A young woman has gone missing in the Chinese province of Jiangxi amid legal action she was taking against a psychiatric hospital that she claimed was holding and abusing sane people.
The missing woman, Li Yixue, also claimed that the psychiatric hospital was committing human rights abuses in collusion with the police.
Ms. Li gained public attention through her live-streaming videos on social media that exposed human rights abuses against people with no mental illnesses being held in Jiangxi Mental Hospital.
Through her legal actions, Ms. Li vowed to challenge the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) judicial and medical systems. She has gained wide support from the Chinese public.
Her efforts follow her own experience with both the police and Jiangxi Mental Hospital.
In March 2022, Ms. Li went to the Dinggong Road Police Station in Nanchang city of Jiangxi Province to report a civil dispute, but the police station refused to file a case for it. An auxiliary police officer surnamed Lai at the station told Ms. Li to meet him in a hotel to talk about filing the case. After the meeting, Ms. Li went to the police station to report that Lai sexually assaulted her at the hotel, according to Chinese media reports.
In the same month, the police at the Dinggong Road Police Station forcibly sent Ms. Li to Jiangxi Mental Hospital and locked her up there for 56 days.
After being discharged from the hospital, Ms. Li sued it for medical malpractice, stating that the hospital’s compulsory hospitalization of her was illegal.
On Dec. 6, 2022, the first lawsuit of her case was held, but the court made no decision on the matter.
Following the no verdict, Ms. Li continued to speak out on the Chinese short video-sharing platform Kuaishou, the equivalent of TikTok, where she revealed the crimes inside the psychiatric hospital that she experienced and witnessed while accusing the police and the hospital in collusion with persecuting Chinese citizens.
Before the second lawsuit on May 23, a large number of Chinese netizens posted on Ms. Li’s Kuaishou account to show their support. Some netizens went to the court on the day of the case but were banned by the authorities from attending the proceedings.
After the one-day proceeding, Ms. Li went missing and hasn’t been heard from since.
Many Chinese netizens have left messages on Ms. Li’s Kuaishou account expressing their concerns about her safety and their support for her. “You are fighting for the rule of law in China for us all; keep going!” one post reads.
Crimes Inside Chinese Psychiatric Hospitals
In her social media videos, Ms. Li revealed that Jiangxi Mental Hospital has locked up a large number of people who aren’t mentally ill, and their families cannot check them out of the hospital.She said in one video that the nurses in the mental hospital are very abusive, tying people to the bed and not allowing them to go to the toilet, so they have to soil their pants.
Ms. Li said that at first, she didn’t understand why she was committed to the mental hospital for reporting the auxiliary police officer’s sexual assault, but when she saw other sane people being held there by the police for various reasons, she realized that her case was not the worst.
She said that some people were sent to the mental hospital for quarreling with the CCP’s community office staff when applying for access permits; some were committed by police for filing complaints, and some were committed for quarreling with the police.
She called the psychiatric hospital the CCP’s “private prison” in one of her videos.
Ms. Li also revealed that she was threatened by the police many times for suing the police officer.
The director of the Dinggong Road Police Station in Xihu District, Nanchang City, Jiangxi Province, even threatened her parents, saying, “If your daughter dares to sue again after she comes out of the mental hospital, next time I will send her to a lunatic asylum instead of the Jiangxi Mental Hospital to lock her up until the day she dies.”
Faced with various surveillance, intimidation, and threats from the police, Ms. Li continued to expose the authorities’ brutal methods of using mental hospitals to persecute healthy Chinese citizens.
Ms. Li said in one live-streaming video that the reason why everyone is looking forward to the outcome of her case is because this matter concerns the personal freedom of every Chinese person.
Used for Persecution
In recent years, numerous cases have been revealed that the CCP has detained normal citizens in mental hospitals for persecution.Lin Shengliang, a Chinese human rights defender in exile in Europe, revealed that independent writer Wang Yuping was recently released from a mental hospital in China where he was detained and force-fed unknown drugs. Mr. Wang has published multiple articles online, advocating various ways to end the CCP’s one-party dictatorship.
In 2022, Chengdu resident Zhu Shuang posted on social media complaining about the CCP’s draconian COVID-19 lockdowns. He was kidnapped from his home and forcibly committed to a mental hospital by the police and detained for more than 40 days.
Mr. Zhu told The Epoch Times that he was stripped naked, tied up, electroshocked, injected with poison, and fed unknown drugs in the hospital.
Mr. Zhu is currently in exile in Canada and has been protesting in front of the Chinese consulate against the regime’s persecution through mental hospitals. On May 25, Mr. Zhu called on everyone on X to go to Chinese consulates to show support for Ms. Li.
Lai Jianping, a former Beijing lawyer and chairman of the China Alliance for Democracy and Justice in Canada, told The Epoch Times that there must be some force behind Ms. Li’s disappearance related to the legal case. They are illegally detaining her again, he said.
Mr. Lai said he saw many similar cases when he was a lawyer in Beijing.
“This is a typical brutal suppression of ordinary Chinese citizens by the CCP’s cruel officials. It is a blatant and serious violation of the basic human rights of Chinese citizens,” he said.
“They adopted the so-called method of committing the patients to a mental hospital, which must have been in collusion with the hospital administration. In fact, this is an illegal detention, and to be more serious, it is kidnapping,” Mr. Lai said.
According to international human rights organizations, unknown numbers of Chinese Falun Gong practitioners, adherents of the traditional practice that follows the principles of truth, compassion, and forbearance, have also been forcibly committed to and persecuted in psychiatric hospitals across China by the communist authorities. They have been tortured and forcibly injected with unknown drugs at the hospitals which has caused serious permanent damages to their health.
