February 2008

How the Chinese Authorities Silenced Dissident Hu Jia

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.

And when the daughter of lawyer-activist Gao Zhisheng sneaked past police to telephone Hu, he E-mailed the moving recording of their conversation around the world. "When the government put Gao Zhisheng under house arrest, they thought the story would go away, but it was Hu Jia who kept on the story and who told the world what was happening," says a journalist who knows Hu well.

Tech saavy. Hu's use of technology added to the credibility of his reports. "When he reported about the persecution of Gao's family after his detention, it was very hard to dispute that it was indeed Gao's 14-year-old daughter crying on the phone," says Eva Pils, assistant law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

His activities did not go unnoticed by the authorities, who placed plainclothes police outside his apartment and monitored his communications. A little after 1 a.m. on December 27, Hu finished a report on the family of a prominent dissident and hit the send button, dispatching the E-mail to subscribers in China and abroad. The message would be his last for a time. About 14 hours later, some 20 police broke into Hu's apartment on the outskirts of Beijing—in a complex that ironically is known as BOBO Freedom City—and took him away, along with his computers, mobile phones, and bank books. He has been charged with "incitement to subvert state power," a charge frequently used to silence dissenters.

Human-rights experts say that while Hu's detention temporarily slowed the flow of information on human-rights abuses, others are stepping in. "By shutting down people like Hu Jia, they are just creating 10 more people to fill his shoes," says Sara Davis, executive director of the human-rights group Asia Catalyst, "because the conditions have not changed."

December 2007
POZ Magazine

Unfine China
by James Wortman
Its national blood supply is still at risk for HIV.

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.”

November 24, 2007
Sydney Morning Herald

Gambling with blood money

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.

"I began selling my blood two times a month, 700 mls a time, when I was two months' pregnant," says Li Chunying, with her one-year-old child strapped to her back. "I would feel faint every time but I'd rest for a few days, and then feel better."

In the West, selling your own body products speaks of desperation; in China it says something more. In traditional Chinese medicine, blood is thought of as a non-renewable substance that is infused with a person's life force and self-esteem. Such donations have proven impossible without financial incentives or coercion.

And so a network of private and government traders sometimes known as "blood chiefs" or "blood heads" exists to buy blood and meet the demand for blood transfusions and blood-based medical products. Sometimes, when market incentives are weak and health regulations are tight, patients die because hospitals run out of blood. More often, regulations have been weak and commercial incentives have got out of hand.

The blood trade has been a sensitive subject since the blood heads of Henan, China's most populous province, found they could increase volumes and profits by drawing blood with recycled needles, pooling it in crude centrifuges to harvest the lucrative blood plasma, and then injecting the leftover blood back into donors. At the peak of the frenzy a decade ago peasants were reportedly held upside down to increase the blood flow.

The Chinese Government will not say how many hundreds of thousands of blood donors and recipients have consequently died of hepatitis B, hepatitis C and AIDS-related diseases. Local activists and health workers estimate there are more than 1 million HIV-positive men, women and children in Henan alone, says Sara Davis, the director of a non-government organisation called Asia Catalyst.

Read the complete article

September 4, 2007

Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report
Chinese Food and Drug Administration Next Year To Begin New Blood Products Policy To Prevent Spread of HIV

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 (Xinhua/People's Daily, 9/12).

But AIDS activists are still harassed, and Davis says discrimination remains common.

"If their identity becomes known they risk being evicted from their homes, they lose their jobs, their children are refused access to education, are turned away from schools, and perhaps worst of all are often refused treatment from hospital workers," said Davis.

Davis says a legal aid center is needed to help people infected with HIV when their rights are violated.

She says despite the canceled conference, she is optimistic her group will be able to continue working with Chinese AIDS activists.

However, Chinese authorities have recently shown less tolerance for foreign activists who support the work of Chinese groups.

Earlier this month officials ordered the closure of China Development Brief, a well-respected publication run by a British national that reported on China's social development and civic activity.

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.

Liu said his only crime was having the same name as a criminal; local police served as both judge and jury.

For 50 years, China's Mao-era reeducation through labor, or laojiao, program has allowed police to sentence petty criminals or anyone they consider troublemakers to as many as four years of incarceration without trial. China's parliament will consider reforming or abolishing the system during its annual session, which begins today, the state-run English-language China Daily said last week.

Real power in China is held by a small group of Politburo members, but the National People's Congress provides insights into their thinking. Other items on the agenda for the 12-day session include measures to protect private property, end preferential treatment for foreign firms and reduce the budget deficit. Debates are expected on issues such as corruption, pollution and easing rural poverty.

The United Nations, Western governments and human rights groups as well as China's Supreme People's Court have roundly criticized the laojiao system. Domestic legal experts argue that it's unconstitutional. And the imprisonment of an estimated 200,000 people in such a manner is an embarrassment as Beijing tries to burnish its image as host of the 2008 Olympics.

Lined up against its many critics is one major supporter. But in China's single-party state, it's a bruiser: the police.

The Ministry of Public Security's argument resonates among the country's top leaders: How do you expect us to safeguard your power in an era of growing unrest if you require us to follow the niceties of judicial process?

...
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.

"When a petitioner tries to publicize a local scandal, someone upsets their superiors, someone is unhappy with corruption, that's been enough to land them in a laojiao facility," said Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology.

"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.