Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2003, Page 164
activities. The government still deals harshly with unregistered groups arresting leaders
and raiding meeting places.‖8 Apologists for the repressive regime will imply that the
suspect unregistered groups are wild and dangerous cults, potential Aum Shinrikyos. A few
may be, but according to Professor Lowe, ―it is surely significant that the number of
practicing Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, affiliated with unregistered churches is
thought to be much greater than the number in the official churches.‖ ―While the beliefs
and practices of many of the unregistered churches meet general standards of Roman
Catholic or Evangelical Protestant orthodoxy, some deviate significantly.‖9 These latter ―less
mainstream groups‖ receive the most intense scrutiny and are most likely to be labeled
―cults.‖
Of course to deviate from the mainstream (in addition to being unregistered) is not
necessarily to be violent or destructive. In the United States it is not customary to apply
intense state scrutiny to Holy Rollers or other out-of-the-mainstream groups. Mr. Rosedale
does not make any distinction between a group that might be dangerous or abhorrent to
practically any society, such as an Aum Shinrikyo, and a group or leader who might be
dangerous to an entrenched, authoritarian party autocracy, such as a Panchen Lama who is
not chosen by the government or an unregistered Catholic Church which recognizes the
Pope rather than the state as its ultimate authority in ecclesiastical matters. But a
defensive, authoritarian ruling party is likely to conflate the two categories of ―danger‖ and
see politically dissident sects as pathological in general.
We have noted above that involuntary commitment is one of the measures which is applied
to persistent loyalists of Falun Gong (as stated by Dr. Lowe). The use of ―psychiatric terror‖
in China against political and religious dissidents has recently attracted substantial attention
in the form of a book, Dangerous Minds by Robin Munro co-published by Human Rights
Watch,10 and a review essay ―China‘s Psychiatric Terror‖ on the Munro volume published in
the New York Review of Books by Jonathon Mirsky.11 The World Psychiatric Association
(WPA) voted overwhelmingly last September to send a delegation China to ―investigate
charges that dissidents were being imprisoned and maltreated as ‗political maniacs‘ both in
regular mental hospitals and in police-run custodial institutions known as the Ankang.‖12 A
scheduled ―educational‖ visit of the MPA delegation next will focus specifically on the
treatment of Falun Gong devotees.13
According to Mirsky, Munro‘s book shows that the psychiatrists who staff the Ankang
institutions ―tend to assume their patients are mad because of their political beliefs or
actions. The diagnoses made in both the political dissident and Falun Gong cases, ranging
from ‗delusions of reform‘ to ‗paranoid psychosis‘, are highly reminiscent of the long-
discredited label of ‗sluggish schizophrenia‘ that the Soviets used to apply to their dissidents
and religious nonconformists.‖14
The number of alleged political prisoners detained in Chinese psychiatric facilities has
periodically risen and fallen. According to Munro there was a marked rise in 1979 after the
Democracy Wall episode and again after the Tiananmen Square demonstration in 1989
when many demonstrators and sympathizers were arrested.
The numbers detained by forensic psychiatrists declined again in the early
1990s. But with the persecution of the Falun Gong, beginning in mid-1999,
tens of thousands were detained, arrested, charged, imprisoned, and
sometimes tortured—and several hundred were sent to mental hospitals. The
number of those detained is now so high that many are confined in ordinary
mental hospitals rather than the Ankang institutions in which apparently there
is not enough room.15
As Mirsky notes, owing to secrecy the details as to what actually happens to religious and
political dissidents in Ankangs is hard to determine. Munro presents a 1987 account by a

Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2003, Page 165
former prisoner at a Shanghai facility who claims that inmates were viciously tortured.
Some Falun Gong devotees claim to have been treated with brutality, particularly in prisons.
Of course one may choose to doubt what Rosedale terms the ―alleged mistreatment‖ of
religious sectarians in terms of brutality, imprisonment and abusive involuntary confinement
as a strategy of political control. However, one always goes out on a bit of a limb when
accepting at face value the defensive denials of an extremely authoritarian/totalitarian
regime (or for that matter an extremely authoritarian ―cult‖). For many years the Soviet
Union was accused of ―psychiatric terror‖ in terms of a politicized abuse of mental hospitals
to control and incarcerate political and religious dissidents. These claims were denied
vehemently by the Soviets even after they withdrew in protest from the World Psychiatric
Association in 1983. The WPA only readmitted the Soviet Union in 1989 after the
Gorbachev reforms, ―when their psychiatrists finally admitted the abuses and slowly set
about correcting them.‖16 In other words the hidden authoritarian secrets ultimately surface.
Rosedale complains about distorted equations of American anticult counseling procedures
applied to persons leaving cults and the ―deceptive and coercive recruitment processes‖ of
cults. The latter entail a climate of ―coerced conformity‖ which impedes exit from a group.
―People who are counseled and choose to leave the group still have the option to return to
the group if they so desire.‖16 Rosedale does not acknowledge that this ‗right of re-entry‘ is
precisely what is denied to Chinese Falun Gong devotees whose ―cult‖ is outlawed and
whose members‘ sectarian persistence risks prison or forced hospitalization.
A Dangerous Cult and Disturbed Cultists?
It may be claimed, of course, that Falun Gong members (and political dissidents)
institutionalized in Chinese mental hospitals are really seriously disturbed—driven crazy by
sinister mind control. But as we have seen and will see further, an official diagnosis can be
transparently spurious and politicized, as in the Chinese psychopathological diagnoses of
―delusions of reform.‖ Munro cites an article in an official Chinese police encyclopedia which
identifies ―people taken into police psychiatry‖ as persons ―commonly known as ‗political
maniacs‘ who shout reactionary slogans, write reactionary banners and reactionary letters,
make anti-government speeches in public and express opinions on important domestic and
international affairs.‖18 Munro also presents the case of a forty-five-year-old female
religious devotee related in 2000 in the Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychological Medicine.
The woman, notes Mirsky, ―was arrested for being a member of Falun Gong and practicing
the qigong exercises.‖ She was allegedly ―having a mental disorder caused by practicing an
evil cult‖ (an official diagnosis). However, notes Mirsky, ―the only ‗mentally dangerous‘
symptom or activity cited in the forty-five-year-old woman‘s police psychiatric report was:
‗even after the government declared Falun Gong to be an evil cult, she refused to be
dissuaded from her beliefs and continued gathering people to practice Falun Gong‘.‖19
Presumably the arrested political dissidents demonstrating or sympathizing with
demonstrators in 1989 Tiananmen Square (or the earlier dissidents writing politically
incorrect slogans on ―Democracy Wall‖) were not motivated by psychopathology and mind
control. Or does Mr. Rosedale feel that Chinese political dissidents, repressively controlled
in a manner similar to Falun Gong members and labeled ―political maniacs,‖ are really
disturbed and brainwashed? Whatever the problems of Falun Gong, it appears that the
institutional police psychiatry system in China is politicized and corrupt such that Chinese
diagnoses of pathology cannot be uncritically accepted at face value when applied to
political and religious dissidents.
Falun Gong claims that its qigong exercises improve spirituality, understanding and health.
Until 1999 Falun Gong was praised as beneficial in mainstream Chinese
medical journals and high officials were among its millions of practitioners its