Currently, police can send people they deem to be mentally ill or a threat to public security to psychiatric hospitals to receive compulsory treatment. Given that police are not professionally trained, they may send the wrong person to mental health units unintentionally. People sent by police are usually admitted into mental hospitals called “An Kang” , meaning “peace and health” in Chinese. These hospitals are under the control of police departments. (China Daily)

If this sounds rather ominous in a George Orwell, Arthur Koestler kind of way, it should. A lot of abuses have occurred over the years because the system gives local police too much autonomy in determining mental status. Someone making trouble for the biggest company in the city? If they have sufficient guanxi with the police, that person might end up at the nearest psychiatric hospital, even if that person has not committed a crime. In fact, when no charges can be brought, and yet the individual is causing trouble to powerful locals, involuntary commitment of this sort can sometimes be the punishment of choice.

I bring up this topic because not only was there an article in China Daily today that called into question the current system (the excerpt above is from that article), but a separate piece also ran in today’s paper relating an incident that illustrates that position quite well.

Police in Central China’s Hubei province have been accused of dumping a sane man in a mental hospital because he was taking photographs of a protest last Friday.

Peng Baoquan, 47, a banker by profession, saw a group of 20 company employees protesting outside a hotel in Shiyan city, where some provincial discipline inspection officials were lodged, the Guangzhou-based Yangcheng Evening News reported.

Peng had only clicked a few pictures of the group before the police caught him and took him to the police station, the report said, adding that the banker was then admitted to a local mental hospital later that night.

Insisting Peng is “not mentally ill”, his family on Monday demanded that he be released immediately. However, the police and the hospital have yet to set Peng free.

A couple of things to keep in mind here. Despite my casual reference to Orwell, I am not suggesting that the system of psychiatric hospitals run by the police is some sort of centrally run gulag archipelago (to bring in a third allusion). These incidents are generally (although not exclusively) carried out by local officials acting on the instructions of other local officials. In the case of Peng, you have provincial officials involved, but the direct actors are probably city police. Specific responsibility is of course unknown at this time. In an article quite critical of the current system, the New York Times in 2002 (this is not a new issue) noted that:

[T]here is little evidence to suggest that the Chinese government routinely uses psychiatric hospitals to imprison political dissidents, as was common in the Soviet Union.

But far more common are cases in which local governments try to employ psychiatric commitment as a convenient way to silence troublemakers and pests.

This is a scary story, but not because it illustrates the abuses of a totalitarian system. Rather, the flaws in the current system reflect the dangers of too little government control over powerful individuals. The kind of control I’m talking about would include better rules that provide for greater transparency, effective oversight (hopefully using individuals that would not be subject to the same political influences as police), and science-based standards for determining mental illness. Bottom line: this is a very basic rule of law issue.

Obviously the goal should be to not only take politics out of the equation, but also to minimize subjectivity of the decision makers to the extent possible. Having untrained police calling the shots is a recipe for disaster, and there have already been too many cases clearly showing that the current system needs reform.