Add Category
Beijing:Â A three-year-old boy has died at a Chinese centre for autistic children which uses punishing exercise regimes to treat a disease of the "rich and lazy".
Police have opened an investigation into the rehabilitation centre in the southern city of Guangzhou, which makes children walk up to 19 kilometres a day and forces them to lie in incubators to "cure" them through sweating.
It is run by self-taught medical practitioner Xia Dejun, who believes the condition is a result of wealthy families spoiling their children.
His centre focuses on building up physical endurance as a means of helping children "recover".
Advertisement
The death last week of Lai Jiari, known as Jia, prompted anger in China, where it is being seen as the latest tragic case relating to alternative therapies. It also highlights the lack of specialist care available in the public health system.
Initial tests said there was no "unnatural" cause of death, but police are continuing to investigate.
Lai's mother, Zhang Wei, said she is suing Mr Xia and wants other parents to wake up to the dangers of his style of treatment. There are said to be up to 9 million autistic children in China.
Other autism centres told her they had a two-year waiting list, he said.
"We had no other choice but to send Jia to this centre," said Mrs Zhang, who is from Dandong on the other side of China. "At least it provided a glimmer of hope."
She said her son died two months into a 21-month course at the centre, which opened in 2013. She did not disclose how much she had paid, but Chinese media said it cost 31,200 yuan ($6400) for three months.
The centre's website said the children are required to walk between 10 and 19 kilometres a day in heavy clothing.
Mrs Zhang said she saw a report saying her son had walked such distances, but that could not be verified by The Telegraph. She emailed pictures of her son in his winter coat, scarf and thick woolly hat being pulled along the street by a worker in a sunhat. The children are also understood to have trained with weights.
The facility was reported to have the correct business licence, but there is no official regulator for privately run rehabilitation agencies in China, the state-run People's Daily said.
Mrs Zhang first became familiar with the work of Mr Xia through his book Notes on the Rehabilitation of Children with Autism. "There are more and more autistic children because we are better off than before and we treat children as 'little emperors,'?" a passage says, referring to a commonly used expression for spoiled children.
"Parents become the slaves of children. Children from this kind of family become sick easily, and can easily become autistic."
"Ask other parents. They will say my training works," Mr Xia told Sixth Tone, a Shanghai-based media outlet, after Jia's death. "The child died at a hospital from an illness. It has nothing to do with my centre."
Telegraph, UK