A prominent Chinese AIDS activist said Monday he has left China for the United States with his wife and 4-year-old daughter after authorities increasingly harassed him and his organization.
Wan Yanhai, founder of the Beijing-based Aizhixing Institute, and his family departed Thursday on a flight out of Hong Kong and were staying with a friend in Philadelphia, Wan said in a telephone interview.
Wan said he decided to leave because of mounting mental stress due to the authorities' intimidation of him as well as their move to regulate overseas donations to local groups, complicating efforts to get money from supporters in other countries.
"As an organization and personally, the attacks from the government had become very serious. I had concerns about my personal safety and was under a lot of stress," Wan said.
"When I am in China, the authorities look at me like I am a bird in a cage. They say: 'If you don't listen to me, then I will eat you'," he said. "But after I leave the country, they will see me in a new light, because I am no longer in their cage."
Despite greater openness in recent years and an acknowledgment that the spread of AIDS is accelerating, China's communist leadership is deeply suspicious of independent activists, and Wan has one of the highest profiles among those working on AIDS in China.
Wan founded the Aizhixing Institute in 1994 to raise awareness and fight discrimination. Among its most significant and politically sensitive work was the publicizing of the spread of AIDS in the 1990s among villagers in central China's Henan province, where people who sold blood were re-injected with pooled blood after buyers had removed important components.
Wan has been detained or questioned several times in the past dozen years for his work, and in recent months he has felt increasing pressure from various government departments. The pressure started piling up this year with problems arising from the tax bureau, the state administration for industry and commerce, the central propaganda department and the education bureau.
In March, the government ruled that China-based aid groups — but not those connected with the government — must show proof that overseas nonprofit donor groups are registered in their home countries. The groups, also known as nongovernmental organizations or NGOs, must strictly follow detailed agreements with foreign donors and not use the money in other ways.
"Funding became a major problem for us after that," Wan said.
Later that month, he was invited to speak at the Southern China Science and Industry University on sexual orientation and mental health, but the event was interrupted by police from Guangzhou, he said. He later heard that a notice had been sent to universities nationwide to prevent them from inviting him to speak.
Wan said the final straw came when he was even getting harrassed by the municipal fire department, which visited his office in Beijing on April 20 for a safety inspection, and then sent a team from the local fire station the next day.
"To be honest, I was becoming very worried. I felt like if we had acted slower, it would not have been good," he said. In the coming days, Wan said, he hopes to meet with international organizations to discuss ways to cooperate on projects and for funding.
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On the Net:
Aizhixing Institute: http://www.aizhi.net/
Copyright 2010 AP News
