Are Chinese leaders finally getting serious about Aids? Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to an Aids ward at Beijing Ditan Hospital on Monday is the latest evidence of China's growing acknowledgement of its Aids crisis.
Last month, senior Chinese officials held an extraordinary set of meetings with business leaders, nongovernmental groups and international organisations to discuss efforts to avoid a looming catastrophe. This positive shift in top-level commitment - and photo opportunities - is welcome, but it is insufficient to improve the critical area of local HIV/Aids policy implementation.
Chinese Vice-Minister of Health Gao Qiang recently admitted that the country now has 840,000 HIV cases and 80,000 Aids patients. More than 150,000 have died since the first Aids case was reported in 1985. International experts believe the total number of cases could balloon to 15 million by 2010 if the government does not take immediate and comprehensive action.
China's Aids victims are primarily young, undereducated and highly mobile. A substantial number of the estimated one million HIV carriers live in the countryside and are between 15 and 25. Some 68 per cent of infections are among intravenous drug users and 9.7 per cent among commercial blood donors.
China has two high-profile HIV/Aids programmes. First, there is politically sensitive China Cares scheme, which seeks to provide free anti-Aids drugs and care for infected people who contracted the disease in the 1990s through contaminated blood transfusions. Second, there is the Joint 121 Action Plan, which aims, through education and awareness, to prevent the spread of Aids from high-risk groups into the general population through 'bridge populations' - which includes sex workers and the 130 million domestic labour migrants.
These two ambitious projects are already showing signs of failure. Under China Cares, the central government has begun to provide domestically manufactured generic anti-retroviral drugs free to about 5,200 out of an officially estimated 35,000 HIV carriers in Henan province. The programme is intended to rectify the provincial government's lacklustre response to the spread of HIV among villagers who were selling their blood.