AIDS still poses a fundamental challenge to China's top-down, hierarchical system, even if Chinese officials deserve praise for finally beginning to confront the epidemic with a raft of new public statements and policies. In order to fight HIV/AIDS, Beijing must give up its stranglehold on civil society, and let a hundred organizations bloom.
While senior Chinese authorities say they want to encourage the development of civil society, and dozens of small AIDS groups have sprouted up around the country, these groups still face obstacles in every aspect of their work. Last winter, I met a mild-mannered businessman in a black suit who spoke about his efforts to hold a meeting of people with AIDS in northwest China. His was a group of a dozen people who gathered quietly in a hotel conference room to learn about their rights under Chinese law.
The businessman, who has been living with HIV/AIDS for nine years, told Human Rights Watch what happened next: "The police came in the door and told us to put our hands on the tables," he said. "They said, `don't touch anything.'. . . We all went downstairs and there was a big van, and they took us all away. At the station, they registered our names and ID numbers."
Police strip-searched female participants in the workshop and forced all the detainees to take drug tests. No one tested positive, and they were released after six hours without charges. The case is not unique: Human Rights Watch gets frequent e-mails and calls alerting us to the arrest, beating, or harassment of AIDS activists in rural China. Many of them, like the man I interviewed, are people who are trying to work within the system, and still getting slammed for it.
This is no way to promote AIDS outreach to vulnerable groups. In China, police can jail drug-users without trial for extended periods. Drug users and sex workers labor in Mao-era camps that claim (and fail) to "re-educate" them. As a result, many hide underground -- as do some of the activists who work with them. The man I interviewed was nervous. "Please don't publish my real name, and don't say which province it was," he said. After the crackdown, he said, the organizer of the AIDS and law workshop, hearing he was about to be arrested, had fled the province and hid in another city for several months.
While his was an extreme case, AIDS activists in China continue to face widespread restrictions, including arduous registration processes that require groups to be closely supervised by government agencies that limit what they can say or do. In some cases, government agencies have shut down NGOs for being too critical. Other officials have siphoned off funds. "You mind your own business," an official told one rural AIDS activist who asked what had happened to his group's grant money. "The government will handle the AIDS epidemic."
Activists also face the ever-present risk of being jailed, even beaten by police or by thugs hired by local officials, in retaliation for outspokenness. This has been a problem especially in Henan province, where tens of thousands of children were orphaned by AIDS. Henan authorities have repeatedly harassed, jailed and beaten young activists who started a non-profit AIDS orphanage.
Finally, though restrictions have begun to loosen recently, police around the country continue to censor potentially life-saving AIDS information for gay men. Gay and bisexual men in China have no legal protection against discrimination or abuse if their identities become known--making the Internet one of the few ways to reach them with AIDS information. But under a sweeping national crackdown on pornography this year, police have blocked many lesbian and gay websites.
Without the active involvement of civil society, government officials cannot reach the gay men, drug users, and sex workers who are most vulnerable to the AIDS virus. Those communities need groups run by people like them, people they trust, who speak their language.
Chinese President Hu Jintao has publicly acknowledged that the country has problems with official corruption. Independent groups can be the eyes and ears for Beijing -- and for the world -- to make sure that national and international aid funds are spent as they were intended. Such community-based groups that genuinely represent people living and working at the front lines of the epidemic must also be at the table when laws are drafted.
Around the world, the urgency of the epidemic has pulled down many old walls. China's leaders have taken a big step in beginning to speak publicly and often about HIV/AIDS. Now they just need to unleash civil society.
