BEIJING – One of China’s longest serving dissident prisoners has been freed and flown to the West, allowing a rare insight into life inside its notorious psychiatric jail system.

Wang Wanxing, 56, spent 13 years in the Beijing Ankang hospital for the criminally insane after staging a one-man demonstration in Tiananmen Square.

He was detained on a ward containing violent criminals and forced to watch electric shock treatment being performed on fellow inmates.

He witnessed two deaths, one person who died while being force-fed and one who had a heart attack during treatment. He himself was compelled to take anti-psychotic drugs.

His release took place quietly in August after negotiations between the German and Chinese governments and he was flown to Frankfurt, where his wife and daughter were living as refugees.

News of his plight has now been made public by a monitoring group, Human Rights Watch, which published a study of China’s psychiatric prison system three years ago.

Details have also been confirmed of President Hu’s state visit to Britain next week. He will be given a ceremonial welcome on Horse Guards Parade and a procession along the Mall with Queen Elizabeth, with whom he will stay at Buckingham Palace.

Human Rights Watch urged Prime Minister Blair and the leaders of Germany and Spain, which Mr. Hu will also visit, to raise the issue of political psychiatry.

“As the truth begins to trickle out from victims and witnesses, China can no longer deny these gruesome practices,” the Asia director of Human Rights Watch, Brad Adams, said.

Mr. Wang said foreign leaders such as Mr. Blair ought to apply “rational, non-emotional” pressure on the Chinese government.

Mr. Wang’s political activism began while at school during the Cultural Revolution, when he was denounced for saying Mao Zedong had both good and bad aspects.

He was detained repeatedly in the 1970s and became involved in the Beijing pro-democracy protests in 1989, which resulted in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. On the third anniversary, he was detained when he tried to unfurl a protest banner, which, according to the authorities, amounted to “disturbing public order.” The official record said: “He was diagnosed as suffering from ‘paranoia,’ and his dangerous behavior was attributed to his state of delusion.”

For seven years, Mr. Wang was kept on a general psychiatric ward containing between 50 and 70 inmates. Later, after a three-month release in 1999 that ended when he announced that he intended to hold a press conference, he was sent to a ward containing psychotic prisoners, many imprisoned for murder. Treatment was by drugs and “electric acupuncture.” He witnessed one inmate die of a heart attack while undergoing the treatment.

On another occasion, an inmate who had been brought in for “persistently submitting petitions” was tied down on a bed after going on hunger strike. Inmates were told to pour food straight into his mouth: He choked and died.

“My guiding principle while I was there was, do not commit suicide, do not run away, do not challenge the staff,” he said. “As long I walked out alive, that would be enough.”

Human Rights Watch said it believed Mr. Wang was treated relatively leniently as a prominent dissident whose case had been taken up by Western governments.

He will now be assessed by an international group that campaigned against the Soviet Union’s abuse of psychiatry for political purposes, the Global Initiative on Psychiatry.

They will be able to use his case to test Chinese diagnoses against international standards, since the authorities claim he is still mentally ill and recommend he be kept under “strict guardianship.”

“When the conversation turns to politics, he displays impairments of thought association and of mental logic,” his release notes, provided in advance to the German government, said.

A Hong Kong-based labor rights campaigner, Robin Munro, who interviewed Mr. Wang in Frankfurt, said he seemed remarkably sane. “All the accounts from his family and people who knew him before his arrest said he was perfectly normal mentally.

“But after 13 years in a prison-run psychiatric asylum, I thought at least I would find a seriously damaged person. What amazed me was how intact he is – he’s very lucid, very clear. He smiles and laughs and showed no sign of any mental disturbance whatsoever.”

Even the release notes suggested that outside his politics, he was relatively normal. The notes said, “He interacts fairly well with others, his mood is stable, and he obeys the staff.”

Mr. Wang said, “I am absolutely fine and sane. Always. I have great confidence in myself. Even when I was arrested, I knew they were doomed to fail.”

As he was being put on the plane, a hospital official told him, “If you ever speak out about your experiences at our hospital, we’ll come and bring you back here.”

HOSPITALS WHERE THE ‘ILLNESS’ IS REVOLT

* China has 25 Ankang hospitals. It intends to set up one for every city of more than a million people – 70 in all.

* Ankang means “Peace and health.”

* 3,000 people have been “treated” at Ankang hospitals because of their political or religious activities or excessive demands for their legal rights since the early 1980s.

* Ankang doctors and nurses are employees of the Public Security Bureau.

* Crimes for which you can be committed include shouting political slogans, writing reactionary banners and letters, making anti-government speeches in public, expressing opinions on important domestic and international affairs, and disrupting the normal work of party and government offices.