Wall Street Journal
October 5, 2009
In China, the Forgotten Manchu Seek to Rekindle Their Past
by Ian Johnson
For decades, China's authoritarian policies kept a lid on ethnic expression. Now, as the party loosens control over society, individuals are defining themselves by their culture -- embracing who they are, what language they speak and what their ancestors accomplished. "This is not a hobby or an interest," says Hukshen, a 22-year-old Manchu language student. "This is a burning emotion I feel, a need to find out who I am."
On some levels, this search can be a positive force, helping to give meaning to people's lives. "Having these outlets helps stability," says Sara Davis, director of Asia Catalyst, a non-governmental organization that promotes grassroots organizing. "If [people] feel proud of their culture, they're invested in their society."
Read more at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125452110732160485.html?m
***
Wall Street Journal
April 20, 2009
Group Puts Spotlight on HIV and China's Young
A new report Monday from a New York-based human rights organization points out continuing deficiencies in how local and national Chinese officials treat children with AIDS and HIV. The report from Asia Catalyst concludes that funding still lags in many rural areas. Even in
places with free juvenile testing, it said, some rural parents were still forced to pay for everything from rubber gloves to cotton balls — a big expense for many in low-income farming areas. It also found a lack of focus on treatments for juveniles, inadequate patient confidentiality and lingering social stigma.
For more, see http://blogs.wsj.com/chinajournal/2009/04/20/group-puts-spotlight-on-HIV-and-China's-young
Global Post
April 20, 2009
China's Youngest AIDS Victims Kept in the Dark
by Kathleen McLaughlin
GEJIU, China — Xin Deming's family has been decimated by AIDS and he is adamant the
disease not ruin the life of his 10-year-old niece. Yet despite his best efforts, she is at the
mercy of erratic treatment, massive social stigma and overwhelming uncertainty about the
future.
In a report released Monday, the U.S. group Asia Catalyst said a number of barriers, including social stigma, lack of adequate health services, and spotty international outreach likely have kept scores of HIV-positive children in China from receiving proper care.
For more, see http://www.globalpost.com/print/1166924
***
COMRADES: The Chinese LGBT Film Festival was featured in Time Out New York and Ming Pao New York.
***
LA Times
November 7, 2008
China's "Action Plan on Human Rights Meets with Skepticism
by John M. Glionna
Facing international criticism over human rights abuses, China is preparing a national "action plan" on such issues as torture and freedom of speech, but critics Thursday were skeptical that the move would bring much change.
Critics called the move a public relations ploy.
...Others were more optimistic.
"Five years ago you couldn't even say the words 'human rights' in China, so the government should be commended for uttering the phrase at last," said Sara Davis, executive director of New York-based Asia Catalyst, which provides support to Chinese groups that promote human rights.
"What's really needed is legal reform and criminal procedure law. That would give their plan some real teeth," she said. "Also protections against police abuse. If those are included, this is truly something we should be celebrating." (read more)
***
The Guardian
December 1, 2008
Belgian Reporters Assaulted and Robbed in China
by Tania Branigan
A Belgian journalist said he and his team were beaten and robbed as they attempted to meet Aids activists in Henan, central China.
..."For every one step China takes forward on HIV, Henan seems to be intent on taking two steps back," said Sara Davis, executive director of the US-based Asia Catalyst, which works to support grassroots activists.
"This is emblematic of the continued effort by Henan authorities to keep quiet the desperate situation of people with Aids there.
"We know that 20-40% of those with HIV in Henan are currently in need of second line drugs and don't have them. People are starting to die and the activists who have spoken out about it have been placed under house arrest, beaten or threatened." (read more)
***Housing Works Update
Olympian Activist
August 15, 2008
Wary of Olympic crackdown, Chinese AIDS activist Li Dan comes to U.S.
With the world focused on China and the Olympics, the popular narrative in the Chinese media is that the government has made huge strides in addressing the AIDS epidemic. But Li Dan, a Chinese AIDS activist doing a summer fellowship at Housing Works, said the reality is more complex.
"The Chinese government wants to cover up the AIDS problem because they want to focus on economic development," Li said. "The AIDS situation may stay the same for a long time, because the Chinese government has very little influence to control the sex industry and combat the blood-selling problem."
The soft spoken Li, 30, who has often been at odds with the his government, is staying at Housing Works' Keith D. Cylar House as part of the Advocate Summer Haven Program run by Asia Catalyst. Asia Catalyst has placed six Chinese advocates in fellowships at AIDS groups in the U.S., Hong Kong and Malaysia. The timing isn't a coincidence. Chinese activists are wary of being in China during the Olympics, especially given the recent three and half year prison sentence handed out to prominent AIDS activist Hu Jia. Hu was detained last year for "inciting subversion of state power and the socialist system".
"There are a lot of international reporters in Beijing now and if we reported that the government is addressing AIDS, that would be fine. But if we reported how the AIDS situation actually was, of course the Chinese government wouldn't be happy," Li said. (read more)
***
U.S. News and World Report
How the Chinese Authorities Silenced Dissident Hu Jia
By Paul Mooney
Posted February 14, 2008
BEIJING—Over the past few years, much of the news about human-rights abuses in China has emerged from the simple living room of Hu Jia, a boyish-looking activist who used several cellphones, a home phone, a small desktop computer, and a video camera as a conduit between victims of Chinese government abuse and the outside world.It was Hu, for instance, who put out the word last fall when authorities barred the wife of a prominent imprisoned activist, the blind, self-trained lawyer Chen Guangcheng, from traveling to accept Asia's top humanitarian award on behalf of her husband. When officials claimed she lacked a valid passport and visa, Hu circulated scanned copies of her documents to show that the government was lying. (read more)
***
POZ Magazine
Unfine China
by James Wortman
December 2007
China’s government has launched a public relations offensive against HIV/AIDS, timed to the upcoming Olympics in Beijing. But poor communication between local and federal governments still fuels infections nationwide. In the first six months of 2007, more than 18,000 new HIV cases were recorded, and activists say China vastly underreports its infections.
The activist group Asia Catalyst says that in rural provinces, citizens are selling and receiving unscreened blood, threatening the country’s entire supply. UNAIDS and the CDC say that some 69,000 commercial blood-product donors and recipients are living with HIV: 10.7 percent of China’s total cases.
“I think the world is looking at China closely now, and I think that the authorities in China are aware of that,” says Asia Catalyst’s Sara Davis, PhD. “It’s a good moment for us to start addressing these issues for the long term.”
***
Sydney Morning Herald
Gambling with blood money
November 24, 2007
As the poor in China sell blood to corrupt officials to survive, HIV is on the rise, write John Garnaut and Maya Li.
Each fortnight the women of Long Field Village drag their stunted bodies to the local blood station, where they sell a wine bottle's worth of blood for 100 yuan ($15). Selling blood can be taxing on under-nourished bodies, but they continue to do it when sick, exhausted and pregnant. (read more)
***
Kaiser Daily HIV/AID Report
Chinese Food and Drug Administration Next Year To Begin New Blood Products Policy To Prevent Spread of HIV
September 14, 2007
China's State Food and Drug Administration recently announced that on Jan. 1, 2008, it will begin a new policy under which all blood products in the country will be screened for HIV and other bloodborne diseases and approved before entering the market, Xinhua/People's Daily reports. (read more)
***
Voice of America
Chinese Authorities Prevent Multinational AIDS Rights Conference
By Daniel Schearf
July 29, 2007
Chinese authorities have banned activists and experts from holding a multinational conference in southern China on the legal rights of people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. As Daniel Schearf reports from Beijing, although Chinese officials have become more supportive of AIDS prevention efforts, discrimination against people with HIV is common, and authorities are still suspicious of activists. (read more)
***
Los Angeles Times
China Thinks of Closing Its Reeducation Prisons
By Mark Magnier
Beijing -- The former prisoner runs a dirt-stained hand over a scar on his forehead and recalls the pain of near-daily whippings by police guards at the Fuxin Reeducation Through Labor facility in northeast China.
"Since we didn't get enough to eat and the work they forced us to do was so hard, we'd collapse, leading to a bad beating," said Liu Jun, 36. "It was also a way for the police to remind you that bribing them would give you less work and more food.
...
For others, the issue is simpler. "These are essentially unmonitored sweatshops," said Sara Davis, executive director of Asia Catalyst, a New York-based civic group.
...
***
China Rights Forum
Dance, Or Else: China's "Simplifying Project" (pdf)
January 2007
China's southwest border has become an adults-only playground for tourists, peopled with dancing women in ethnic dress, swaying palm trees, exotic fruits and peacocks. While many domestic Chinese tourists visiting southern Yunnan province come for illegal pleasures (alcohol, drugs, gambling, jade, sex workers), they spend their days attending performances staged in state-run "ethnic theme parks", dances in "ethnic dining halls", reconstituted "ethnic villages", and the like. Such performances are an outgrowth of official policy. They are the cumulative result of decades of official intervention in creating, pruning and regulating public expressions of minority ethnic identity.
***
New York Times
Letter to the Editor, AIDS in China
November 2006
To the editor:
"China's Muslims Awake to Nexus of Needles and AIDS" (news article, Nov. 12) shows one bright spot in China's war against the AIDS epidemic: in Xinjiang, the authorities are beginning to offer methadone to drug users.
But the article does not show an uglier piece of the picture. Every year authorities around the country forcibly detain thousands of drug users in prisons — treatment centers in name only.
As a researcher at Human Rights Watch, I visited one such facility and interviewed detainees from others. Under Chinese law, the police may sentence individuals to three to six months, sometimes longer, in these prisons, without trial.
Detainees are kept in unclean and overcrowded cells. They get no counseling and are compelled to take part in forced, unpaid labor, working long hours on farms or in sweatshops that profit the prisons.
Chinese sex workers also face similar detention. As interviewees have told me, all this punitive approach accomplishes is to marginalize those at high risk of H.I.V. infection, and drive them underground, away from the authorities and any program that could teach them about preventing H.I.V.
China should abolish these fake treatment centers and replace them with real ones.
Sara Davis
Executive Director