[PROFILE] Lanlan: Leading the Fight for Acceptance of Sex Workers in China

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Lanlan, a founding member and now executive director of Tianjin Xin’ai （天津信爱）was born in 1978, a time of great economic change for China. After dropping out of school at thirteen, Lanlan tried her hand at farming and eventually found work in a restaurant, chopping vegetables and washing dishes. In 2000, after the birth of her daughter, Lanlan turned to sex work to support her child and aging parents. She was motivated to start a sex worker support group when she began to feel, as she says, that “AIDS NGO staff could not relate to sex workers or their particular needs.” Today, Tianjin Xin’ai conducts outreach to sex workers, providing them with occupational safety training, health training, and legal training. The mission, says Lanlan, is self-confidence, self-respect, and mutual support.

Because of restrictive U.S. visa policies, Lanlan may be one of the few sex workers in
attendance at the AIDS 2012 conference this year. Lanlan spoke to Asia Catalyst about her own work and why she looking forward to Washington, DC.

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[COMMENTARY] What We Talk About When We Talk About Outreach

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By Mike Frick 

Many of our partners in China engage in “outreach” to marginalized communities such as sex workers, drug users, or men who have sex with men, that are at increased risk of contracting HIV. We hear a lot about “outreach,” but what do these activities actually look like in practice? China program director Gisa Hartmann and I experienced outreach first-hand when we accompanied Lanlan, a member of Asia Catalyst’s NGO Leadership Cohort, on an afternoon with female sex workers in Tianjin.

Lanlan is the founder and executive director of Tianjin’s Xin’ai Home, a grassroots organization dedicated to promoting the health and rights of female sex workers in Tianjin. Over the course of four hours, Lan Lan showed us two different outreach environments: a bathhouse with about twenty-five sex workers and a street with dozens of hair salons and massage parlors, each staffed by two or three women.

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[NEWS] Room for Debate at China’s LGBT Community Leader Conference

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Aibai Transgender Program Manager Wu Jisuan. Photo by Queer Comrades

The first China Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual &Transgender (LGBT) Community Leader Conference took place last weekend and the “intense debates about the development of ideas, tactics and future directions for the LGBT movement in China” are hopefully just the beginning. Hosted by the Beijing Gender Health Education Institute, the conference boasted almost 100 regionally diverse activists representing 53 organizations and a wide range of viewpoints.  To see a longer write up and many great pictures check out the Queer Comrades blog here.

[PROFILE] Yuan Wenli: Mobilizing Women Affected by HIV/AIDS in China

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Yuan Wenli, originally from Henan province, an area ravaged by HIV/AIDS, started Henan Golden Sunshine in 2005, after her son was infected with HIV. The organization aims to help women and children living with HIV/AIDS and to incorporate women’s voices in advocacy in China. Subsequently Yuan helped establish the Henan Regional Network of Women Living with HIV/AIDS in 2010 and in 2012 became the secretary
of Women’s Network Against AIDS in China. Yuan will be coming to the International AIDS Conference, AIDS 2012, in Washington this July on a full scholarship, and will present her own talk Mainstreaming Gender into The National Global Fund Strategy in China: A Case Study from a Grassroots Women’s NGO Network on Thursday July 26th in English.

Yuan spoke to Asia Catalyst about her own work and what she is most looking forward to at AIDS 2012 this year.

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[UPDATE] UN Endorses Asia Catalyst Report on Compensation

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In the good news category, UNAIDS has recently come out strongly in favor of China’s Blood Disaster: The Way Forward, a joint report published by Asia Catalyst and the Korekata Law Center this year. The statement, available here boldly calls for ‘comprehensive and inclusive process of consultation and dialogue involving representatives from government, civil society, people infected through contaminated transfusions, legal experts, academia and other relevant fields.’