BEIJING, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Beijing dismissed as "totally groundless and unacceptable" on Tuesday a recent Western study alleging China uses mental asylums to incarcerate government opponents, including members of the banned Falun Gong group.
"Such allegations are totally groundless and unacceptable," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao said of a report by a British academic. The study said Chinese political abuse of psychiatry might exceed that of the former Soviet Union.
"There is no evidence to support it," Zhu told a news conference.
China, which faces increasing criticism this year over its drive to eradicate the Falun Gong spiritual movement, last week also dismissed a report by the human rights group Amnesty International accusing it of widespread torture of prisoners.
RESURGENCE
British academic Robin Munro, in a study published in the Columbia Journal of Asian Law, said research of Chinese psychiatric literature since the 1950s and case studies show a "longstanding record of the muse of psychiatry for politically repressive purposes."
The 130-page "Judicial Psychiatry in China and its Political Abuses" says China's programme "resembles in all key respects that of the former Soviet Union" and may exceed it.
Munro, a senior research fellow at the Law Department and Centre for Chinese Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, says China's network of police mental asylums was copied from the former Soviet Union.
The study says China's arrested political dissidents can be "prime candidates" for incarceration in a national network of 20 top secret "Ankang" (Peace and Happiness) mental institutions run directly by the Ministry of Public Security.
It details many cases of political dissidents and labour activists alleged to have been held in mental hospitals and forced to take psychiatric drugs.
The practice appeared to have diminished in the early 1990s. But it has undergone a resurgence in recent years, largely as a result of the crackdown on Falun Gong, which combines meditation and exercises with a doctrine rooted loosely in Buddhist and Taoist teachings, Munro wrote.
The study cites reports from overseas adherents of Falun Gong that hundreds of its practitioners have been forcibly medicated or sent to mental hospitals.
China has repeatedly denied abuse of detained followers of Falun Gong which it banned as an "evil cult" in 1999.
The government has acknowledged a handful of deaths in custody but said the people were old, sick or had committed suicide.
05:57 02-20-01
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