[PROFILE] Shen Tingting: Researcher For Action

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Shen Tingting, a prominent HIV/AIDS and human rights advocate in Beijing, China, has been working with marginalized communities since her college days. In 2007, she, along with Li Dan, co-founded the Korekata AIDS Law Center. Until 2012, she was the deputy director of its parent organization, Dongjen Center for Human Rights Education and Action [https://www.dongjen.org/]. At Dongjen, she founded and managed an outreach program for sex workers in Beijing after she earned her masters from Renmin University in Social Welfare in 2009. Currently Tingting is a visiting research fellow at Asia Catalyst.

Tingting has written and advocated on a range of rights-related HIV/AIDS issues, including testing and confidentiality, compensation for victims of China’s blood disaster, and the rights of sex workers and drug users. She is the author of a new report on HIV testing and human rights in China, Real-Name Testing: Is China Ready? and previously conducted research to co-author a major bilingual human rights report, China’s Blood Disaster: The Way Forward. Her articles have also appeared in the HIV/AIDS Law and Policy Review.
She will present a poster on compensation for China’s HIV blood disaster on Tuesday, July 24th from 12:30 to 2:30pm and will speak in several other sessions. In the run-up to this year’s International AIDS Conference, AIDS 2012, Tingting sat down with Asia Catalyst to chat about her work.

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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.’

[REPORT] Dream of Ding Village

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The following is a cross post from the great people at The China Beat. The site provides context and criticism on contemporary China from China scholars and journalists. 

By Mike Frick
“Since you have gone, the house is empty, it has been three seasons now
Extinguish the lamps, let the twilight come, we must endure the setting sun” 
–Chinese funeral couplet

In 2000-2001, Elisabeth Rosenthal published a series of reports in the New York Times that alerted the world to a startling AIDS epidemic among farmers in central China. Beginning in the early 1990s, thousands of farmers in the Yellow River provinces of Henan, Hebei, Hubei, and Shanxi had contracted HIV through commercial blood selling. Local government officials in Henan promoted blood and plasma selling as a rural development scheme that would lift farmers out of poverty.

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[NEWS] Asia Catalyst Report Cited by Local Chinese Health Officials

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The Shenzhen Center for Disease Control and Prevention has picked up China’s Blood Disaster: The Way Forward, a report jointly prepared by Asia Catalyst and Korekata AIDS Law Center . 

While government officials maintain only 65,100 people contracted HIV through blood sales and transfusions, AIDS activists have long argued the true number is much higher. The report finds that still few of the thousands affected have been able to get compensation.

[NEWS] Cross Post From China Geeks on Blood Disaster

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The following is a cross post from the great people at China Geeks. The site offers translation and analysis of modern China.

By Meg Davis

China’s annual “two sessions” wrapped up this week, and Chinese lawmakers finally considered proposals to establish a national compensation fund for thousands of victims of the world’s largest HIV blood disaster.

Back in 2002, Elisabeth Rosenthal wrote in the New York Timesthat in Henan, “poverty begat AIDS, but AIDS has begotten previously unimaginable poverty.” For thousands who received tainted blood transfusions while local authorities covered up the epidemic, the compensation fund would be a life-changer.

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