[COMMENTARY] Sex Workers Breaking New Ground in China and Myanmar

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Ye Haiyan self-portrait with poster, which reads “Legalize sex work and decriminalize prostitution! Sex work is work!”
 

By Meg Davis

The crisis of the HIV/AIDS pandemic is creating incentive and space for mobilization of marginalized communities, and
otherwise restrictive states such as China and Myanmar (Burma) are largely allowing it. In recent months, both Chinese and Burmese sex worker-led organizations have moved into the public eye.

 

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[NEWS] Last Train Home, A Documentary About Migrant Workers in China

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By Wen-Hsuan Tseng

Last Train Home, an award-winning documentary directed by Chinese-Canadian
director Lixin Fan, will open in New York on September 3rd at IFC
Center. Every spring, China’s cities are plunged into chaos as 130 million
migrant workers journey to their home villages for the New Year’s holiday. This mass exodus is the world’s largest human migration–an epic spectacle that reveals a country tragically caught between its rural past
and industrial future.

 

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[REPORT] Community-Driven Rights Research: Sex Workers in China

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By Mike Frick

From June through early August, I
helped Asia Catalyst’s partner organization, Phoenix, to train five volunteers
in research and rights documentation skills. Phoenix is an NGO that serves
women living with HIV/AIDS – many of them sex workers and drug users — in
Gejiu, Yunnan Province, China. The five participating volunteers on our
research team are all former drug users, and several of them also work as sex
workers. Our goal was to build their capacity to conduct the kind of research
that can inform advocacy and make a difference in the lives of the community
Phoenix serves.

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[NEWS] Ashoka Job Opening in China

Ashoka (www.ashoka.org) is the world’s largest
association of social entrepreneurs — men and women who are creating new
institutions and system-changing solutions for the world’s most urgent social
problems. Since 1980, Ashoka has pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship,
electing and connecting more than 2,000 individuals with system-changing ideas
in over 70 countries. And now, Ashoka is headed to China.

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