Dr Wan Yan Hai, 38, has not been heard from since 24 August, when he attended a Beijing screening of a film shown as part of a lesbian and gay film festival for which he was on the steering committee. Dr Wan has been campaigning for more than ten years with and on behalf of people affected by HIV, including lesbian, gay and transsexual people, injecting drug users and sex workers in China.
Dr Wan and his non-governmental AIZHI (AIDS) Action Project have been increasingly forthright on the need for China to acknowledge and deal with its growing HIV epidemics. In particular, he has sought to address the failings which led to as many as one million people in Henan province acquiring HIV through commercial blood transfusion services controlled by local officials. His group has run petition drives calling on the authorities to compensate those affected, by practices which were then officially condoned but have since been banned, and to provide them with effective treatment.
The Henan scandal has deeply embarrassed the Chinese authorities and there are fears that Dr Wan, who was under close surveillance by the Beijing authorities at the time of his disappearance, may now be under arrest as a result. The AIZHI Action Project’s offices in a private university were closed down under official pressure in July, and there has been other evidence of official displeasure. The publication on Aizhi’s website (in Chinese, here) of an internal Henan statistical report on the extent of the HIV outbreak was a possible cause for his detention for disclosing “state secrets”. Chinese official secrets laws are draconian and suspects are routinely denied access to lawyers and jailed for long prison terms.
The alarm has been raised by Dr Wan’s wife, Su Zhaosheng, who is currently studying in the USA. Dr Wan is due to travel to Canada later this month to accept a human rights award on 13 September from the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network and Human Rights Watch. These organizations have now taken up the question of his whereabouts and safety with the Chinese authorities, and Amnesty International and others have joined in the campaign for information and, if he is detained, for his immediate release.
Last week, Chinese researchers criticised government epidemiologists in a letter to the British Medical Journal, arguing that they had glossed over the extent of the epidemic in rural blood donors and painted an over-optimistic picture of the adequacy of surveillence activities in China.
The Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria is due to consider an application from China to support the response to HIV/AIDS work in the country. It remains to be seen whether they will be able to approve such funding while there are unanswered questions, raised in an increasingly public way, about China’s ability to support open discussion of the painful realities of HIV and AIDS.
Further information is available on the website of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, here.