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Fury in China After an Outspoken Teacher Disappears
Supporters of Li Tiantian believe that local officials may have sent her to a psychiatric hospital, a longstanding way of stifling and discrediting dissent.
An undated photograph of the teacher, Li Tiantian.
Chinese social media sites have echoed for days with a question that has been met with silence by Communist Party officials: Where is Li Tiantian?
Ms. Li, an outspoken but previously little known teacher at a rural school in Hunan Province, southern China, disappeared after telling friends that police officers had forced their way into her home and were taking her to a psychiatric hospital. She told them the authorities had accused her of violating the bounds of officially acceptable comment on social media.
In recent weeks, Ms. Li had publicly sympathized with a teacher in Shanghai who was hounded online and fired after saying that there should be more rigorous study of China’s official death count for the Nanjing massacre, the Japanese Army’s murder of residents of that city in 1937.
“I’ve been targeted by public security,” Ms. Li said in one message to Cui Junjie, a friend who has galvanized support for Ms. Li on the internet. Mr. Cui shared screenshots of Ms. Li’s messages with The New York Times.
“I didn’t commit any crime, so I can never admit to one,” she told Mr. Cui. “But they want to seize the chance to convict me.”
Ms. Li, 27, has complained of bouts of depression. But many friends and supporters believe that she has become a victim of a decades-old practice in China: using psychiatric confinement to stifle dissenters. Even if she was unwell, they have said, enforced confinement was not an answer.
The authorities had stayed mostly mute about Ms. Li’s disappearance on Sunday and did not answer repeated phone calls from The New York Times. The local government of Xiangxi, the area of Hunan where Ms. Li lives, broke its silence on Friday, saying in a statement that she had checked into a hospital for psychiatric treatment at the behest of her family.
Unusually, China’s censors did not shut down a nationwide outpouring over several days of anger about Ms. Li’s disappearance, possibly because the central authorities saw the case as a messy controversy best left to the local authorities to clean up.
Many of the comments have been from supporters who see her as a symbol of the damage wrought by the Chinese government’s heavy-handed censorship under Xi Jinping, who has demanded political loyalty, including from teachers. Her supporters have also criticized nationalists who attacked Ms. Li online for bucking official orthodoxy. Ms. Li has also said she is four months pregnant, adding to fears for her safety.
“Restore her freedom and formally apologize,” Huang Jian, a commentator on Weibo, another popular social media platform, declared in a video statement. “Your ignorance, idiocy and barbarity are an utter disgrace for China.”
On Thursday, Hu Xijin, the recently retired chief editor of Global Times, a popular Communist Party-run newspaper, shared a video online in which a woman who described herself as Ms. Li’s mother said a relative working in the local education bureau had taken Ms. Li to a psychiatric hospital to treat her depression.
The Xiangxi government said in its statement on Friday that Ms. Li’s mother had agreed to her hospitalization after Ms. Li “suddenly lost control of her emotions and tried to take excessive steps” when officials came to her home. It said that Ms. Li still faced repercussions for her comments.
“As for her issuing inappropriate statements, after she leaves hospital, she will undergo education and counseling in line with the laws and regulations,” the Xiangxi government said.
The statement, however, failed to quell widespread skepticism on the Chinese internet about Ms. Li’s treatment.
In previous decades, Chinese officials regularly committedpersistent petitioners and protesters to psychiatric hospitals, drawing criticism from human rights advocates and doctors. Gao Jian, a Chinese writer who recently published a book on the topic, said in an interview that the practice was less frequent, but that it still took place.
“This tool of treating someone as mentally ill is still quite a useful one for local governments,” Mr. Gao said in messaged responses to questions. “It’s a way of completely skating around the law.”
Fury in China After an Outspoken Teacher Disappears (Published 2021)
Supporters of Li Tiantian believe that local officials may have sent her to a psychiatric hospital, a longstanding way of stifling and discrediting dissent.
