Public Health
Reporter Philip Pan writes that activists organizing assistance for HIV victims in Henan Province face many obstacles. Li Dan gave up a career in astronomy to try to help the victims of HIV/AIDS in Henan. He decided to focus on children whose parents had died of the disease, and set up an orphanage and school in Shangqiu, finding volunteers to staff it, and raising funds from donors in Shanghai and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, he was not able to get his school approved by the local bureau of civil affairs unless he turned the money over to them and had the city run the school. Li's decision to go ahead with the school without approval led to determined efforts by local leaders to close it down, in part because they felt that such a school harmed the city's reputation.
The following text was retrieved from the Law-Lib.com Web site on October 13, 2006.
According to Human Rights in China, a group of peasants in Fujian province has written an open letter appealing for China’s central government to intervene on a case in which police brought in hired thugs to suppress a village protest. HRIC reports that the open letter says that on August 1st, a large group of law enforcement officers and individuals recently released from Reeeducation Through Labor and Reform Through Labor camps arrived at a factory where villagers were staging a sit-in and attacked the villagers, injuring at lease 15 people.
According to an AP report carried on Channel News Asia's website, a spokeswoman for the Ramon Magsaysay international award foundation has said that Chinese authorities refused to grant 72-year-old Jiang Yanyong travel papers and he will be represented at the ceremony on Tuesday by his brother. The report states that, in the award citation, the foundation said that "in 2003, as the virus called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome swept unacknowledged into Beijing, he (Jiang) broke Chinas habit of silence and forced the truth of SARS into the open."
The following Chinese text was retrieved on December 6, 2016, from the website of the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China.