40 Years of Petitioning

A man beaten by authorities to the point of mental illness in the 1970s is still trying to lodge a complaint about his treatment.

2009.02.11
Liu Zhenjiang Liu Zhenjiang, from Liaoning province, has been pursuing compensation against officials since 1977, after he was beaten and locked up for earning extra income.
Courtesy of Liu family


HONG KONG—A Chinese man punished three decades ago for seeking work in another town, before the era of economic reforms, was beaten to the point of mental disturbance by local police and officials and incarcerated in mental hospitals, he and his family say.

Liu Zhenjiang, a former manual worker from Ertai township in the northeastern province of Liaoning, said he had been pursuing compensation against officials and police since 1977, after he was beaten and locked up for earning more than 1,000 yuan (U.S.$170) in another town from bucket weaving.


Video footage of Liu Zhenjiang and his near-derelict living quarters, shot by his brothers and handed to RFA Mandarin service reporter Bai Fan.

"Today, things like this are very common and he should be called a migrant worker," Liu's brother Liu Zhendong said. "But at that time, this kind of activity was banned."

Liu Zhendong said his brother was detained by the township Communist Party Committee and denounced at public meetings.

"He was locked up there and guarded by four urban youths [sent to the countryside by the government]. They beat my brother brutally and repeatedly over a period of two weeks, until he became mentally deranged," he added.

"A month later, I saw my brother’s body was full of bruises and he was acting like a madman, so I went to the county government to appeal," Liu Zhendong said.

'Escape' from asylum

"After I knocked on many doors there, finally a cadre received me and was surprised at what I said. He called our township Party committee and ordered my brother's immediate release,” he said.

Liu Zhenjiang said he was beaten with clubs and shovels at the Party committee office, then taken to a mental institution.

"I escaped from the mental hospital. If I didn’t flee, I would have died there," he said.

"Mental hospitals are like hell and all their treatment equipment is like a torture rack," Liu Zhenjiang said. "If someone died, that was simply counted as a case of medical malpractice."

Liu said he lived in a ruined house with no money for electricity and a collapsed roof.

"I still have fears about the horrors of the past," he said.

Local officials said Liu's case was a “historical problem,” but his case has drawn attention weeks after a number of Chinese petitioners have begun to describe publicly their incarceration in mental institutions.

Officials deny claim

"The real issue here is not just economic—it’s political," current township Party secretary Lü Yongwen said.

"Last year, during the National People’s Congress…we tried to educate him," Lü said, referring to Liu Zhendong.

"He helped his brother apply for migrant worker status, and subsequently got him a salary of 700-800 yuan (U.S.$100)  a month."

"We understand the situation and at festivals we give him rice, flour, meat, and many other things for free."

Asked if Liu Zhenjiang should be compensated, Lü said:

"We have already compensated him," adding that Liu Zhenjiang's brother had refused to have the house repaired because he wanted higher compensation.

Call for investigations

In an interview with RFA's Mandarin service in December, Tianjin-based petitioner Li Shuchun, 66, described being incarcerated in a mental hospital along with a dozen other petitioners and force-fed medication.

And a police officer in the northeastern city of Wafangdian confirmed that "diehard" petitioner Wang Taihe was held in a psychiatric hospital in Wafangdian city, near Dalian, since he was brought back by local officials after trying to protest during the Olympic Games in Beijing.

The police officer called such practices an "open secret" among China's establishment, and said the authorities feared Wang would start a disturbance.

In a related development, the Chinese-language New Beijing News reported in December that 57-year-old Sun Fawu was forcibly committed to the Xintai Psychiatric Hospital in the eastern province of Shandong after spending years trying to obtain compensation for houses and farmlands lost to the coal-mining industry.

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences professor Yu Jianrong, who researches grassroots politics and activism, said on his personal blog that local officials had activated concerted strategies for reducing the number of petitioners lodging complaints about them with higher levels of government.

In a Dec. 27 visit to a government seminar on petitioners, he said official researchers had dismissed the New Beijing News report as unreliable but declined to make public their investigation into the issue.

Yu quoted local official documents as setting out strategies that would ensure very few petitioners actually got as far as registering formal complaints with departments at higher levels of government

His ideological attitude was criticized by the head of the research bureau, Zhang Yan, he wrote.

Original reporting in Mandarin by Bai Fan. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie and Chen Ping. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

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