Chinese doctors are offering painful electroshock therapy and drug prescriptions they claim will “cure” homosexuality, an undercover documentary team has discovered, even though the treatments have no scientific basis and a Beijing court recently ruled against the practice.



Though the government stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental illness in 2001 and it was legalised in 1997, psychiatrists at hospitals in major cities are still charging hundreds of pounds for painful and bogus “conversion therapy” they claim can alter sexual orientation, Channel 4’s Unreported World found.

“Can you bear this kind of pain? How long can you bear it? If you can really bear with it then you can change,” one doctor told an undercover gay activist who filmed his consultation at a hospital in the port city of Tianjin.

That doctor recommends electroshock therapy, or doses of nausea-inducing drugs, every time her patient feels what she calls “urges”.

Chinese court rules ‘gay cure’ treatments illegal Read more

“Your conditioned reflex is that when you see someone of the same sex, you feel love. Now what I want to make you feel is scared,” she tells John Shen, deputy director of one of China’s largest gay rights group, who went to the clinic with concealed recording devices to expose the practice.

Last year a court in Beijing made a landmark ruling against a clinic in south China that administered electroshock and hypnosis “conversion” treatments. The Xinyu Piaoxiang clinic had to pay 3,500 yuan (£360) in compensation and publish an apology on its website.

Activists who filed the case hoped it would set a precedent, but a year later many other medical centres are still trying to cash in on mainstream Chinese society’s unease with homosexuality.

Parents unwilling to accept that their children are gay, or worried that it means they will not have grandchildren, often force them to attend the “conversion clinics”, Shen said.

He volunteered to go undercover partly to fend off expected pressurefrom his family when he decides to come out to them.

“When I come out to relatives or my mum or my dad, when they say to me ‘you have to go to the hospital and check first,’ I might just answer them that I’ve already gone. And I kind of exposed all the bad things there,” says Shen, who after an initial proposal is not actually offered either shock or drug treatment.

A second undercover volunteer is less fortunate. Painful footage shows him twitching on a hospital bed as a brusque medical attendant administers shocks. He exclaims in pain and then says that half of his face has gone numb.

The Huashan clinic, also in Tianjin, charges him 3,500 yuan, more than two months disposable income for an average Chinese worker, and warns him that he will need to return frequently and pay out similar amounts.

“You have to carry on doing the therapy,” an unnamed doctor tells him. “We have had people here finish the first treatment cycle and improved and they repeated the treatment cycle again and again. It isn’t possible to only do a few treatments.”

The activists expect their fight to change opinions to be a slow one. Beijing is increasingly wary of civil society and activist groups, particularly ones with foreign connections, regardless of the issues they are working on.

The government has increased pressure on groups fighting for everything from feminism to coal miners, making it hard for them to campaign for change.

“For NGO people we have this kind of joke, we say if you never been visited by a policeman that means that means you are not achieving a very good job,” said Xin Ying, director of the Beijing LGBT Centre.

Her team, struggling to put together an annual fundraising gala that is a vital source of funds, are constantly followed and photographed. Police make it clear that they know that Channel 4 are filming with them, and they know the topic of the documentary.

The film ends on an optimistic note, when Shen revisits the hospital where he was initially offered shocks and the nausea drug. He sees a different therapist, the head of the psychiatric department, who tells him he does not need treatment because he doesn’t have a problem.

“She told me that now it’s not a mental disorder any more and that she thinks it’s no big deal. You can still lead a normal life,” he says. “I think there are still a lot of bad doctors and our work may never end. But, yes, progress!”