Every day without fail, Cao Xiaoxian goes to a local government office, as he has for a year, to beg for help for his family.
His face drawn and tired, the 34-year-old has no choice -- he has AIDS, and so has his wife and his 11-year-old son.
The only one who may not infected with HIV, the virus that causes the disease, is his nine-month-old baby daughter, but she is too young for a definitive test.
"This morning I went [to the government office] again. They told me the central government didn't give any instructions about which family should get help and which would not," Cao says.
He was infected when he sold his blood to government blood stations collecting plasma to make blood products, as many farmers in central China do to help eke out a living.
Cao had to give up his part-time job as a delivery truck driver because the disease and the antiretroviral drugs he is taking leave him too weak to work.
"If he does any hard labor, he gets a fever," says his wife Zhou Xiaoneng, also 34.
Without any means of income, the couple live off their land and sometimes the generosity of donors.
To save money, they rarely eat meat, do not have a telephone and do not use the fan even in the hot summer, turning it on only briefly when guests visit.
"We have no money to even buy candy for our kids," Zhou says.
Barely surviving
The family is no exception. Many other families with several members suffering from the deadly disease barely manage to survive.
Although billions of dollars is being spent on life-saving AIDS drugs across the world, donor governments are failing to ensure developing world patients have adequate diets, the UN World Food Program (WFP) warned last week at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto.
The WFP joined the non-governmental organization Partners in Health here to say that people getting antiretroviral therapies were much more likely to die if they were undernourished.
They nutrition programs for HIV patients were critically underfunded, even though a lack of food was often cited by people living with the disease, most of them in developing nations, as the most urgent need.
Although China has been praised for launching a program to provide HIV-positive citizens with free drugs in 2003, it provides very little else, even for people like Cao who were victims of an unsanitary government-approved scheme to encourage poor farmers to sell blood beginning in the 1980s.
Families with AIDS receive a stipend of just 12 yuan (US$1.50) per person for month, but not everyone gets the money as some corrupt local officials have been known to siphon off funds, volunteers in villages with a high number of AIDS sufferers say.
Babies receive milk powder and children who have AIDS or whose parents have AIDS are supposed to get free tuition, but some people receive only a waiver for a part of their tuition.
No backup
An AIDS patient in another village, Qiudian, says she does not know how she and her husband will be able to put their teenage daughter through high school.
"If she doesn't get a scholarship, she will have to drop out of school," says Cheng Xiaolan, 38.
In Cheng's home, a brand-new washing machine which was part of her wedding dowry years ago, sits covered in the cardboard box it came in. The family no longer uses it because they need to save on the electricity bill.
"I hope the government will give us some economic assistance," Cheng says.
Patients like her also have to scrape together money to pay for medical expenses that the government does not pay.
"It's still not adequate," says Wiwat Rojanapithayakorn, the World Health Organization's HIV/AIDS team leader in China, regarding the amount of support China provides to patients.
"They still don't pay for diseases associated with AIDS -- opportunistic diseases such as tuberculosis, liver problems, pneumonia and fungal infections," he says.
Around 650,000 people in China have the HIV virus, translating into a rate of 0.05 percent in a population of 1.3 billion, but the rate of infections is rapidly rising.
Last year, 70,000 more Chinese contracted the virus, equivalent to 192 per day, according to official estimates, leading the government and outside experts to predict there could be 1.5 million cases by 2010.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs