Chinese AIDS prevention campaign faces battle with old taboos
Church opposition, conservative values go head-to-head with free condom plan in Zhejiang.
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| Two men in this 2006 file photo look at a condom vending machine with an AIDS warning attached to it outside the Huashan hospital in Shanghai. (Photo by Mark Ralston/AFP) |
Instead of using money, students swipe their university cards over a scanner and a box of condoms drops, free of charge.
"My son and his friends in school know it is for AIDS prevention but it seems to them the government is encouraging sexual liberation," says a church worker who didn’t want to be named.
Conservative and often reserved when it comes to talk of sex, China is suddenly embracing a more open approach to this issue in a bid to tackle a recent rise in HIV/AIDS cases among young people.
Not everyone is convinced, not least in Zhejiang province with its large Christian minority, that the pilot scheme to provide free condoms is a good thing.
The communist government appears alarmed at recent data that showed HIV infections had risen by 35 percent among 15 to 24 year-olds over the past four years.
Although the total number of cases remains a fraction of the total population of 1.35 billion, 14,000 people were diagnosed with HIV in the first 10 months of this year — 10 percent higher than on the same period in 2014.
The main driver of the spike were men having sex with men, accounting for 82 percent of reported infections this year and last.
"Youngsters face a growing threat from HIV," said Wu Zunyou, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, when he revealed the new data late last month.
Overall, China reported 575,000 people were living with HIV but some campaigners and medical professionals have suggested the real figure could be much higher. The continuing taboo against same sex relations pushes one of the main risk groups into avoiding HIV testing.
In the past, China typically left sex education to trial and error, and tackled unwanted pregnancies with 13 million abortions a year, a key tool of the one-child policy that ran for 37 years until the end of October.
In 1978, the year Beijing introduced the policy, Deng Xiaoping also launched "gaige kaifang," his landmark economic reform plan that opened China to the world. People embraced opportunities to make money as society opened up while largely retaining a conservative approach to sex.
Young Chinese nowadays buy smart-phones in the hundreds of millions and use dating apps like Tan Tan (scouting around), an equivalent of Tinder launched in July last year.
But parents still have a large say in who their children marry and expect them to abstain from having sex beforehand — sex is still rarely discussed across this generational gap.
Gay and lesbian relations remain even more taboo, and few Chinese admit to having sexual relationships with someone from the same sex.
Condoms are widely available, but for many Chinese they remain expensive, embarrassing and little understood.
By extension, ignorance of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS remains common, said Dr. Bernhard Schwartlander, representative of the World Health Organization (WHO) in China.
"More and more young people in China are having sex. But many of them are doing so without the knowledge and information that can help protect them from the risks of unsafe sex," he said.
The WHO launched a safe sex campaign this month using China's Twitter equivalent Weibo, and although initial responses have been encouraging, Schwartlander said it remains an uphill battle to change attitudes.
The stigma against people with HIV/AIDS remains rampant in China, according to activists. In an apparent bid to prove the point, two HIV-positive men were about to board a Spring Airlines flight in the northeastern city of Shijiazhuang last year and informed staff of their medical condition. They were prevented from boarding the plane.
In response, airline president, Wang Zhenghua, blamed the incident on worried staff, adding that HIV-positive passengers can board flights, just as long as they don’t make themselves "overly noticeable."
When it comes to sex education that could help tackle HIV/AIDS in China, most Chinese remain similarly ill-informed — and resistant to doing anything about it.
In November, a woman threw feces at Sexologist Peng Xiaohui, and slapped him in the face during a speech at the Sex Culture Festival in Guangzhou.
Peng later told the Beijing News he believed 99 percent of Chinese adults were ill-informed on sex education recommending that Beijing role out a comprehensive program in schools across the country.
He has accused the Chinese government and wider society of conflating healthy sex — and sex education — with pornography.
"The state bans condom and birth control pill advertising, but allows advertisements for abortion. It’s like putting the cart before the horse," said Peng.
It's against this backdrop that Beijing has made a rare departure from its conservative stance on sex education by piloting free condom-vending machines in Zhejiang. The province has one of the highest concentrations of Christians in China.
More than 120,000 — over 11 percent — of the people in the main city, Wenzhou, are Christian.
Despite their numbers, churches have had little impact on the government's condom policy, said Father Paul, an underground priest in Wenzhou.
The city has been the focal point of a cross removal campaign that has seen hundreds of crosses taken down by force since December 2013.
In a rare point of agreement between church and state in China, both have traditionally promoted chastity in schools. But with plans to install condom machines in all 128 universities in Zhejiang within a year, the atheist communist party and church look set to part ways on how to tackle HIV/AIDS.
"The [condom] campaign means that chastity education is not sufficient in schools and it encourages sexual liberation," Father Paul told ucanews.com �. "It's a moral crisis in today’s society."
Source: UCAN
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