2005年NPR美国国家公共电台七月-One Man Against AIDS in China

This is All Things Considered from NPR news. I'm Michelle Noris. And I am Robert Seagull, and we are going to continue now with our series on the growing sense of individualism in China. The series is called "A Nation of Individuals". After decades of Communist rule, the Chinese people are beginning to strike out on their own, often for the first time. Today, NPR's Rob Gifford has the story of Li Dan, a young idealist who has devoted 1 his life to helping 2 people with HIV/AIDS.

It's 8 o'clock on a hot summer morning, and 27-year-old Li Dan is standing 3 outside the You An Infectious Diseases Hospital in southern Beijing. With him are three children, aged 4 between 7 and 9 from Henan Province, south of the capital.
Li is briefing the father of one of the children about the test they are all about to undergo.
Inside the hospital, 9-year-old Ji Haibo stretches out his arm for a blood test watched by his father and by Li Dan himself.
The boy was recently told he had contracted HIV from an infected flood transfusion 5. The only reason he is here is because Li Dan knows how to get treatment for him and will help him pay, otherwise he'll be sitting in his poor village back in Henan waiting to die. Outside， the boy's father Ji Jianguo can't stop thanking Li Dan.
"We are so grateful to Li Dan. We didn't get any help from the local government. All these costs are being paid for by Li Dan himself."

The rise of China on the world stage is coinciding with the emergence 6 within China of a new type of citizen. Whether these citizens succeed in building the society they want to will be crucial in shaping what kind of country China becomes. Chinese society is at the turning point after more than 25 years of economic reform. The party has retreated from people's everyday lives, but has also left funding of many basic services such as health care and education to market forces. Many poorer members of society are falling through the cracks. Into this space have stepped a small group of new idealists, activists 8 who don't want to just follow the money-grabbing way as the GOGO 1990s. Li Dan exemplifies this group.

"I first became aware of AIDS when I saw the Tom Hanks movie Philadelphia in 1998. I realized there was a group of people being ostracized 9 by society because of this disease. It was pure youthful idealism on my part. I just wanted to do something to help them."

Much to the horror of his parents, Li gave up his graduate studies in solar physics at a good university in Beijing, and threw himself into full time voluntary work, publicizing the AIDS problem. Li has become skilled at using the foreign and increasingly the local media, which can now report some sensitive issues such as AIDS. He can often be seen sitting in a downtown Mc Donald's briefing reporters on the latest news. When he first began he says his activism went quite smoothly 10, then he heard about the AIDS villages of Henan Province south of Beijing, whole villages of people infected with HIV through the unhygienic practices of government-run blood collection centres. That is where the boy Ji Haibo, whom Li Dan has brought to Beijing, became infected. Incensed 11 by how the Henan government was trying to cover up its complexity 12, Li set about trying to help the children orphaned 13 by AIDS.

"Many officials in Henan thought we had a political agenda, but we didn't. We were just trying to help the AIDS orphans 14."

Even so he and his small group of fellow volunteers have been detained several times and beaten by local police. Li Dan has now officially set up an NGO called rather euphemistically "The All-kid Culture Communication Centre", to try to help the AIDS orphans. He says you still can't use the word "AIDS" in the name of an organization. Big problem, he says, is the complete lack of any concept of civil society in modern China, that space between the individual and the government that has long been filled in the West by religious or civic 15 organizations.

"What China needs most of all is civil society. Since 1949, there has been none at all. The government tries to keep all the good works on its own hands but then doesn't do anything. It's very difficult because there is no precedent 16, no one to teach us how to do it, so we are just feeling our way tentatively."

Li says there are more organizations like his in China set up by persistent 17 individuals like himself doing more and more good works. And he says they've carved out a limited space in which to work independently and they've started influencing the government. Beijing has within the last year dramatically changed its AIDS policy, admitted its problem and set up ways to deal with it. Many experts credit activists like Li Dan for raising official awareness 18. But he says the government still doesn't want too many people like him doing this kind of work.

The next day Li is talking to a group of students at a university in central Beijing. They've gathered to hear him giving a lecture about AIDS. Just five years ago, three years even, such a public lecture would have been unthinkable.

It's not often that these 20-year-old students hear people speaking on the subject of oral and anal sex, but here he is, a skinny activist 7, only 27 himself, describing all the details of how AIDS can and can not be transmitted. Afterwards back in McDonald's he gets into a long discussion with his friends about where China is going.

I am not optimistic about the future, of course as a Chinese person I want China to be strong. But Americans only see the flourishing cities, and I think they misunderstand. The cities are a tiny part of what's going on in China, and they are not representative at all."

Asked about the future of NGOs he is even less optimistic. For civil society to flourish, he says, you really need a lot of people to stand up and take part, and demand power from the government in a peaceful way as Mahatma Gandy did. There are some people doing it, he says, like me, but it's simply not happening on mass scale yet. Chinese people he says because of their education are used to being told what to do but not used to getting up and starting things himself.
Rob Gifford NPR news, Beijing

AIDS and HIV researchers and health care providers from around the world are meeting in Rio De Janeiro right now. Among the topics of discussion: how HIV is spreading along the route that heroin 19 travels from Afghanistan to Eastern Europe.

Christ B of Johns Hopkins said at the conference that infections are rising in countries like Belarus, Iran, Tajikistan and Ukraine. Cheap heroin is easier to come by in those countries since the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Heroin is often injected and IV-drug users who share dirty needles can spread HIV. Doctor B said that it is a relatively 20 recent epidemic 21 but it's fast growing. He said drug treatment and HIV prevention must be implemented 22 now everywhere that heroin is flowing.