Tales of the Chinese psychiatric gulag.

After 13 years of detention in Beijing's Ankang hospital for the criminally insane, Chinese dissident Wang Wanxing, 56, has been allowed to emigrate to Frankfurt, Germany, to join his wile and daughter.

Wang was arrested in 1993 for attempting to display a protest banner on Tiananmen Square. According to Communist Chinese authorities, this act amounted to "disturbing public order." An official report on Wang claimed that he was "diagnosed as suffering from 'paranoia,' and his dangerous behavior was attributed to his state of delusion." A separate report filed on his release insisted that Wang needed to be kept under "strict guardianship.... When the conversation turns to politics, he displays impairments of thought association and mental logic."

Non-Chinese officials who interviewed Wang in Germany, predictably, found him to be entirely sane and remarkably well-adjusted for a veteran of Beijing's psychiatric gulag. "I am absolutely fine and sane," Wang told the London Telegraph. "Even when I was arrested, I knew they were doomed to tail."

During his imprisonment, reports the Telegraph, Wang "witnessed two deaths, one from a heart attack during treatment and one person who died while being force-fed. He was himself forced to take anti-psychotic drugs." During a temporary release in 1999, Wang announced his intention to talk to the press. He was immediately arrested and confined to a ward containing psychotic prisoners, many of whom were convicted of murder.

Wang's political activism "began at school during the Cultural Revolution, when he was denounced for saying that Chairman Mao had both good and bad aspects," relates the Telegraph. He was repeatedly imprisoned during the 1970s and was involved in the 1989 protests that ended with the massacre at Tiananmen Square.