Down and out in China
By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - As China basks in the spotlight of hosting another international extravaganza - the World Expo, which opened May 1 in Shanghai - it is worth noting that a homeless man named Cheng Guorong is one of the most popular figures on the Internet in the country so far this year.
Actually, while most netizens would immediately recognize Cheng's strikingly handsome face and strange sartorial flare, they probably would not know his real name. For months, Cheng, a vagabond in the city of Ningbo in eastern Zhejiang province, was regarded as the "coolest man in China".
His rugged good looks, captured in photographs by Ningbo residents enthralled by the possibilities of his life story, prompted comparisons to film stars such as Takeshi Kaneshiro and Ken
Watanabe. He was called the "Beggar Prince" and the "Handsome Vagabond", but the name that eventually stuck and transformed him into a mythical cyber hero was "Brother Sharp".
Brother Sharp, who appears to be in his mid thirties, became widely admired for his penetrating gaze and the "beggar chic" style of layered clothing he wore - blue cotton pullover, black leather jacket and black overcoat, all of these rather soiled items apparently picked up off the streets of Ningbo. And, the ever-present cigarette in his mouth or between his fingers only further enhanced his image as a rebel without a cause.
Once his image went viral and his fame spread, Brother Sharp was hounded by paparazzi and a growing band of groupies as he made his daily rounds as a Ningbo beggar. A legend was born. Brother Sharp's story morphed from a curiosity piece into the epitome of man versus society - or, in this particular case, handsome, intelligent Chinese man versus greedy, inhumane Chinese society.
China's most popular shopping portal, taobao.com, introduced a Brother Sharp fashion line, with a jacket inspired by the tramp's motley wardrobe priced at nearly 9,000 yuan (US$1,318). The mainstream media picked up his story, and speculation about his background became rife. Was he a university graduate who had given up on socialism with Chinese characteristics? Was he a jilted lover? Perhaps both? The stories multiplied.
As it turns out, however, Cheng is nothing like the Brother Sharp depicted on blogs and in Internet chat rooms; he is a schizophrenic who had been separated from his family with no idea of how to get back home. After his wife died in a car accident 11 years ago, Cheng left his home in the city of Shangrao in Jiangxi province, which borders Zhejiang, to become a migrant worker. At some point, his family lost track of him.
Now, thanks to his unwanted fame, they are reunited.
While that outcome should be celebrated, the dark side of this story should not be ignored. It is unfortunate that the revelation of Brother Sharp's schizophrenia has caused most of the millions of people who followed his story to lose interest. The story continues, and it is much bigger and more important than a beggar chic fashion line.
According to the World Health Organization, 7% of China's population - about 100 million people - suffers from some form of mental illness. Most of them, like Brother Sharp, are left to their own devices.
The news is full of reminders of a growing mental health crisis. The final week of last month was especially eye opening. On April 29, a knife-wielding man burst into a kindergarten classroom in the city of Taixing in Jiangsu province, stabbing 29 children and three adults before he could be subdued. A day earlier a teacher with a knife stabbed 16 students and another teacher in a city in Guangdong province. On that same day, 42-year-old former surgeon Zheng Minsheng was executed for killing eight children in a schoolyard knife attack on March 23 in Fujian province. The week ended with state media reporting that a man in Weifang, located in Shandong province, had burned himself to death after injuring five children with a hammer at a kindergarten in the city.
Such bizarre attacks on schoolchildren have become a common story over the years, but this recent spate of insanity has been particularly unsettling, spurring the Ministry of Security to order police to step up protection of children in schools across the nation. But where is the accompanying call by the Ministry of Health to identify and take care of the millions of deranged people who are currently untreated in China?
To their credit, health officials have finally recognized the growing problem, with major research into mental illness included in the government's current five-year plan. In Beijing, where there are now only 6,900 psychiatric beds for the more than 150,000 people estimated to suffer from mental disorders, six new mental health clinics are planned.
That's progress, but there is still a long way to go.
It is telling that Zheng, who was almost certainly insane, was executed for his horrible crime without any inquiry into his mental health. Last December, Beijing's indifference to the mentally handicapped attracted international scrutiny when a mentally disturbed Briton, Akmal Shaikh, was executed for drug trafficking.
China's suicide rate, which official media acknowledge is among the highest in the world, is another sign that mental health is being neglected in the country. Every year around 2.25 million people attempt suicide in China; 250,000 to 300,000 succeed.
China is one of a few countries in which more women (58% of the total) commit suicide than men and in which rural residents die by their own hand in greater numbers than their urban counterparts. Suicide is now the leading cause of death for people between the ages 15 and 34.
Add it all up and China accounts for a quarter of the total of global suicides.
All this is happening in a nation of 1.3 billion people served by, at last count, 4,000 psychiatrists and a paucity of psychiatric hospitals that are used more as lock-down centers for those who oppose the Communist Party than facilities to help the mentally ill.
For example, Xu Lindong, a perfectly sane villager from central Henan province, whose case had been exposed by the reform-minded China Youth Daily, was finally released from a psychiatric hospital last month after enduring six years of interrogation, electric shocks and forced drugging.
His act of criminal madness: petitioning his local government over a land dispute.
During his incarceration, Xu's family had no idea where he was. He had simply disappeared. Now, thanks to the China Youth Daily report, he is free and, although physically broken, determined to seek justice. He plans to sue the government and the psychiatric hospitals that confined him.
China's practice of treating troublemakers as psychiatric patients goes back to the Cultural Revolution, during which the profession of psychiatry was outlawed; its tradition of ignoring those who are actually mentally handicapped goes back much farther. But the proud nation that is now hosting the biggest and most expensive World Expo ever also needs to show the world that it cares about its most vulnerable - and, in some cases, most dangerous - citizens.
