Associated Press - December 3, 2008
Henry Sanderson

Li Xige, who is HIV positive, said she had managed to escape house arrest in her rural town, but that local police tracked her to Beijing.

Li, who campaigns for compensation for victims of infected blood transfusions, said she was taken from her hotel by police early Tuesday, two days after participating in an official event at the Olympic Bird's Nest stadium for World AIDS Day.

"Four (local) police and one township official took me on the train and accompanied me home," Li said in a telephone interview. She said she is allowed to leave her house, although is trailed by police, and must avoid traveling to places like Beijing.

The ceremony at the Bird's Nest, where a massive red ribbon was unveiled, was fulfillment of a pledge by Chinese health authorities and the U.N. AIDS agency to combat the stigma of people with the disease in China.

Police in Li's home county, Ningling, said they were not clear about the case, as did a police officer from Haidian district Public Security bureau in Beijing where Li stayed.

A clerk at the hotel where Li stayed said Li was there Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, but then left. The clerk, who identified herself as Ms. Zhou, said she did not know if Li had been taken away by police.

Li said she escaped house arrest 10 days ago and came to Beijing also to give a statement to the Supreme Court after a local court refused to hear her case demanding compensation from a local hospital that gave her HIV through a blood transfusion. The Supreme Court turned her away, she said.

After years of denying that AIDS was a problem, Chinese leaders have shifted gears in recent years, confronting the disease more openly and promising anonymous testing, free treatment for the poor and a ban on discrimination against people with the virus. But activists walk a thin line in their work, and are often detained, threatened, or even attacked.

Henan in particular has been highly sensitive to the AIDS issue since the virus that causes the disease spread widely there in the 1990s through unhygienic blood-buying rings, which allegedly operated with official protection.

Last week, a two-person crew from Flemish public broadcaster VRT, accompanied by an assistant, said they were attacked by eight people after trying to report on AIDS victims in central Henan.

Li has been under house arrest since July 2006 when she went to the Ministry of Health in Beijing to petition and was dragged back home by Henan police and detained for a month. She has been guarded everyday by two policemen, a number that increased to six during the Olympics, she said.

Li contracted the virus through a blood transfusion after giving birth to her daughter in 1995. She later passed the virus through breast milk to her daughter, who died in 2004. Her other daughter has also been diagnosed as HIV positive.

On Monday, President Hu Jintao was shown on state television visiting a Beijing hospital and shaking hands with HIV/AIDS patients, wearing a red ribbon.

One activist said Li's case shows how much attitudes toward the disease still need to change in China.

"Every year on the AIDS Day we see leaders visiting AIDS patients. But we also see people who contracted AIDS and asked for compensation taken away by police," Wan Yanhai, a founder of a nonprofit group working on AIDS education and awareness, said Wednesday.

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