Wall Street Journal - April 2, 2002
Leslie Chang, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Li Dan, a lanky graduate student from Beijing, has traveled to this remote AIDS-stricken village in central China with an ambitious proposal: to build a factory to help sick villagers earn money. Mr. Li's dream hangs in the air for a few minutes -- and then a bored-looking official punctures it. The township government is broke, he says.

But the 24-year-old in jeans and sneakers persists. "We want to help the villagers support themselves," he says. "If it works well, it can be a model for the whole country."

Finally, the official agrees in principle, even raising the possibility of offering land or tax breaks. Outside, on the sunlit street, Mr. Li allows himself a smile. "At least now we won't get arrested," he says.

Warily navigating the line between discussion and detention, a new breed of AIDS activist is emerging in China. Mindful of the dangers -- many local officials continue to deny the existence of AIDS in their villages -- they are careful to include the officials in their plans when they can.

But they are also courting danger by seeking media attention, applying for foreign funding and coalescing into formal organizations.

The problem is enormous. At least one million Chinese are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, researchers say. Many are impoverished farmers who sold their blood to unlicensed blood-bank operators in the mid-1990s, became infected because the operators used unsanitary techniques and equipment and are now beginning to die. While officials and scholars in Beijing acknowledge there is an epidemic, they have been slow to mobilize to help the sick, leaving an opening for growing ranks of volunteers to do what they can.

Like many of his fellow activists, Mr. Li stumbled on AIDS almost by chance. A graduate student in astronomy at one of Beijing's most prestigious universities, he started volunteering for the Red Cross in college because the work was assigned to his academic department. Last August, he went to central Henan province and visited villages where blood selling was prevalent and a significant chunk of the population was infected with HIV.

"It was the first time I saw people suffering," he says, recalling his overnight transformation from astronomer to activist. He rented a cramped apartment in Beijing to house villagers who came to the capital for medicines, raised funds to treat a six-year-old girl with AIDS, and recently returned to Henan to film villagers describing their plight for a three-hour CD-ROM that he sent to media and government offices. In January, he was detained overnight by the Beijing police, who discovered his CD-ROM in the hands of two villagers who were visiting.

His parents and teachers have urged him to abandon the work, and his girlfriend has threatened to leave him if he doesn't give it up. "The local government is not happy because our work makes it look bad," he says. "But there are many things in society that will not be known unless you say them."

More people like Mr. Li are emerging in China. He has hooked up with a group of like-minded graduate students, journalists and activists to form the Aizhi Action Project (the word in Chinese means "love of knowledge").

The group envisions a full agenda: lobbying makers of HIV drugs to lower their prices, setting up poverty-alleviation programs in hard-hit villages, and training volunteers to teach others about the disease and staff a telephone counseling hotline.

Such activity reflects a broader official acceptance of independent organizations, particularly those supplying social services that the government lacks the means to provide. Yet a marathon six-hour meeting of Aizhi Action -- held in a drab Beijing office building on a recent afternoon -- reveals the monumental challenges facing China's nascent civil society. For one thing, these activists are amateurs. One man at the meeting promotes a vague plan to teach villagers carpentry. Even a simple task like preparing medical pamphlets to train volunteers is a challenge for a group that doesn't include a single doctor.

There is also a staggering gap between the urban do-gooders and the farmers they seek to help, two of whom have been invited to attend the meeting. With their heavy sweaters and thick country accents, the two men are mostly silent. Asked what poverty alleviation program might work, Zhao Yong, whose wife died of AIDS-related complications last April, thinks hard for a moment. Then he suddenly brightens: "We'd like to raise chickens," he says. There is an awkward silence before one of the organizers explains, "We want something that can benefit the whole village, not just a few people."

The clash between the earnest ideals of the activists and the every-man-for-himself mentality that governs rural life is in evidence on a later trip by Mr. Li to Dongguan Village. The town is a knot of rutted dirt paths that are strewn with garbage and lined with solid brick houses -- homes built with the villagers' blood money. After an overnight train ride from Beijing, Mr. Li is immediately surrounded by villagers and sucked into the deep dissension engendered by a previous visit, when he donated more than $400 for children of the sick. Now the people who aren't sick want some money too, and the ones who are sick want more.

"You give them meat and they bite your fingers," complains Mr. Zhao, who helped distribute donations on Mr. Li's behalf. In other villages, the climate has become even more poisonous. Mr. Li has met farmers infected with HIV who demanded payment to be interviewed or filmed, and who informed on him to local officials when he didn't pay.

His hardest task may be counseling patience to the sick farmers. Over lunch in a roadside restaurant, Mr. Li must explain to a sobbing village woman why only a few of her neighbors are eligible for experimental drug trials being run by Beijing hospitals, and not one bottle of medicine is available for her dying husband.

Yet on the long journey home Mr. Li says he is optimistic. With local officials on board for the planned factory, his group can now seek funding to build it. He has received more than 100 letters from people who want to volunteer, and he gets regular phone calls from eager donors.

Even the policemen who detained him overnight were kind, he says. "They said, 'The work you do is very important.'"

Write to Leslie Chang at leslie.chang@wsj.com
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