Content area
Full Text
The dizzying pace of change in China is apparent in the most surprising places. Take the old Xilou hutong in East Beijing. Here, amid a warren of dusty grey alleyways is the impressively large and colourful courtyard where emperors practised kung fu during the Qing dynasty. Today this cultural relic is the unlikely headquarters of Wan Yanhai, an HIV activist whose home 2 years ago was a prison where he was incarcerated for revealing the true scale of the country's AIDS crisis.
The grounds house the small offices of the Aizhixing Institute of Health Education, the not-for-profit organisation that Wan-now internationally acclaimed and domestically vindicated-established to encourage the government to do more to tackle a disease that the UN warns could infect up to 10 million Chinese people by 2010.
No one would ever mistake this moon-faced doctor-who wears pullovers and Harry Potter glasses-for a kung fu master, but he and his organisation have proved quite capable of delivering devastating blows in the battle over AIDS policy.
The efforts of Wan and others have stunned an authoritarian government out of a decade-long state of denial. Authorities have announced free HIV tests, needle-exchange programmes, condom promotions, and subsidised treatment for the poor. Wan told The Lancet that while he applauds these changes, he doubts about whether the new policy can be implemented, given the problems of the health system and the lack of reliable data. He poured scorn on the government's estimate of 840...