In the summer of 2018, a young woman splashed ink on a poster of Xi Jinping in Shanghai, sparking a tragic chain of events that have left at least two people dead and another disappeared, presumed dead.
Dear Dong Yaoqiong,
We’ve never met, but we have followed your tragic story and that of your father over these last seven years.
Today is 23 September 2025, three years after your father died in prison, his body covered in wounds and bruises. He was just 54 years old.
At the time, we read that you might not have even been told that he had died.
Perhaps, even, that he was in prison at all.
And then last year, rumours began circulating among rights defenders, your friends and family members, that maybe you too had died.
No one had heard from you since January 2021. That was when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forcibly locked you up in a psychiatric hospital for the third time.
We looked up that hospital—Zhuzhou City Hospital No. 3. From the image on its website, it has a modern façade with gleaming windows, but we know from the testimony of many others who have been forcibly committed to mental institutions by the CCP that what goes on in the psychiatric detention ward is cruel, frightening and inhumane.
To this day, the CCP still uses psychiatric detention on their perceived enemies – petitioners fighting injustice in their villages, activists speaking out for freedom and rights. It is one of the most chilling ways the CCP uses to disappear critics – forced hospitalization in a mental facility without medical justification. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of victims.
We documented it all for our report—Drugged and Detained: China’s Psychiatric Prisons. We described how people with absolutely no medical reason are belted to their beds and left to lie in their own waste for hours; how they are subjected to excruciating electroshock therapy without anaesthesia leaving them traumatized and crushed; and how they are force fed drugs that render them unable to think or feel.
There are no visitors or phone calls home. They are locked up – just like you—for months and years at a time. If they are released, and don’t stay silent, they go back, again and again.
They have no way to be let out. They have no way to ask for help.
