You Must Be Crazy

Duh, the solution is obvious. Communist China is a worker's paradise. If you complain, then you must be crazy.

The authorities in the eastern Chinese city of Xintai have been abducting citizens who make complaints, according to a state newspaper.

These people are held in mental hospitals until they withdraw their grievances, the Beijing News reports.

An investigation found that at least 18 people had been detained in this way, after trying to take complaints about local officials to higher authorities.

Some of those held were reportedly forced to take powerful drugs.

Sigh, how do you fix a corrupt political system that has no accountability to the people it governs?

Longer article in the New York Times

Sun Fawu, 57, a farmer seeking compensation for land spoiled by a coal mining operation, said he was seized by local authorities on his way to petition the central government in Beijing and taken to the Xintai Mental Health Center in October.

During a 20-day stay, he said, he was lashed to a bed, forced to take pills and given injections that made him numb and woozy. When he told the doctor he was a petitioner, not mentally ill, the doctor reportedly said: “I don’t care if you’re sick or not. As long as you are sent by the township government, I’ll treat you as a mental patient.”

In an interview with the paper, the hospital’s director, Wu Yuzhu, acknowledged that some of the 18 patients brought there by the police in recent years were not deranged, but he said that had no choice but to take them in. “The hospital also had its misgivings,” he said.