Houston Chronicle: China's Dissidents - Must Open Mental Wards For Honest Examinations

September 09, 2002

If China is to gain the respect of Free World nations, which it repeatedly demands, it must open its psychiatric hospitals and mental wards to unsupervised inspection by the World Psychiatric Association.

China continues to deny long-standing accusations that it silences political dissidents and members of the Falun Gong spiritual [group] by imprisoning them in mental hospitals, where they are subjected to mind-altering psychiatric drugs and electric shock treatments. China's simple denial of involvement in such practices is not convincing enough, since there is good evidence that such cruelty is occurring, and the world has only to recall the mass psychiatric abuse of political dissidents in the former Soviet Union.

Such barbarism cannot be tolerated by civilized people, which led the World Psychiatric Association, an organization comprising psychiatric organizations in 105 nations, to vote recently to send a fact-finding team to China as soon as possible.

Naturally, China, which is a member of the world organization, continues to deny allegations of psychiatric imprisonment and abuse, but it has not yet agreed to throw open the doors of its mental wards to objective fact finders.

Chinese officials, in seeking closer economic ties to free nations, must realize that Western ambitions for greater profits are ultimately connected to Western demands that human rights and personal liberties be respected.

If China is to become an equal partner with the West on the world's stage, it must not engage in barbarous behaviors it stands accused of.

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