Dangerous Minds: Political Psychiatry in China Today and its Origins in the Mao Era (review)

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched its first political attack on dissidents in 1951. Known as "reform thinking," it condemned the capitalist inclinations of university professors. A series of such attacks have followed down the years and the targets were expanded to include all intellectuals, students, workers, and religious citizens burdened with noncommunist ideas. The epoch of the so-called Cultural Revolution (1966-76) was the climax of "reform thinking": anyone who had suffered so much as a moment's deviation from Maoist orthodoxy was censured. Beginning at that time, some thirty years ago, the CCP began to commit dissidents to custodial mental asylums: differences of opinion and belief were now taken as psychological symptoms. Although, over the last twenty years, China's economic system has been reformed significantly, the principle and policy of "reform thinking" remains, and psychiatric treatment still functions today as a way of suppressing religious dissent. Dangerous Minds systematically documents the political uses of psychiatry and illuminates one of the ghastliest corners in the CCP's China.