Xu Lindong, a farmer from Henan province in central China, walked out of a hospital on the weekend, released after a Chinese newspaper reported about his confinement since October 2003, when he went to Beijing to denounce local officials.
Xu told Reuters that he was forced to take drugs and was given electric shocks while held in hospitals in Luohe, a city in a flat brown expanse of rural China long troubled by tensions between officials and poor farmers.
"I'm not going to let this die down. I'll take this to court and demand justice," Xu said in a telephone interview on Tuesday, speaking haltingly after what he said was the shock of emerging from a locked ward to national attention.
"The doctors said I was obsessive compulsive, but I told them I wasn't," he added. "An obsessive compulsive is someone who can't control what he does, but I was just petitioning, just trying to get the officials to pay attention." Xu's case has been taken up by Chinese rights advocates and lawyers, who say local Communist Party officials appear to be increasingly using psychiatric confinement against determined "petitioners,” even if they present no danger to themselves or others.
"There appear to be more and more reports of (Chinese) psychiatric institutions being used for the purpose of illegally detaining and silencing civil society activists, dissidents, or individuals who have run afoul of local officials," said Phelim Kine, a researcher on China for Human Rights Watch, the New York-based advocacy group.
Calls to propaganda and police offices in Luohe about Xu's case were not answered, or officials referred queries to other offices, which also declined comment.
Holding protesters in psychiatric wards can be more expensive than detention centers, but can avoid procedures that come with formal detention.
There are no firm estimates of how widespread the practice is. Liu Feiyue, a human rights activist in central China's Hubei province who monitors the issue, said he had received reports about psychiatric detention of petitioners that all together involved hundreds of people being held.
Xu was freed after a report last week in the China Youth Daily, a state-run paper that sometimes runs combative stories about rights issues. That report soon spread across the Internet, sparking an upwelling of anger.
"Save me, I want to get out," Xu wrote on a scrap of paper he handed to a reporter from China Youth Daily, the paper reported.
Xu's family "ran around for many years calling out without getting any movement from the relevant authorities, but once this spread through reports and on the Internet, they reacted in a flash,” the Yangcheng Evening News, a popular newspaper in southern China, commented on Monday.
Chang Boyang, a lawyer in Henan who has taken up Xu's case, said he would be demanding compensation and an apology from officials in Xu's home of Daliu township.
"Xu was a stubborn type, but I don't think he was mentally ill," Chang said by telephone. "Even if he was, there was no attempt to notify his family where he was, or to seek his or their approval for any treatment." Xu took up the land dispute of a neighbor in 1997, helping him write complaints and visiting government "petitions and grievance offices" on his behalf.
Xu's brother, Xu Linfu, said his family found out where he was only after a released patient from the hospital passed on word last year.
Lawyer Chang said he had launched a nationwide petition urging lawyers to take up the problem of psychiatric detention.
"Cases like this are always happening, but this time he was held for so long that it's shocking," said Chang. "But the problem is not an isolated one."
