Petitioner Sun Fawu of Shandong

Sun Dongdong. Image source: Sina

The Sun Dongdong affair, which involved the PKU professor declaring in China Newsweek that 99% of petitioners are insane, has put the topic of petitioners and mental hospitals in the news once more.

This video from iFeng.com, taken from Phoenix TV’s Social Watch (“社会能见度”) program, tells the story of a petitioner named Sun Fawu (孙法武), who was taken to a mental hospital and kept there. In the first video, his wife Zhang Xuefang (张学芳) gives an interview. Transcript below (the transcript is first because the video, which follows, auto-plays):

Narrator: On October 19th, 2008, the wife of Sun Fawu received a phone call telling her that her husband has been taken to the police station.

Zhang Xuefang: He stayed in the police station, and the young man there said that he wasn’t the one in charge. So he [Sun] had to stay there.

I said, I have to go work, what if they “dealt” with him?

I went there the next day, but there wasn’t anybody there. I looked for people at the police station, but there weren’t anyone there but one guard. I asked him where he [Sun] was, he said he didn’t know.

Narrator: Zhang Xuefang did not find out where Sun Fawu went. Later she found out from the local Bureau of Letter and Calls that Sun had already been sent to the Xintai mental institution, which was also the local mental hospital.

ZXF: I said what illness did he have, that they put him in the mental hospital? They said mental illness! Go, you go and see him! I’ll write out the directions.

Narrator: In the mental hospital Zhang Xuefang saw her husband. He was already under treatment for mental illness. Zhang Xuefang wanted to bring her husband home, but was given a unexpected response.

ZXF: The director of the hospital said none of them thought he was ill, and that whoever brought him here had to take him away. Go back and speak to your government, he said. Law enforcers (执法人员) brought him here.

I took him to see five or six people to say that he wasn’t ill. I said that I’m his wife, and that look, I would know. Did they get my fingerprint, or my signature [as proof that he was insane]? They said they didn’t care, that law enforcers brought him there, so they would treat him as if he was insane.

Presenter Zeng Zimo: Our interviews in Xintai were extremely hard to get. To get to the interviewees we had to use a series of different phone numbers. Only this way would they reveal the place of interview and other details.

All the interviewees would tell us beforehand that they were being followed after they step out the door. During the entire process of the interview, they displayed uneasiness and fear.

On the iFeng video site (Chinese) is the rest of program on Sun Fawu － there are six videos in total. Interviews with Sun Fawu and his stay at the mental hospital follow, as well as other cases, such as that of Shi Hengsheng, an 84-year-old man who has been in the same asylum, also for petitioning, for two years. Shi recorded on a cigarette box the names of 18 people who was taken there, and told Sun’s wife to go to Beijing with the box.