Cultic Studies Review
News Summaries: topic government

News Summaries: February 16-28, 2002

Government Policy

Treatment for "Rocking The Boat" in Rural China

As a result of protesting a land dispute with her local government in rural Suileng County of Heilongjiang Province, in northeast China, stubborn Huang Shuron has been forcibly committed to a series of psychiatric hospitals, five times in the last three years.

Forty-two and divorced, Mrs. Huang has spent a total of 210 days in custody, at times subjected to powerful drugs and electroshock therapy, although friends and family, experts in Beijing, and even some of the psychiatrists who have hospitalized, her say she is perfectly sane. "I would agree that I'm strong- willed and very determined, perhaps too determined," she said recently, shortly after being released for the fifth time, after 52 days, by doctors who concluded that they could not justify keeping her.  Fearing that she would be recommitted if she remained in her hometown, she has fled with her two teenage children to Beijing, where she survives by selling discarded trash.

Although Beijing's two-and-a-half-year crackdown on the banned Falun Gong has stirred fresh concern over the political misuse of psychiatry, there is little evidence to suggest that the Chinese government routinely uses psychiatric hospitals to imprison political dissidents, as was common in the Soviet Union.  But far more common are cases in which local governments try to employ psychiatric commitment as a convenient way to silence troublemakers and pests. (Elizabeth Rosenthal, New York Times, 2/6/02, Internet)

Copyright © 2002, AFF.  All right reserved.