AIDS victims in China get hope

XIAN, China -- Behind the AIDS conference that just ended in Bangkok last week lies one of the real and, until now, barely noticed stories of genuine hope in the struggle against this dread disease.
It is the story of a dramatic turnaround in China's approach to the almost always fatal HIV virus, from looking at the plague as a punishment for sexual deviancy and depravity to considering it, well, a disease that could smite anyone -- and does.
"China has a common problem with others," was the way Dr. Zhao Baige, the influential vice minister of the National Population Planning Commission, told a small group of us in Beijing on the eve of the Bangkok meeting. He spoke with a clarity never before seen on the sensitive and controversial subject.
"We need high-quality counseling; we need to protect private lives and we need to know how to link reproductive health and AIDS."
One can see the new attitude everywhere. The government, which previously treated AIDS as a scourge from heaven, just announced that, as of next month, medical insurance in Beijing will begin to cover AIDS drugs. (Although this seems now to cover only the capital, the practice will surely spread elsewhere.)
Education
The newspapers are widely printing columns urging "more ammunition on AIDS." In a recent column in China Daily, Zheng Lifei wrote: "Besides offering free and voluntary testing and medications for the poor, which was announced in April, the government should take the lead in educating the masses to sharpen their awareness about AIDS before the problem spirals out of control."
Amazingly -- and encouragingly -- this change in the leading country in Asia, a country of 1.3 billion people with 840,000 HIV carriers and at least 80,000 full-blown AIDS patients, has come only in the last eight months. The signal to the world that China is coming of age occurred last Dec. 1, 2003, when the new, young Premier Wen Jiabao took the unprecedented action of going to a Beijing hospital on World AIDS Day to shake hands with several AIDS patients. It was a stunning change from these victims' formerly humiliated status -- and all China took careful note.
Moreover, this change in attitude, policy and approach has now been verified by neutral outside institutions like the University of Southampton in England and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.
Indeed, this spring's CSIS report carried the discussion of the deadly HIV infection to new levels of analysis by connecting it with the changeover of leadership here -- from the traditionalist Jiang Zemin to the attractive young president Hu Jintao.
"During the past 15 months, new leaders have emerged in China with a stronger commitment to improving social welfare in general and to addressing HIV/AIDS in particular," the report reads.
"Since March 2003, new leaders of the 'fourth generation' have taken up posts and demonstrated a greater concern with issues of public health, with frequent, specific reference to HIV/AIDS ... A major new moment in China's approach to its public health has begun."
Blood for money
But these changes, while dramatic and welcome, do not mean that the problem is anywhere near a solution. For one thing, the changes came about largely because the state suddenly realized that the infection was hitting not only drug users and gay people but, especially, Chinese who were selling their blood for money in the remote and still impoverished countryside of this vast "universe" and who were being infected by unscrupulous blood-leeching locals.
One of China's greatest AIDS activists, an elderly woman doctor in Henan province, Dr. Gao Yaojie, is still under constant danger from these local blood dealers.
Still, these changes mark a real beginning, not only in terms of HIV/AIDS, but also in terms of the larger Chinese outlook toward society and the state's relationship to the human beings in that society. On many levels, this relationship is changing from that of a faceless officialdom managing a faceless mass society to one of individualized human concern and development.
This is indeed becoming the China of the "fourth generation" of leadership within the modern era.
Universal Press Syndicate