A Chinese woman with HIV has married her partner in a widely reported ceremony in Beijing which illustrates changing attitudes in China towards the country’s growing Aids crisis.
The wedding was timed to coincide with tomorrow’s World Aids day.
Identified by the pseudonym ”Little Qin”, the 28-year-old bride exchanged vows with her husband, ”Little Ming” (24) on Thursday. The groom is officially described as free from infection, although there are fears that this may no longer be so.
Little Qin was introduced to drugs in the south-western city of Guizhou by her first boyfriend who then abandoned her. She was befriended by Little Ming, a taxi-driver who found her wandering the streets. Newspapers have described in touching detail how he tracked her down when she ran away to her village to avoid compromising him.
”Suddenly he appeared before me calling my name,” Little Qin recalls. ”We fell into each other’s arms and burst out crying.”
Yesterday’s Beijing Times published a picture of the wedding on its front page with the couple’s faces obscured. It said that its reporter had presented them with nine red roses ”to wish them eternal life”.
After years of denying that China had a serious problem, the government now acknowledges that at least one-million people are probably infected and that the number could reach 10-million by the end of the decade.
”A lot of things have changed in terms of the response to the epidemic,” the UNAids director Peter Piot said at a national Aids conference in Beijing earlier this month.
While the spread of Aids through unsafe sex and drug abuse is widely reported, details of a scandal in rural areas involving contaminated blood remain more sensitive.
Government-approved schemes for commercial blood collection in Henan and other provinces resulted in tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of peasants being infected.
The Beijing-based non-governmental Aizhi project has reported several recent cases of peasants from Henan being beaten or detained by police when they tried to publicise the plight of villages where dozens of children have become orphans.
This week’s media coverage of the ”Aids couple” has been accompanied by injunctions against popular prejudice and praise for the husband’s faithful behaviour. However, the tale may be less happy than appears at first sight.
Two weeks ago the couple were interviewed in a Guizhou hospital where Little Ming was said to be suffering from a liver infection and persistent high fever. He had not been tested for HIV since March, he told the Shanghai Xinmin Weekly.
Little Qin, who at one stage was sent to a labour farm for taking drugs, has made several attempts to stop using them.
Her new husband, the Xinmin Weekly reported, had recently started taking drugs as well. He explained he did so to show Little Qin ”how easy it is to give them up”. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001