On November 25, a farmer in Jiangxi province was carrying RMB 10,000 (a huge sum of money for a farmer in this remote area) with him while waiting for a train in Guixi. Suddenly he noticed that several men were following him, and he thought they might be planning to rob him. So he ran away to avoid them. While running a police car drove by and stopped it to ask the police men for help. They took him to the police station, where the farmer was still so afraid that he did not want to let go of one of the three officers.
So what do you do then? Simple, you send the farmer to a mental institution, and leave him there without an address or contact number. His money was put into the a patient account to pay for the cost of treating the ‘patient’. Likely because he was upset of being put in an asylum, the farmer refused to take any medicine or food during the first days. But after 10 days he gave up and he started to receive treatment. But the farmer got angry often, because he knew he did not belong here. The staff did not listen to him, however, and gave him an injection each time he complained, so he would fall asleep. Finally last week the farmer managed to bribe a nurse to call his relatives, who came to free him right away. The paper version of the Shanghai Daily that reported this story does not mention anything about the patient getting his money back, or the police being reprimanded. Likely this happens more often, and the farmer was actually lucky to get out.