� In the ankang�"peace and health"�system, detainees are strapped onto
beds, pumped full of drugs, receive electric-shock therapy, and are
left to lie in their own excrement.

� Researchers Chi Yin and Jerome Cohen, writing on the Diplomat site,
report that some Chinese are confined for their lifetimes.

� The system also appears to be grounded in the Chinese Communist
Party's optimistic totalitarian notion that medical treatment can make
people obedient.

� Chinese medical personnel administered drugs that damaged the central
nervous system of adherents of that faith, intentionally overdosed
them, applied extreme-strength electroacupuncture, and brutally force-
fed them.

� The abuse of psychiatry has continued for seven decades in the
People's Republic of China. The Chinese Communist Party has changed the
organizational structures and the methods of how it destroys people in
psychiatric institutions, but the destruction of life continues.

� Safeguard Defenders�and the international community�must finally
acknowledge that the Party is inherently murderous. The only way to end
the abuse of psychiatry in China as well as the Party's other horrific
crimes is to end its rule of China.

China's regime is torturing and killing critics, petitioners,
activists, dissidents, and religious adherents in psychiatric
hospitals, thereby bypassing its horribly misdescribed criminal justice
system. The "barbaric practice," as a Madrid-based NGO termed it this
month, is still widespread.

Safeguard Defenders, in "Drugged and Detained: China's Psychiatric
Prisons," details how police and government agents are sending Chinese
citizens "for medically unnecessary involuntary hospitalizations" in
the police-run ankang system, which was established in the 1980s.

The new report updates work by leading researcher Robin Munro, the
author of "Dangerous Minds: Political Psychiatry in China Today and Its
Origins in the Mao Era" and the groundbreaking 2000 article "Judicial
Psychiatry in China and Its Political Abuses."

In the ankang�"peace and health"�system, detainees are strapped onto
beds, pumped full of drugs, receive electric-shock therapy, and are
left to lie in their own excrement.

"Some languish for years," Safeguard Defenders notes. Those who survive
often can barely function after release. Those released are often
recommitted to such facilities without justifiable reason. One woman
had been committed 20 times. Researchers Chi Yin and Jerome Cohen,
writing on the Diplomat site, report that some Chinese are confined for
their lifetimes.

The Soviets perfected techniques for breaking people in psychiatric
facilities, and Mao Zedong's regime adopted them about a decade after
taking power. As Munro reported in 2002, the "earliest known examples
of political-style psychiatric diagnosis in China" date back to the
early 1960s.

After intense criticism from the international community, China in 2012
and 2013 both enacted the Mental Health Law and amended its Criminal
Procedure Law to require medical assessments for compulsory psychiatric
treatment and judicial review of police-initiated commitments to
psychiatric institutions.

The Safeguard Defenders report examined 99 cases from 2015 to 2021 and
called these examples "just the tip of the iceberg." The witness
reports were first recorded by a Chinese organization.

Because the Chinese regime often ignores the procedures mandated by its
Criminal Procedure Law, why does it feel necessary to commit dissidents
and other individuals to psychiatric facilities? After all, it already
has the means to silence opponents and deter them.

Safeguard Defenders points out that the use of psychiatric facilities
stigmatizes opponents of the regime. "They are," its reports states,
"discredited and isolated from others with this false label of 'mental
illness.' "

The system also appears to be grounded in the Chinese Communist Party's
optimistic totalitarian notion that medical treatment can make people
obedient.

Sean Lin, communications director of the Falun Dafa Association in
Washington, D.C., tells Gatestone that the Chinese regime from the
first days of the prosecution of the Falun Gong religious group was
focused on "scientific transformation" of individuals. Adherents of the
faith were framed as mentally ill and subject to improvement.

Chinese medical personnel administered drugs that damaged the central
nervous system of adherents of that faith, intentionally overdosed
them, applied extreme-strength electroacupuncture, and brutally force-
fed them. These treatments were in addition to physical torture, Lin,
also a microbiologist and former lab director of the viral disease
branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, reports.

Falun Gong adherents, according to Lin, suffered emaciation, visceral
failure, organ decay, cerebral thrombosis, heart pain, paralysis,
insanity, amnesia, blindness, and death.

The ankang facilities engaged in these acts, but Lin also reports that
the 610 Office, a now-dissolved unit established to persecute the Falun
Gong, and other regime agencies sometimes forced healthy Falun Gong
adherents into China's regular psychiatric facilities.

"Legal reforms did not work," Safeguard Defenders correctly reports.

The NGO demands that China, among other things, take "immediate steps
to put a stop to the political abuse of psychiatry." Amen to that.

The organization also urges China to "urgently review its
responsibilities under international law as regards the treatment of
psychiatric patients and endeavor to revise current legislation and
improve the medical sector's understanding of such legislation to
prevent this kind of abuse from happening ever again."

The "medical sector's understanding"? Safeguard Defenders gets an "A"
for its reporting and an "F" for this recommendation.

The NGO, with these words, seems to believe that horrific psychiatric
abuses continue because Chinese doctors do not comprehend prohibitions
contained in Chinese law.

That view is breathtakingly na�ve. The abuse of psychiatry has
continued for seven decades in the People's Republic of China. The
Chinese Communist Party has changed the organizational structures and
the methods of how it destroys people in psychiatric institutions, but
the destruction of life continues.

Safeguard Defenders�and the international community�must finally
acknowledge that the Party is inherently murderous. The only way to end
the abuse of psychiatry in China as well as the Party's other horrific
crimes is to end its rule of China.

--
Let's go Brandon!