[UPDATE] April – June 2012

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AIDS 2012 Comes To Our Backyard 

The largest AIDS conference in the world, brining together over 20,000 individuals, is coming to Washington DC this summer. Asia Catalyst is pleased to award travel scholarships to help four Chinese AIDS activists take part in AIDS 2012, the world’s largest AIDS conference. The four activists – three women and one man — include the mother of a child living with HIV/AIDS, a former sex worker, a rights advocate, and a youth leader. They will speak at the conference, join in roundtable discussions, and share policy recommendations with the UN and international agencies. Together, they represent the next generation of civil society leaders in China’s fight against HIV/AIDS.
In preparation for the International AIDS Conference in Washington D.C. in July, the China team, together with three student volunteers from the International School of Beijing, has been supporting our three Chinese delegates to finalize their presentations, posters, and design brochures about their organizations.

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[EVENT] We Can End AIDS March For Economic Justice and Human Rights

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July 24th, 2012 Downtown Washington, D.C. 

On Tuesday, July 24, we want you to mobilize in the streets for economic justice, human rights and an end to AIDS as the massive International AIDS Conference meets in Washington DC. 
Over 30,000 people from local DC neighborhoods, across the USA, and worldwide – will march together to illuminate the social and economic costs of putting profit in front of the resources, rights and policies that can end AIDS. 
Together, we will call out to our leaders this clear, compelling truth: 
We can end AIDS in the next generation, through economic justice and human rights to bring prevention, treatment and a cure to all. 

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[PROFILE] Xiao Bao: Empowering LGBT in China

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Zhao Zheng, known to his friends and coworkers as Xiao Bao, has been working in HIV and STI prevention since 2004. In 2008 he was conferred the title of Youth Ambassador for HIV Prevention by the Tianjin HIV and STI Prevention Coordinating Committee. At 26, he is the youngest of the activists Asia Catalyst is supporting to go to the International AIDS Conference this July. 

Currently the program officer and coordinator for Tianjin Deep Blue Working Group (天津深蓝工作组), Xiao Bao is responsible for, among other things, program management, training, planning, research and evaluation. In 2008, Xiao Bao was appointed a Community Liaison to the China Men Who Have Sex With Men (MSM) Health Forum. In collaboration with the Institute of Sexuality and Sociology at Renmin University, he completed research to assess the size of the MSM population in Tianjin, and initiated the MSM Population Ethnic Research Survey in 2010. 
In the run-up to this year’s International AIDS Conference, AIDS 2012, Xiao Bao spoke to Asia Catalyst about his own work.

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[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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[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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