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Heavy hand hinders China's anti-AIDS drive
By Antoaneta Bezlova
October 1, 2002
BEIJING - In a swift, uncompromising crackdown on the "yellow vice" in karaoke
parlors near the Dazhongsi temple in China's capital, police detained all of
the women who were made up and dressed in the traditional cheongsam outfits.
The bars in which they were working, near Beijing's biggest wholesale vegetable
market, are mostly frequented by peasant dealers from neighboring provinces. In
the morning after the mid-September raid, photos of the girls with bowed heads
appeared in the papers. Articles praised police efforts to safeguard socialist
morality by purging the prostitutes, often seen as the cause of the problem
rather than the victims.
The crackdown is just one of a series of government sweeps aimed at ridding
China's cities of prostitution, drug abuse and gambling - "evils of the
capitalist society" - that have made a steady comeback in the past few decades
of wrenching market reforms.
But now the same tough government response is also being blamed for the
authorities' failure to raise HIV awareness in the sexually conservative
society and to step up prevention efforts in the battle to contain China's
growing AIDS epidemic.
China's punitive treatment of high-risk groups, such as sex workers and drug
addicts, has hindered effective preventive strategies. It has also made the
question of treating HIV/AIDS patients and helping people living with the
disease if not a taboo, then a very sensitive, issue.
Because prostitution is banned in China, efforts to promote the use of condoms
in places like bars and parlors are slighted as attempts to legalize sex work.
Most recent government guidelines, such as "The Medium and Long Term Plan for
AIDS Prevention and Control of 2001" reiterate that "prostitution, drug
trafficking and drug abuse must be vigorously cracked upon".
China has an estimated 1.7 million people with HIV/AIDS. The United Nations
forecasts that some 10 million people in China could have HIV positive by 2010.
While UN missions and non-governmental organizations are lobbying the central
government to give the green light to free condom distribution projects in
areas outside of a few trial cities, local officials are fearful of
implementing them.
"Condom is still a very sensitive word in China," said Kumiko Yoshida, a
coordinator of the HIV/AIDS focal point at the UN Fund for Population mission
in Beijing. "It is still seen as a sex commodity rather than a health product,
and you can't just simply go around the place distributing it."
Zhao Pengfei, a World Health Organization official in charge of its 100 percent
condom use project in China, has witnessed nothing less than a storm since
trial distribution of condoms took off in Li county in central Hunan province
this summer. Indignant residents accused the local government of legalizing the
undeclared local red-light district because it encouraged karaoke bar owners to
distribute free condoms and place condom-vending machines in their
establishments.
"It was only because we had local officials' support that our project could
weather the storm," Zhao said. "We chose Li county not because it is a
particularly HIV-affected area, but because we could secure government support
for a scheme, which many other places wouldn't dare to touch."
Yet the success of these first modest trials is being challenged by the fact
that the decision whether to use condoms or not remains entirely in the hands
of the male customers. According to a national survey of China's sex workers,
conducted by the Sexual Sociology Research Institute at the People's University
in Beijing, some 25 percent of people who buy sex refuse to wear condoms.
"There is nothing girls in that business can do about it," said Zhao Pengfei.
"They can refuse to work for a day, but eventually they would give up because
they need to make a living out of their clients."
Professor Pan Suiming, a renowned sociologist and director of the institute
behind the survey, said that prevention efforts should target not the girls but
bosses and managers with money and power, who are sex workers' most regular
clients and the real "bridge population". "They are the largest group,
accounting for 40 percent [of total clients]," Pan says. This compares with
just 10 percent of other groups like workers and peasants.
As men with money and power, China's bosses and mangers can afford to buy sex
more often than other men can. They can also afford to support one or more
mistresses and could have various occasional lovers. "As a rule, once these men
become infected, they will spread the infection to the most number of women -
and there is nothing women can do about it," said Pan.
The only way out is shifting criminal responsibility for prostitution from sex
workers to the organizers of commercial sex, and moral responsibility from sex
workers to their clients, suggests Professor Qiu Renzong, a philosopher at the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Speaking at an UN Development Program
(UNDP)-sponsored AIDS conference in Beijing this summer, Qiu argued that sex
workers should receive "education for prevention of AIDS and vocational
training", while their clients should be subject to "compulsory education in
law and morality".
"The core principle of Chinese AIDS law is that people are not treated as
principles enjoying rights; they are treated as targets of management," said
Professor Li Dun of Qinghua University, who has been reviewing Chinese legal
documents related to HIV/AIDS as part of UNDP-funded research and advocacy
project.
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