Xiaomi Li and the Lingnan Partner Community Support Center: The Success Story of an Internet Intervention for MSM in Guangzhou

Xiaomi Li lives and works in Guangzhou, China’s third largest city. She works for one of the largest HIV-testing and service providers in Southern China, the Lingnan Partner Community Support Center. The group has over seven years of HIV/AIDS-related service experience.

At the congress, Xiaomi presented on Lingnan Partner Community Support Center’s online interventions for men who have sex with men (MSM). For the past 15 years, the Guangzhou Tongzhi, a popular local newspaper for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgenders (LGBT), has been operating a national website with over two million visitors per year.

Xiaomi and her colleagues were interested in game-based social networking on the site, where users can earn credits to upgrade game levels, which is particularly popular with MSM in Guangzhou, who, according to statistics by the Guangzhou Center for Disease Control (CDC), make up about 46,000 active users.

This game-based social networking platform was the entry point for the research and development of the Lingnan Partner and Community and Support Center’s online HIV/AIDS education and intervention tools. According to Xiaomi, these tools increase risk awareness and promote HIV-testing, including scheduling appointments with CDC and sending reminder text messages. They also enable queries into test results and collect feedback.

For many years, only a few dozen test-takers from the MSM community were recorded in Guangzhou. But in 2012, 5,389 MSM that underwent HIV-testing were mobilized through these online tools. These men account for 83% of the city’s annual total. The proven effectiveness of this internet intervention approach led government partners, including the Guangzhou CDC, to support HIV-testing by community-based organizations.

This piece is the second in a series introducing you to the partners that Asia Catalyst is supporting through scholarships, strategy and translation to attend the 11th International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific.  The Congress brought together over 4,000 delegates from 22 countries in the region in Bangkok this month.