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In January last year, a Chinese construction porter in Hubei called Jiang Tianlu was taking his seven-year-old daughter to school when police appeared, seized him and locked him up in a local psychiatric hospital. For Mr Jiang, the ordeal was terrifying, but it wasnt new. It was his fifth or sixth time he has lost count. This had become the authorities way of dealing with his efforts to get justice for his father, who was beaten to death by a well-connected local official in 2004. Mr Jiangs repeated letters and visits to petition the government in Beijing had annoyed the wrong people.

In a report released this week by the NGO Safeguard Defenders, Mr Jiang recounts his treatment during previous hospital stays: he was tied to a bed, beaten around the head, forced to take drugs, subjected to electroshock therapy and humiliated by guards. All of this took place in the name of treatment for his mental health illness. His true illness, of course, is not psychological. The real sickness is the Chinese Communist Party and the regime it runs.

Mr Jiangs case is just one of 99 examined by Safeguard Defenders these are the only ones they could find public information on but the cases span the length and breadth of China, suggesting the practice is widespread. All of them involve innocent citizens thrown into psychiatric wards against their will and detained for anything from a few days to more than 15 years. Most recounted being tied down to their bed for hours, some left to lie in their own faeces for so long that their skin ulcerated, many were beaten, given forcible injections or drugs or electroshock treatment with no anaesthetic.

What were their crimes? Some were democracy protesters or dissidents, like Dong Yaoqiong or Ink Girl, as shes known, a real estate agent who was locked up in a hospital after streaming footage of herself throwing ink on a picture of Xi Jinping. She came out suffering from a dementia-like condition (in her 30s), incontinence and night terrors.

For the most part, though, the criminally insane locked up in this way are not even politically active dissidents, as such. They are petitioners like Mr Jiang, often among Chinas poorest and least educated citizens, who have attracted punishment simply for trying to get restitution for specific grievances.

The petitioning system has a very long history in China. For centuries, it was one of the few ways ordinary people had of circumventing pernicious local officials and appealing to an imperial authority for justice when it worked, that is. It continued under communism, when people began writing letters to Chairman Mao instead. But petitioners have always run a risk by taking on local vested interests and challenging corrupt officials. They have little protection when the police come to take revenge.

Officially, using psychiatric wards as detention and torture centres is against Chinese law, let alone a myriad of international rules and norms, but the law is a fickle thing in China. Aside from the policy aim of stability maintenance, a priority that is thought to cost the government $217billion per year more than the military budget the practice can be a money-spinner for the hospitals or doctors who collude in it. Occasionally, its even used by families who want to disappear an inconvenient member.

Getting someone sectioned is, of course, just one way of making them go away in China. There are other extra-judicial regimes, documented by Safeguard Defenders among others, like the liuzhi prison system run directly by the CCP or the residential surveillance at a designated location (secret jail) system. These are in addition to the regular justice system, where conviction rates recently reached 99.97 per cent, the highest since public records began in 1980. But of course, as Xi expands his campaign for total control of Chinas 1.4 billion people, public records of such policies are getting harder to find. Which is why we ought to bear witness while we can.

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China's real sickness isn't its dissidents, but the Chinese Communist Party - The Telegraph