One year after a Chinese government prison sentence stopped him from visiting Montreal to receive an international award for AIDS activism, Dr. Wan Yanhai was finally able to speak about his experiences, to an audience of about 75 people at Concordia’s Hall Building last Thursday.
In his speech, ‘AIDS in China: Crisis, Solutions,’ Yanhai described his country struggles with an increasingly uncontrollable epidemic, and with a dictatorship that still refuses to recognize the magnitude of the problem.
“In 1985, when the first case of AIDS appeared in Beijing, the official response (from the Chinese government) was a newspaper article,” said Yanhai. The article said that AIDS would not be a problem in China, because China has good morals, there is no homosexuality, and the health care system is fine.”
Five years later, AIDS had already swept through 82 per cent of intravenous drug users. Today, the UN estimates that up to five or ten million Chinese people are infected, and that over 260,000 children will be AIDS orphans by 2010.
Prostitutes, drug users, homosexuals and poor villagers are the hardest hit. With the exception of gay activist groups, very few community groups and organizations exist to deal with the situation, and even then, the Chinese government seldom recognizes them. “Gay and lesbian communities lack political economical support, and some activists might be persecuted,” said Yanhai. Recently, the editors of a gay website disappeared, after a government newspaper challenged them for organizing gay community social gatherings.”
Prostitution and drug use are still illegal, so virtually no organizations exist for the people involved. Instead, according to Yanhai, the government’s main response to the crisis is to cover it up even more. The media is still not allowed to talk about blood-related infections, and official press releases have little to do with reality.
“Two years ago, the government published an action plan saying 50 per cent of people with AIDS could receive home care, but really, only 400 people were getting treatment.” And out of millions of AIDS cases, only 3,000 people were getting domestically produced drugs.
Violent crackdowns also play their part. Last June, said Yanhai, over 700 policemen attacked a small village well known for its involvement in AIDS issues. The next night, 500 armed officers and local officials attacked another small village with less than 600 residents.
Many of the villagers-most of whom had AIDS- were beaten, and 13 of them were arrested. Yanhai himself was jailed in a Beijing detention centre for nearly a month last September, on charges of revealing sensitive information about the Chinese government.T That year, he was the winner of the First Annual Award for Action on HIV / AIDS and Human Rights, which his wife accepted in Montreal on his behalf.
According to the Canadian HIV / AIDS Legal Network and Human Rights Watch, which granted him the award, Yanhai has spent much of his life raising awareness about HIV and AIDS. Among other things, he set up the first AIDS telephone hotline in China, conducted surveys on homosexual behaviour and appeared on a number of gay rights talk shows and radio stations.
For his efforts, the Chinese government accused him of supporting prostitution and homosexuality, shut down the hotline, and fired Yanhai from his post at the Ministry of Health.
Regardless, in 1994, he went on to found the AIZHI (AIDS) Action Project in Beijing, which remains one of the only sources of information about the AIDS pandemic available to the Chinese people.
“The Chinese government has the capacity to handle this issue,” said Yanhai, “but it involves human rights protection, poverty, and sex, which makes it very complicated.” Two objectives still have to be met: information transparency, and human rights protection. “The government has not yet made a strong commitment to human rights,” he said.
Afterwards, Glenn Betteridge, a Senior Policy Analyst for the Canadian AIDS/HIV Legal Network, praised Yanhai’s speech as “extremely interesting.”
“It’s rare to get a Chinese point of view on the situation in China, not to mention the complexity of working in a non-democratic country,” he said.
Yanhai’s hour-long speech was the first in a series of four lectures on the global AIDS pandemic, sponsored by the Concordia University Lecture Series on HIV / AIDS, and the Canadian AIDS / HIV Legal Network.
Next in the line-up, DarlEne Palmer, an intervention worker with intravenous drug users, will give her talk, “Et si A peut faire un petit peu moins mal,” in French on Nov. 6.
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