Li Yixue, once an unknown, became an internet sensation after she was forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital twice in a row for pursuing her rights. In truth, China has far more than one Li Yixue—thousands of victims have suffered the same fate. Her case has once again drawn public attention to them. Using psychiatric hospitals to deal with targets of "stability maintenance" is a longstanding CCP tactic. Ankang hospitals across the country are directly run by the police, and in 2012 the authorities publicly announced that no sane person could be committed to a psychiatric hospital without police approval—which merely made an unspoken rule official. According to a report released in August 2022 by Safeguard Defenders, an international human rights organization that has long monitored China's human rights record, the CCP routinely forces rights activists, petitioners, and other groups into psychiatric facilities known as "Ankang hospitals." The report documented the experiences of 99 victims. Most said they had suffered various forms of abuse in these hospitals, including beatings, electric shocks, and injections of unknown drugs. Between 2015 and 2021, these victims were confined a combined total of 144 times across 109 psychiatric hospitals spanning 21 provinces, municipalities, and regions. The report further stated that as many as a third of the victims were committed repeatedly, about half were held for more than six months, and nine victims were confined for more than ten years. Over the years, media both inside and outside China have reported and exposed a large number of cases in which the CCP has used psychiatric hospitals to persecute ordinary people, and every one of them is shocking. Each of these victims could be called another Li Yixue—many suffered even worse than she did. Zhou Xiao, an IT worker from Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, is a typical example. According to New Tang Dynasty Television, in 2012, the then 26-year-old Zhou was reported to the authorities after discussing the "June Fourth" Tiananmen crackdown with a neighbor. Without any legal process or medical certification, police came to his door and hauled him straight into the Wuxi Mental Health Center. Zhou revealed that psychiatric hospitals torment people even more viciously and cruelly than prisons. "A prison at least has to put on some show of legality, some pretense of human rights—it has to go through procedures. But inside a psychiatric hospital, killing someone is incredibly easy. There are no procedures required—they just say you're having an episode, that you're prone to violence, and they tie you down. They can literally restrain you to death. Being tied down for months, even a year—that kind of thing can and does happen." On his first day in the hospital, Zhou was placed in a level-one ward and kept tied down from that afternoon until the next morning, unable to use the bathroom or eat, while orderlies secretly slapped him and injected him with unknown drugs. After he was later moved to a general ward, he was given electric shock treatment five times. Zhou said: "I underwent five rounds of electroconvulsive therapy—ECT—which shocks the brain directly. They did it five times. There's a special room, like a lab, where you lie down and they put something over your head. I was shocked five times. Each time, I'd lose my memory afterward. It would take a full day, until nighttime, before I recovered." Zhou said he was slapped many times in the hospital, and some orderlies would strip patients naked to beat them, or tie them up before beating them. But beatings, he said, were relatively mild compared to a form of electric torture he witnessed, which was truly horrifying.
"They use needles like acupuncture needles, stick a bunch of them into your body, and then run electricity through them—they call it 'electric shock.' They even admitted in front of us that this isn't treatment, it's punishment. I never went through it myself, but I saw the people who were shocked—they were in agony, screaming wildly, sobbing uncontrollably." Zhou said that although the Wuxi Mental Health Center has no law-enforcement authority, it functions in practice just like a prison—an instrument of CCP violence. During his hospitalization, three people died in his ward: one elderly patient died of illness, another was beaten to death, and the third simply disappeared. In December 2015, police committed Zhou to a psychiatric hospital again. The first time, he had been held for four months; this time, he was confined for another three. Returning from Zhou's story to Li Yixue's, it is not hard to imagine what she will now face after being sent back into a psychiatric hospital. One netizen put it well: "The whole country, the whole world, cannot save one vulnerable woman. She spoke a few honest words and firmly stood up for her own rights, and for that she has been locked up in a psychiatric hospital again and again. This regime is simply too evil."