After a group of patients escaped from a mental hospital in southern China, the nation’s netizens have asked whether those who escaped are mentally ill or are actually political prisoners.
The Wuzhou city Communist Party propaganda committee reported on July 8 that 42 mentally ill patients escaped from Teng County Third People’s Hospital of Wuzhou in the Guangzi autonomous region.
Regime mouthpiece Xinhua and other mainland China media reported that six or seven mental patients, who planned the escape, surrounded a doctor handing out medicine and took the gate key. They opened the door and escaped; several other patients then followed.
The committee also reported that local police mobilized approximately 400 people to search for 42 escaped patients, who were all eventually located and returned to the hospital.
Netizens Leery of Report
Chinese netizens suspected that the ringleaders in the escape attempt are actually sane people forced into mental hospitals for speaking out against officials.
Luo Changping, deputy chief editor of the financial magazine Caijing was very suspicious about the veracity of the report.
“How can a group of insane people plot to run away? How can they convince 80 percent of the other insane residents (to go with them) and get past the monitoring medical staff? How many of them are not really insane? How many evil stories are hidden behind this?”
Netizen “LeiLeiBeautyShop” alluded to reports that many petitioners and dissenters are forcibly sent to mental hospitals.
“The leaders were all sent to the mental hospital by police; actually we all understand what that means…”
Sentencing the Sane to Asylums
Reports of sane people being forced into mental hospitals in China after complaining to authorities are increasing.
Mainland China’s Beijing News reported on June 19 about a Liaoning Province resident who, while selling pigs in Shandong Province, was forced into a mental hospital because he complained to local officials.
Officials from the Civil Affairs Bureau in Linyi City put Liu Gang to a mental hospital twice, where he was tied up and injected with drugs because of his public appeals.
In a similar 2012 report by China News Weekly, Jiang Hee, an employee of the Grain Bureau in Danyang City, Jiangsu Province, was sentenced to a mental hospital three times and stayed there almost 10 years because she reported her boss’s wrongdoings.
The Falun Gong website Minghui.org has reported on cases of Falun Gong practitioners forced into mental hospitals in China because they refuse to give up the spiritual discipline. The most recent case is Feng Kai, a Falun Gong practitioner from Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province. Feng was kidnapped from his home by police and sent to Xuzhou mental hospital on June 25, 2013.
Falun Gong is a traditional practice for cultivating the body, mind, and spirit that is rooted in ancient Chinese culture. Since 1999 when the communist regime in China started the nation-wide persecution of Falun Gong, numerous torture cases in mental hospitals have been reported on the Minghui.org website.
Translated by Aileen Wu. Written in English by Arleen Richards
Read the original Chinese article.
