Tuesday February 20, 2001

It requires an effort these days to remember that Beijing is not and has never been an Olympic city. Visitors are advised to repeat this simple fact at least three times a day, to avoid drowning in the tidal waves of pro-Olympic propaganda that are washing over China in support of Beijing's bid for the 2008 games.

[...]

If you can't have a democratically accountable administration that acts for the welfare of the citizens, they say, then an international event for which China has to clean up its act is the next best thing. But it's not just the air that needs cleaning up in China, nor is it clear that China is willing to do more than slap a lick of paint over some very rotten structures indeed.

On the eve of the international Olympic delegation's arrival in China, a new study published in the Colombia Journal of Asian Law has revealed a hidden scandal that could put China's Olympic bid in greater jeopardy even than Beijing's air quality: like the Soviet Union in the 70s, China is actively engaged in the misuse of psychiatry for political ends, torturing and incarcerating political dissidents in asylums and subjecting them to inappropriate surgical and medical procedures.

The 130-page study is written by a British researcher, Robin Munro, who has painstakingly pieced together his case from a close reading of hundreds of Chinese journals, reports and case histories. The scandal of Soviet psychiatric abuse was so notorious that the Soviet psychiatrists' professional association was forced out of the World Psychiatric Association by pressure from western practitioners. A similar campaign to suspend China from the World Psychiatric As sociation meeting next year has begun.

Like the old Soviet Union, China, according to Munro, has a secret network of special high security psychiatric hospitals in which people who have committed no crime other than failing to agree with their government can be confined indefinitely without trial. A glance at the diagnostic terms used in such hospitals and the kind of behaviour that can lead to incarceration is revealing. "Sluggish schizophrenia" and "paranoid psychosis" are old favourites from the Soviet Union. According to these diagnoses the patient seems quite normal apart from having mad ideas.

[...] As far as "excessive religiosity" is concerned, faith in anything other than Maoism has long been seen as unfair competition by the Chinese government, but the current upsurge in the psychiatric abuse of this category of patient that Munro has detected is directly related to the government's long-running confrontation with the Falun Gong movement. When a government spokesman says that Falun Gong believers are mentally disturbed, he is not simply delivering an off the cuff jibe. In a flagrant violation of professional ethics, hundreds of Falun Gong followers have been forced into mental hospitals and subjected to enforced "treatment" in the past 18 months.

The Chinese government is desperate to win the Olympics because it needs to win popularity at home and acceptance abroad. Few mainland Chinese are likely to raise their voices against the bid - you'd have to be mad to do so - and thanks to Mr Munro, we now know where that can lead.