John Pomfret has written an in-depth article on the arrest of the health official who blew the whistle on China’s cover-up of the Henan AIDS debacle.

Read between the lines, and the entire tragedy becomes clear:

The AIDS epidemic in Henan was touched off in the early 1990s when provincial health officials began to push a plan encouraging peasants to sell their blood. Dealers bought blood from villagers and pooled it, mixing healthy blood with HIV-infected blood. They extracted plasma, a blood component with medical uses, and re-injected the rest of the blood back into the farmers’ arms. AIDS spread quickly through the poor communities.

Henan’s authorities tried for years to repress all reporting about the disease. Ma’s arrest appears to be connected to the case of Wan Yanhai, a prominent AIDS activist who was detained for a month last summer after he received the document. Officials accused Ma, who prepared the document, of passing it to Wan; Wan said he did not know who e-mailed him the document. After AIDS activists and international organizations condemned Wan’s detention, he was released and allowed to travel to the United States.

Chinese sources described Ma’s arrest as a move by Liu Quanxi, the former director of Henan’s health department and the man widely blamed for presiding over Henan’s AIDS epidemic. Liu has remained a force in Henan politics and has avoided taking any responsibility for the epidemic, the sources said. Liu lobbied strongly for Ma’s arrest, the sources added, as a way to warn anyone who might consider exposing his role in the epidemic there.

According to the classified document, Liu’s department was “caught up in the get-rich craze” of the early 1990s as blood sales skyrocketed. Liu ordered the local medical center to focus on blood collection to earn revenue. He also led a blood-selling delegation to the United States in 1993-94, with the message that “there isn’t any HIV in Henan province and the blood is cheap,” the document said. He now holds a senior post in the province’s legislature.

This fellow Liu sounds like a real role model. He infects thousands of peasants with AIDS, he gets rich selling their blood, he moves up the ranks of the CCP and goes unpunished, he successfully lobbies for the arrest of the good guy….

My guess is that the CCP will have to let Ma Shiwen out of jail, and soon. The uproar that is beginning to well is only going to crescendo, and that could have repercussions for China’s economy. (If anything talks in the PRC, it’s money.) This is one of those human rights stories that isn’t going to just go away. It’s simply too terrible. And it will hurt China in more ways than one:

Ma’s arrest is likely to further hurt China’s efforts to win nearly $100 million in funding from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The fund has rejected two previous applications, partly because of China’s attempts to hide the scale of the epidemic.

An interesting profile of Hong Kong’s “Goddess of Ddemocracy” Audrey Eu appears in today’s Scotsman. She sounds like a true leader, despite being a lawyer:

Articulate and plain-speaking, Ms Eu has distinguished herself in the past year by highlighting to ordinary Hong Kong people the dangers of the planned law [Article 23] in clear, simple terms.

“They prefer people at the end of the day who perhaps listen to reason and would be prepared to be fair,” the former chairwoman of the Hong Kong Bar Association said during a recent interview at her office.

The article also notes the aftermath of Eu’s efforts, which has the CCP in a total tizzy:

In a sign the China-backed administration remains acutely worried about potential public unrest, a government official yesterday said it would scale back preliminary work on a huge reclamation project which conservation groups fear will ruin the city’s stunning harbour, to allow more time to discuss the plan with its opponents.

The outpouring of anger at the China-backed government rattled leaders in both Hong Kong and Beijing, who feared it may spark similar expressions of unrest elsewhere in the country.

Be sure to read Bush’s stammering, commitment-less and utterly unconvincing statement about finding the official(s) who leaked Valerie Plame’s CIA status to the media.

And people wonder why we distrust Bush?

Thanks to Conrad, I just discovered a fine article on China’s handling of the SARS and AIDS crises and the amazing similarities in the CCP’s approach to each.

The article is from several months ago, and it closes with the reporter presenting two option which, he says, the CCP must choose between:

When the Chinese people ask Beijing to explain why there were so many people with AIDS, the new leadership under President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao will have two options. One option is to continue the state-sanctioned disinformation campaign regarding AIDS and its origins in China. This is unlikely, as not only has Beijing pledged to be more open with SARS, but nobody inside or outside of China is likely to believe Beijing’s deceptive dismissals and denials. The other option is to throw the closet door wide and bring out the skeletons for all to see: the Chinese would have to be told that just as they had been duped regarding SARS, they had previously been deliberately kept in the dark regarding members of the CCP collecting profits as they spread the seeds of HIV in Henan.

Isn’t this amazing — that the reporter assumed that it would be, in the wake of SARS, literally unthinkable that the CCP would go on pulling the wool over its citizens’ eyes in relation to AIDS. After all, look how it backfired with SARS. Look at the damage in terms of dead citizens (nothing the CCP has ever cared much about in the past, granted) and political embarrassment.

Any rational human being would have agreed at the time with the reporter. Repeating such a fiasco would be tantamount to insanity. And look now at the story of Henan. Look at how the one hero is put in prison. Not just arrested but sentenced to serve in a dungeon for ten years in a secret trial. Look at how, instead of the openness that the report predicted as inevitable, information on AIDS in China is more restricted than ever before.

There is only one possible consequence: More death and more discrimination. If it were anywhere else but China, it would simply be beyond all belief.

It is good to see that the story I brought up below is gaining worldwide attention. The latest word, from Newsday:

A human rights organization demanded Tuesday that China release a health official reportedly convicted of circulating a restricted government report on a blood-selling scandal that spread AIDS in a central Chinese province.

It was at least the second such legal action involving the same government report.

Human Rights Watch said Ma Shiwen should be freed immediately and not be punished for distributing the report, which it said blamed national authorities for the spread of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, in the central Chinese province of Henan. The report apparently was given to Chinese AIDS activists.

“The Chinese government is targeting honest health officials, but it has done little to address the humanitarian catastrophe in Henan,” said Brad Adams, executive director of the Asia Division of the New York-based rights group

China has a great opportunity to show that it learned a big lesson from SARS. I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt, at least for a little while.

Gone from the top of his homepage is the prominent notice about how he knows nothing of any investigation. Draw your own conclusions.

Now there’s a new headline, “I Meant Exactly What I Said, No Clinton Here.” Isn’t it telling that in his moment of truth, Limbaugh chooses yet again to kick sand in Clinton’s face?

This is exactly why I find it hard not to criticize Limbaugh in his hypocrisy. I simply say to myself, What would Limbaugh do if those he loathed (like, say, Bill Clinton) were in a similar situation? Would he show compassion? Would he extend sympathy? Would he be politely silent?

Rush Limbaugh, politely silent? The king of the smear, the man who has elevated innuendo into a fine art?

I won’t mock Limbaugh in regard to the drug allegations; I don’t know the facts, and to do so would be to descend to Rush’s level. But I can comment on his slippery, true-to-form sliminess, using a crisis of his own making to take yet another jab at Clinton, and speaking in the same type of legalese he used to lambaste Clinton for during the Monica days.

I would have hoped that now, in his most dire moment, he would have shown a different side. But no. He remains the same Rush Limbaugh we know and love, using his own mess to smear others. So my sympathy level drops to yet another new low, and I can’t help but wonder whether there is a poetic justice to Limbaugh’s plight.

This is one of the most shocking of all the state censorship stories. The only answer to China’s AIDS crisis is information and honesty. This is the price to be paid by those who attempt to tell the truth:

A leading health official in China’s AIDS-stricken Henan province has been sentenced to more than 10 years in prison on a conviction of leaking state secrets.

Ma Shiwen, deputy director of the Henan Centre for Disease Control (CDC), who was arrested several months ago for leaking documents on the Henan epidemic, was recently sentenced, according to Gao Yaojie, a well-known volunteer doctor in Henan.

This begs the question, Did China learn anything from the SARS fiasco? And do Hu’s promises of greater openness carry any weight, aside from propaganda value?

To this day, China has not revealed the true extent of the outbreak, despite recently beginning to seek funding from abroad to treat some of the victims.

So much for openness.

Related post: The indescribable tragedy of AIDS in China

No posting for the next 24 hours due to sore throat and fever. Thanks.

I’ve written a lot on this topic, and we’re going to see it in the news more and more. At least the government is acknowledging the seriousness of the crisis:

(Beijing) The number of AIDS patients in China has soared 140 percent in a year, state media reported on Saturday, 12 months after the United Nations warned of an explosive epidemic in the world’s most populous country.

More than a quarter-miillion people have died of AIDS in China so far, and more than 10 million will be infected by 2010, according to the UN.

The River at the Center of the World — A Journey up the Yangtze and Back in Chinese Time. That’s the name of a strange and at times magical book by Simon Winchester that I recently finished. Magical, but not fictional.

It is a sort-of travelogue of Winchester’s trip along the Yangtze River from the point where it veers northward in Yunnan to where it empties out into the East China Sea at Shanghai. But it is much more than that. The book is rich with history of the cities and peoples its author encounters on the way, and of China in general. As one reviewer writes, “It is history in the round, political and economic, liberally laced with archaeology, anthropology, sociology and geology.”

The greatest moment of the book takes place on the very first page of its preface, where Winchester explains the miracle of the river’s course, in language that can only be described as mesmerizing. The point he makes here is incredible: that thanks to a freakish cluster of limestone mountains, a river roaring southwards suddenly swerves in exactly the opposite direction and then veers eastward, dividing China in two and altering for all time the destiny of Asia.

About a thousand miles downstream from the Yangtze’s source — after it has performed nearly a quarter of its journey from the mountains to the sea — the river executes a most remarkable hairpin bend. Within the space of a few hundred yards, a river that for hundreds of miles has been pouring relentlessly and indisputably southward slams head-on into a massif of limestone, ricochets and canonnades off it and then promptly thunders headlong back up to the north.

[….]

The sheer sharpness of the turn is what is so peculiarly dramatic about it — the sudden whirl-on-a-sixpence, turn-on-a-dime, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t kind of a back flip, a riparian volte-facie of epic dimensions. It is so dramatically obvious that it shows up on even the smallest-scale maps….it shows up as a strange notch, a kink, a curious indentation in the passage of great waters….what Shigu should be remembered for is the miracle of geography that took place there, and that allowed China to be watered by and divided by and unified by the most important river in the world

Without this little crook, this geological freak, the Yangtze would have “dribbled lazily and insignificantly” into the Gulf of Tonkin. Go take a look at a map (see below); it’s right there. I had never known of this phenomenon before, and it totally captured my imagination (as you can probably yell).

Winchester is a trained geologist and editor of Conde Nast, a spinner of yarns and a good enough writer to conjure up with words the full force and fury of the world’s most treacherous river and make us feel that we are right there with him.

It isn’t just the river. He takes us from city to city along the journey, describing his often hilarious, always fascinating encounters with a host of characters too strange to be fictional.

He wrote the book in 1996, a few years before the world’s hugest dam would block the Yangtze’s path and flood the Three Gorges, affecting the lives of hundreds of millions and altering the environment on a scale that can scarcely be imagined. Here Winchester’s expertise as a geologist comes into play as he explains just how dangerous, just how idiotic the Three Gorges Dam is. Suffice it to say that he views it as nothing less than a calamity, one for which the Chinese in the future will pay dearly.

What I especially appreciated is how every page reflects Wincherster’s fascination with what he calls “the delicious strangeness of China.” This is something I relate to deeply, and the book brought back all of my own amazements, surprises, shocks and curiosities. If I hadn’t lived there myself, I would have thought some of these stories were made up, they are so preposterous.

It’s not perfect, and it’s quite long at more than 400 pages. But I was definitely spellbound. It’s just too bad that Winchester gives us the most dramatic part of the story — the kink of the river at Shigu — right on the first page, after which nearly everything else can only be an anti-climax.

The amazing “notch,” above and slightly to the right of the “K” in Kunming.