Online outrage over Chinese anti-gang campaign targeting mentally ill and parents of dead children
- A poster by a neighbourhood association in Xiangtan city, Hunan province, listed the stigmatised groups as people to monitor
- Images shown on Weibo drew widespread condemnation and the posters have come down
A neighbourhood association in central China’s Hunan province has caused a social media uproar because its anti-gang poster campaign targeted mental health patients and “shidu families”, parents who have lost their only child.
Created by the Guangchang Street neighbourhood association of the city of Xiangtan, the poster, titled “10 key tasks in removing gangs and crimes”, included the monitoring of patients with severe mental illness as well as families who have lost their only child.
Images of the poster were uploaded to the social media site Weibo on Tuesday, drawing widespread condemnation. They had since been removed from the streets, the news portal Thepaper.cn reported.
The district’s health commission apologised to the families affected by the poster and said it was investigating the incident, the commission’s deputy director, Chen Jianguang, told Thepaper.
China’s one-child policy has a legacy of bereaved parents facing humiliation and despair
China’s one-child policy, in effect from the early 1980s to 2015, created “shidu families”, parents who have lost their one child and could not have another, because of age or other factors. (Shidu is shorthand for “lose the only child”.)
Authorities have enacted social welfare policies to care for these childless couples. However, some of them continue to campaign for better retirement and health care benefits.
Mr Tong, a 64-year-old Xiangtan resident who lost his son five years ago, told the news site that he was angered and confused by the poster.
Tong defended shidu families’ occasional demands of government agencies as reasonable, and added that he never thought the community would see them as a criminal influence.
Millions with mental illness in China, India go untreated: study
Mental illness, which is also stigmatised in China, is on the rise in the country, according to the 2019 China Mental Health Survey. However, mental health care services are undersupplied. The country had 1.7 psychiatrists for every 100,000 people in 2014, compared to 12 for every 100,000 in the United States, according to the World Health Organisation.
The association’s posters drew widespread sympathy for shidu families on Weibo, with many users blaming the government for their plight.
“Who created these families? We followed the party’s call for national family planning and only had one child,” a user from Beijing wrote. “Now they end up in this situation, and face removal?”
Another city in the northern province of Shanxi has also been found to have similar anti-gang initiatives targeting “shidu families”, Thepaper reported.
