dissidents and other political nonconformists were being subjected to forensic psychiatric appraisal by the police and then committed to special psychiatric hospitals on an involuntary and indefinite basis. One prominent example was that of Wang Wanxing, a middle-aged worker who had first been arrested in the mid-1970s for supporting the then officially denounced policies of Deng Xiaoping. Partially rehabilitated after the death of Mao, Wang resumed his political- activist career in the 1980s and became personally acquainted with the student leaders of the spring 1989 pro-democracy movement in Beijing. In June 1992, he unfurled a banner in Tiananmen Square calling for greater human rights and democracy in China, was immediately arrested, and then sent to an institution for the criminally insane in the outskirts of the capital, where he remained — diagnosed by police psychiatrists as a “paranoid psychotic” — until early 1999. In November of that year, after he announced his intention to hold a press conference with foreign journalists to discuss his ordeal, he was again detained and sent back to the same psychiatric detention facility for an indeterminate period. Wang’s case and others like it have been the subject of several statements of concern to the Chinese authorities by relevant bodies of the United Nations.6