sinoscribe
Journalist Kathleen E. McLaughlin

Chinese children living with AIDS

GEJIU, China — Xin Deming’s family has been decimated by AIDS and he is adamant the disease not ruin the life of his 10-year-old niece. Yet despite his best efforts, she is at the mercy of erratic treatment, massive social stigma and overwhelming uncertainty about the future.

In Xin’s family, three of four sons used heroin, turning to needles at the beginning of an AIDS epidemic that sprouted more than a decade ago near the Chinese border with Vietnam in Yunnan province. A growing drug problem and burgeoning sex-work industry on the drug trafficking route created a fertile environment for AIDS to spread in Gejiu, a tin-mining town of 300,000 people on China’s Red River. International agencies say Gejiu has more cases of AIDS and HIV infection than any other city in China.

In Xin’s family, two of three drug-addicted brothers died. Xin, 41, is off drugs and now works for a local non-governmental organization devoted to AIDS education. He is strong and outspoken, but at the mercy of a health care system plagued with problems. His niece, the orphaned daughter of his elder brother, must be protected, he insists, even if it means keeping her in the dark about her own health. She attends school in a rural area where the city health committee, prone to gossip and leaks of private information, is not privy to her health records.

“She told me she knows she’s different,” Xin said. “I asked what she meant, and she said, ‘I don’t know why, I just know I’m different from the other kids.’”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/090420/chinas-youngest-aids-victims-kept-the-dark

China’s health-care predicament

Editor’s note: While the health care reform battle rages in Washington, D.C., China has been quietly revamping its own massive health care system — with decidely mixed results. In this three-part special report, Kathleen E. McLaughlin and photographer Sharron Lovell tracked the results on both urban and rural residents.

BEIJING — The price list at a top Beijing hospital explains a lot about what is wrong with China’s health care system: An appendectomy by a leading surgeon, available to any Chinese citizen, costs only $34.

This is not because the doctors or the equipment come cheap — Peking University People’s Hospital attracts the top medical talent in the country. It has the seventh highest-paid doctors in China and imports cutting edge technology from around the world. The low cost of surgery is not because the communist government makes up the funding gap between patient prices and the actual cost of care.

Instead, it is simply because the central government set a maximum hospital rate 20 years ago in an attempt to guarantee health care access to all citizens. It hasn’t allowed them to be raised since, despite China’s massive economic growth, increased personal income and rising inflation. In short, that $34 doesn’t cover much and the costs are made up in other ways.

Read the series at Global Post:

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/090728/rural-health-care

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/090728/china-urban-health-care

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/090804/china-health-care-reform

Asia Society podcast on ethnic tensions in China

Website update

Fear grips Uighurs

Shaoguan, China – When the local government in Xinjiang province dispatched more than 800 Uighur workers to a toy factory here in May, they couldn’t have predicted their fate would blow up into a national crisis. Today, police say two of the Uighur workers were killed and scores more injured in the June 26 events that ignited a firestorm of protest in restive Xinjiang. More mysteriously, some 700 of the original Uighur workers of Shaoguan’s massive electronic toy factory are being held out of sight behind locked gates roughly 10 miles away in an abandoned factory. Their plight, and the lack of quick police action on the initial murders, sparked mass protests and killings on July 5 in the Urumqi, adding the latest cracks in China’s façade of ethnic harmony.

http://www.feer.com/politics/2009/july58/Fear-Grips-Shaoguans-Uighurs

Life on Planet Uighur

SHAOGUAN, China — At the heart of a deadly June toy factory clash that sparked mass protests and killings 2,000 miles away in China’s far west lies a government policy that sends thousands of young Muslim Uighurs to fill labor gaps in the southeast.

Experts say despite yawning cultural differences and communication problems between Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese, there typically is little language training or other preparation for young Uighurs before they arrive in Guangdong province for factory jobs. Most come straight off the farm, far even from the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi, and are dropped directly into an atmosphere that might as well be a different planet.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/uighur-labor-policy

At a Nike factory…

HUIZHOU, China — Blind luck sent hundreds of Muslim Uighurs to a factory here last year to make Nike shoes, instead of five hours north, where their friends and neighbors from the same rural patch of China’s far northwest went to make toys.

Though they aren’t there, the Shaoguan toy factory is heavy on the minds of Uighurs here, as they wait for news of loved ones and friends who have had little contact with the outside since the June 26 toy factory brawl and murder of Uighurs in their factory dorms — the incident that helped ignite mass protests and 184 deaths in Xinjiang province July 5.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/090713/uighur-workers-guangdong

Uighur workers held behind locked gates

SHAOGUAN, China — Three weeks after simmering racial tension escalated to mayhem and a double murder at a toy factory here, about 750 Uighur workers remain largely out of sight, behind locked gates and guarded doors — perhaps because they are at the center of a storm that has brought international attention to a remote Chinese province.

Most of the Xinjiang migrants who arrived at the massive factory in northern Guangdong province in May are apparently being held in a branch workshop 15 miles up the road, after the fight here led to mass protests and killings 2,000 miles away in their home province. Their tightly guarded new home and workshop is sealed off, and requests to visit inside and interview the Uighur men playing pool behind the gates after dark were refused by guards without explanation.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china/uighurs/xinjiang/guangdong-factory

Ai Weiwei’s internet game

BEIJING — Ai Weiwei believes in the power of the internet. That’s precisely why on July 1, he wants China to stop using it.

A general internet strike — no work, no games, no email or anything else online — for 24 hours on the date the government plans to require censorship software on all new computers, he says, will be a quiet act of rebellion. Not coincidentally, July 1 is the 88th anniversary of the Communist Party of China. Though he posted the idea, Ai wants to leave the meaning to those who participate.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/090623/meet-the-man-who-wants-shut-down-the-internet-china

China’s response to H1N1

BEIJING — It’s become on-board theater for those arriving in China: A team of health workers, dressed head-to-toe in white space suits, boards each international flight to scan every passenger for fever and other flu symptoms before they are allowed to set foot in country.

The team moves from seat to seat, checking each traveler, pausing to confer over any abnormality. Stories abound from tourists and business travelers, relishing in the oddity that is China’s heavy-handed reaction to the swine flu, photographing alien temperature checkers, regaling friends back home with the strange tale.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-and-its-neighbors/090609/greetings-earthlings-welcome-china