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HIV/AIDS in China

Posted on December 1, 2014 | Leave a comment

December 1 each year is World AIDS Day.  Estimates of the number of HIV/AIDS sufferers in China has varied widely, from about 600,000 to an order of magnitude larger than that. Though the infection rate in China as a whole remains relatively low, the sheer size of China’s population (about 1.4 billion) makes it important that any outbreak there be contained. Per China-based government health statistics (China CDC), by the end of 2023, the number of HIV/AIDS sufferers in China had reached 1.3 million. Though this is still a small proportion of the overall population, it points to the importance of prevention and treatment efforts.

It’s thought that the first AIDS fatality in China was that of an infected tourist during the 1980’s. By the 1990’s, AIDS had gained a foothold in local populations, primarily among intravenous drug users in southern provinces adjacent to the “Golden Triangle,” Southeast Asia’s prime poppy-growing region. Then, in a scheme in which some levels of the Chinese government played an indirect but culpable role, peasants in several rural interior provinces were infected through unsafe blood donation procedures.

China had stopped accepting blood components internationally during the 1980’s (ostensibly to avoid HIV contamination of the blood supply). Local entrepreneurs began to fill the supply gaps by recruiting rural donors to sell their blood for money. These “bloodhead” recruiters promised to minimize the impact of the loss of blood by extracting only plasma and returning donors’ red blood cells to them at the close of the donation process.  In some areas, safe blood handling practices were not followed—equipment was unsanitary, blood was pooled among donors before being returned. Soon whole villages were  afflicted with the “nameless fever.”  It took over a decade before the problem was acknowledged. It is estimated that 3-5% of current HIV/AIDS infections in China originated through unsafe donations—by 2010, Chinese government sources claimed that unsafe donation centers had been shut down and that all blood products were being tested for the virus before use.

A turning point in China’s official posture toward the AIDS epidemic may have come in 2003, when large parts of the country were essentially locked down during efforts to control a more short-term but also potentially lethal virus-caused infection, SARS (sudden acute respiratory syndrome). As the global reaction to SARS slowed international travel and domestic tourism in China to a trickle and seriously disrupted Chinese commerce, Chinese officials realized that having a large population of HIV-infected citizens could become an economic and human rights disaster.

My exposure to the AIDS epidemic and to efforts to contain it in China was extremely limited: the only time I saw any AIDS-related publicity was once during a 2006-2007 teaching assignment in rural Xinjiang—at the far end of the college campus, tucked away behind a line of trees, was a billboard cautioning of the dangers of unsafe sex, listing a telephone number someone could call for additional HIV/AIDS information.  A few of my Chinese teaching colleagues had heard vague stories of a young woman student who had become infected, subsequently forced out of school and shunned by her family.

China’s infected population has continued to grow, fueled by intravenous drug use and men having sex with men, but increasingly through unprotected heterosexual sex among sex workers and migrant laborers. The Chinese government has started promoting condom use as a safeguard against transmission, but the effectiveness of condom campaigns varies widely from region to region, and results are hard to verify. Among officially recognized victims of the disease, about a third are receiving antiretroviral drugs.

The year 2010 was the first in which AIDS was the leading cause of death from communicable diseases in China, passing tuberculosis and rabies, the former record holders. That year, over 7,700 Chinese died of AIDS. HIV/AIDS cases have been confirmed in all of China’s provinces, independent cities, and autonomous regions. As is the case in much of the rest of the world, China’s efforts to contain and reduce the HIV/AIDS epidemic can be spotty and inconsistent. Local customs, stigmatization of those infected, misinformation, some local governments’ reluctance to admit there is a problem, and the huge proportion of migrant, mostly male, laborers in the country, make developing effective overall strategies difficult.

One of the most visible spokespeople for HIV/AIDS awareness in China is James Chau, a young British-born journalist who has lived for the past decade in China. Chau became a U.N. AIDS goodwill ambassador in China in 2009. Since then, he has attended numerous international conferences on the disease, and has worked within China to educate the public about the disease and to reduce the stigma experienced by those infected with the virus.

If you have contacts in the HIV/AIDS community in China, perhaps you can use today as a reminder to provide monetary and moral support for ongoing efforts there to contain the disease and to treat its victims. Regardless of where any of us live or who we know, each can each contribute a small part to the multitude of solutions that will be needed to reduce the toll of this dreadful disease worldwide. Check the World AIDS Day website (http://www.worldaidsday.org) for ideas, or find your own way to contribute within your community.

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Simple Gifts

Posted on November 17, 2014 | Leave a comment

“Ruby” is a Chinese economic success story. Ruby grew up in poverty in a mountainous rural county about 5 hours’ drive across the mountains from the regional hospital in Ya’an, Sichuan, where she is now a doctor, a kidney disease specialist. Since her youth, she’s completed high school, university, and advanced training. She has earned enough to purchase an in-town apartment, one she shared with her aging parents when she wasn’t either on duty or catching a few hours’ sleep at the staff dormitory at the hospital between work shifts. She dresses well and enjoys travel, but has been somewhat limited in her leisure time because of work and family obligations. 

I first met Ruby at an autumn evening’s “English corner” session, open to students, staff, and town residents in Ya’an where my husband and I were spending the 2008-2009 academic year as foreign teachers at a local university. For much of the year, when she could get time off, Ruby practiced her English with us while she showed us around many of the tourist sites and natural areas closest to our university town.

Over the course of the years when I’ve traveled in China, living standards have improved tremendously.  The “three most wanteds” list that in the 1950’s included such basics as a bicycle, a radio, and leather shoes, more recently moved up to washing machine, mobile phone, television, computer, air conditioner, and even car for China’s burgeoning urban middle class.  The poverty rate throughout China, measured as those surviving on less than $1.25 per day,  decreased from 81% in 1981 to only a third as high, 27%, by 2012. In many urban areas, the rate is even lower. Still, there are pockets in the countryside that the new affluence seems largely to have passed by. Ruby’s hometown was one of these. It was inaccessible via major road. We never had a chance to see it during our year in Ya’an. Its isolation, we heard, reinforced the largely agrarian, hardscrabble existence of its inhabitants, who grew subsistence food crops plus fruit for regional markets.

After our teaching year was over, we kept up with Ruby intermittently by email.  On a later China visit, we reconnected. We were excited when she was able to arrange a weekend in the area where she’d grown up.  During Ruby’s childhood, settlements in Hanyuan County were mostly located in a fertile alluvial plain, tucked between successive ranges of the mountains of western Sichuan. Then came the double whammy of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake plus the impending relocation of all low-lying settlements to make way for an impoundment lake that would soon flood the valley, backed up behind a hydroelectric dam being built downstream.

By the time we got to Hanyuan, most low-lying areas were abandoned. A steep, raw new city was taking shape higher along the mountain slopes. We had a hot pot dinner at one of the few remaining lowland restaurants, then went to visit one of Ruby’s friends in her new apartment block in the new city.  Not many foreigners came to this part of the country, so we were a novelty.  On Sunday, before starting the long trek back to Ya’an, Ruby took us for a walk along one of the major streets. Locals came up to her and asked her who we were and why we were in Hanyuan—she replied that we were her friends, and that she’d brought us from Ya’an on a short visit to her hometown.

We were headed back uphill to the apartment block where her friend lived when still another group of locals approached us from behind.  Three little girls, dressed in warm colorful jackets against the chill, were out walking with their grandfather. The grandfather checked with Ruby to see who we were, then explained in local dialect to his granddaughters. After a block or so, the eldest girl walked up to Jim and took hold of his hand. A little later, the two younger girls, emboldened by their cousin’s example, came up beside me and each took one of my hands. Ruby used her cell phone to snap a low-resolution picture of the group of us—two foreigners, several local adults, and three adventuresome young Chinese girls, enjoying the simple gift of a weekend walk together.

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Better City, Better Life

Posted on October 20, 2014 | Leave a comment

“Better city, better life” was the theme and mantra of Expo 2010 Shanghai China, held from May 1 through October 31 of that year in one of China’s preeminent urban areas. This international exposition, the first since 1992, was extravagant in every way. My brief visit was a drop in the bucket of the 73,000,000 visitors to the fair, a record since attendance has been tracked. On a single day in October, 2010, over a million people passed through the Expo entrance turnstiles. During the three days in which I had a chance to visit, I barely scratched the surface of the 246 national and organizational pavilions that made up this biggest of all global expositions so far (both in land area and in number of exhibitors).

Most of the time I’ve spent in China, I’ve avoided large metropolitan areas, where crowding and pollution can be detrimental to both mental and physical health.  However, increasingly in China, and globally, humans live in cities. According to a 2014 update from the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, about 54% of the world’s population lived in cities. This is a big change from the 34% of global population that inhabited cities as recently as 1960. Asia is one of the most rapidly urbanizing regions. The small-scale Chinese farmer plowing his rice paddy with a water buffalo is increasingly a thing of the past.

When America was industrializing in the early 20th century, a popular song of the time wondered about the preferences of U.S. World War I veterans returning from service in Europe:  “How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree (Paris)?” The same can now be said for Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and numerous other Chinese metropolises. Especially for young men, the dislocations and changes in lifestyle that accompany moving to the city can be offset by increasing economic opportunities.

Urbanization is happening much more quickly in modern China and India than it did in Europe and North America last century. Those of us with rural or small-town roots may bemoan the loss of the so-called bucolic lifestyle we imaginatively remember from long-ago childhoods. What we too easily forget is the amount of hard physical labor required to do small-scale farming, or the isolation that can stalk those whose nearest neighbors may be out of sight.

Both the content of Expo 2010 and the rapid transitions of Chinese and of global populations toward urban life highlight some of the opportunities and challenges that city life presents.  How do rural-to-urban migrants develop and adapt appropriate urban life skills? How do we maintain ties with neighbors when we have millions of them? How do we create transportation systems that are convenient but minimally polluting?  How do we provide safe and reliable supplies of food and water when much of the land surface is sparsely peopled, and close to 2/3 of all humans live in urban centers of 100,000 people or more?  How do we avoid pandemics? Are there keys to sustaining “megacities” (of over 10 million population)? Are there limits to the population size of a viable urban center?

No current city, not even Shanghai, is an ideal model.  Some of Shanghai’s features were hastily and temporarily improved for the period of the exposition—factories were shut down or moved, construction of new subway lines was expedited, neighborhoods at or near the Expo site were either demolished or spruced up. Since the end of Expo, the city has had at least one spell, in December 2013, in which particulate air pollution reached such dangerous levels that school children were cautioned to stay indoors.

A transition to cleaner energy and more climate-friendly living styles is a needed part of “better city better life,”  in Shanghai, and in other cities worldwide. Still, Shanghai’s 2010 expo pointed out some fruitful avenues for future urbanization.

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Fall Foliage–“Huyang” Trees

Posted on October 6, 2014 | Leave a comment

Vermont has its maples, Colorado its aspens. The Taklamakan region of China has its “variegated leaf poplars,” known in Chinese as “huyang” trees.  These trees are desert-hardy, and have been spotted even deep within the Taklamakan.  Their leaves at different stages and on different parts of the tree can mimic poplar, willow, and even maple leaves. In the autumn, they turn a golden yellow, lighting up the area around them. Until I went to Xinjiang, I had never heard of these trees (also called “Euphrates poplars,” though not so often in sometimes ethnically tense Xinjiang).

Recently, the trees have become increasingly endangered, and I worry they may follow the trajectory of the American chestnut trees which once formed an important part of the deciduous forests of the eastern United States. During the early 20th century, nearly all American chestnuts succumbed to a fungal blight accidentally introduced from Asia—only a few isolated stands remain.  So far, no biological blight is affecting the variegated leaf poplars, but the incursion of more and more people into the areas where they’ve grown has put increasing pressure on these “trees of the desert.” 

Some of the characteristics that make them most adapted to their geographical region—deep, extensive roots and slow-decaying wood—have also made them most susceptible to human invasion. Their harvested wood is popular for building materials; their intrusive roots make them anathema to those constructing housing or irrigation projects near stands of the trees, whose roots over time will invade foundations and pipes.

The Chinese national television network, CCTV, in 2009 broadcast a 12 part series titled in English, “The Last Stand of the Euphrates Poplars.”  Shortly afterward, in 2010, the P.R.C. applied for UNESCO World Heritage status for parts of the Taklamakan/Tarim Basin region, including the Euphrates poplar’s extensive stands there as part of the justification for a designation:

“The Tarim Basin is the world’s core area of these poplar trees which cover 352,200 ha, accounting for 90% of their total area in China and 54.29% of the global distribution. The largest natural poplar trees in the world occur in the Tarim River drainage area and large areas of undisturbed poplar forests have been preserved in this region.”

As of early 2026, the application was still under review.

As a town resident in the Tarim River oasis settlement at Ala’er, Xinjiang during the school year 2006-2007, I got few initial chances to see these poplars up close. That changed one autumn weekend when a work colleague arranged a group day trip out into the desert. We packed up a small van with tarps, water, and a picnic lunch, then set out from town.  We stopped first at a fairly high set of sand dunes, took some pictures, and took turns horsing around and rolling down the sides of the dunes. A large trash heap near the dunes only slightly marred the idyllic scene. (Why bother with landfills when the desert winds will sooner or later cover your trash for you?) Even here there were a few poplars, their roots burrowing deep under the dunes.

Next we stopped at a construction site where several tributaries that flow out of the surrounding mountains meet the Tarim River. Since it was autumn, flow from the glacier-fed tributaries was minimal or nonexistent, but there were a lot of pipes and several dams—trying to capture as much of the water as possible. For our picnic site, we went downstream about a third of a mile to a large grove of poplars, golden and just starting to shed their leaves. There was a slight breeze, and the trees murmured in a way I associate with aspen groves in the American West.

It is possible that ancestors of the current trees developed as much as 65 million years ago. It is my hope that, despite our busy efforts to “conquer” the desert, these beautiful trees will continue to thrive where little else can for millions of years more.

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Music and Friendship

Posted on September 15, 2014 | Leave a comment

Poets and writers have long proclaimed music a universal language.  Whenever I’ve taught in China, I’ve incorporated music into my English lessons and programs.  But learning goes both ways—some of the first Chinese words I learned, beyond the very basic “ni hao,” “zai jian,” and “xie xie,” (hello, goodbye, and thank you), came through a song.

In 2002, during my first short teaching stint in Zhengzhou, capital city of central Henan Province, I was presenting a lesson about Chinese immigration to the United States. The first large-scale Chinese settlement in America, I told my students, came in the wake of the 1848 discovery of gold in California, along the U.S. West Coast across the Pacific Ocean from China. At that time, several thousand Chinese young men, mostly from the coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, crossed the ocean in search of “gold mountain.” China was undergoing hardship and turmoil—it seemed a good time to leave in search of a better life.

I used simple tools to supplement my lecture and to connect the students to these adventuresome ancestors of theirs. First I drew a rough outline map of the U.S., pointing out where California was. Then I wrote on the chalk board some lyrics of the folk song “Clementine,” honing in on vocabulary about “miners” and “49ers.”  After I explained some more about the California gold rush and sang parts of the Clementine lyric a couple of times, I invited the students to sing along—many did.

At that time, most Chinese students were still shy about asking questions in class, especially outside major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou. The school where I taught this lesson was a large public junior middle school (roughly equivalent to U.S. grades 7-9) in a mid-sized provincial capital. At the end of our singing, I saw several students looking puzzled. I was resigned to not knowing what had intrigued them. I expected them to wait quietly to see what this strange foreign teacher would do next. They surprised me. One of the bolder students raised his hand.

“Excuse me, teacher,” he began.  “We all know that tune, but it has different words.”

He and several of his cohorts then proceeded to teach me the Chinese “Happy New Year” song—“Xinnian Hao,” whose tune seems to have crossed the Pacific, possibly in both directions.

A bit later in my China travels, I was exposed to a classical Chinese lyric that has haunted me ever since:  “Dan Yuan Ren Chang Jiu,” loosely translatable as “Wishing We Last Forever.”  In the year 1076, Song dynasty poet Su Shi  composed the verse. At Mid-Autumn Festival (honoring the harvest moon, plus family and lovers’ reunions, occurring in September or early October by the Chinese lunar calendar), he spent the night drinking wine, looking at the full moon, and missing his long-lost brother. Toward morning, he wrote the characters of one of his best-known poems. With a modernized tune, the lyric was recorded in 1983 by Taiwanese singer Theresa Teng (Deng LiJun).  I first heard the song in 2007. At the end of my year’s teaching in 2009, my students sang me the song karaoke-style in farewell.  I’ve tried an Americanized adaptation below about long-distance friendships.  Click here for a link to the Theresa Teng Chinese version.

(To Friendship   —adapted by Jinny Batterson)

How bright the round moon shines—
Wine soaks this sorrow of mine,
How I long to see you,
Friends, just one more time.

The moon first waxes, then wanes,
‘Til just a sliver remains,
Riding high, cold, distant,
In the pre-dawn sky, just as lonesome as I.

Oceans may divide us,
Mountain ranges hide us,
Friendship’s still there.
Whether by pale moonlight
Or by noonday sunlight
We stay aware
Of others who care.

People have joys, sorrows, fears,
Journeys range both far and near.
Though we stay continents apart
And never meet again, treasured memories remain.

 

 

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Bristlecone Pine

Posted on March 27, 2014 | Leave a comment

Bristlecone Pine —by Jinny Batterson

(This poem was written in the late 1990’s when I attended a conference in western Colorado founded by one of my data processing mentors, Jerry Weinberg, with his wife Dani. Jerry, during the time that I knew him best, was beset by physical ailments of one kind or another, also jettisoning non-essential body parts to keep going. Though he hasn’t yet reached the millennial mark, he’s past 80, still writing, still distilling wisdom and sharing it with anyone who has time to pay attention. Jerry’s website is at www.geraldmweinberg.com. Check out some of his poetry, too.)

Solitary, silhouetted
Against a desert sky,
Its trunk twisted,
Its branches out of symmetry,
A mute testament
To the
Will to survive.
In dry years or decades,
It jettisons limbs, even trunk, to keep
Remaining life
Concentrated, capable of
Regeneration. In wet years
Or decades,
It bursts forth
In luxurious lopsided
Growth.
This is how it
Endures
For
Millennia.

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A Good Failure

Posted on September 12, 2013 | Leave a comment

(Generations run long in our family. My older grandfather was born in rural Mississippi in September, 1869. He lived until 1961, through immense changes in the political and social landscape which he puzzled to make sense of.  I hope this remembrance does him justice.)

“You can learn a lot from a good failure,” my grandpa used to say,
Whenever he could get anyone to listen, which was not that often.
He probably spoke from experience, as someone who went bust
During the Texas oil boom at the turn of the last century.

Undaunted, he moved furniture and family further north,
Though he never lost some of the regionalisms of his upbringing.
For the next 20 years or so, he plodded along as a Baltimore bookkeeper,
Counting other people’s money, until the Depression dried up even that.
He got odd jobs when he could, but mainly lived out the rest of a long life
Supported by the earnings of his wife, and later his children.

If that hurt his Southern male pride, he got over it.
He raised berries, which flourished, and pecan trees, which
Grew spindly and refused to bear fruit
In the Maryland climate. During the summer,
He sat in their shade in a rakish straw hat, waving a straw fan,
Telling his granddaughter stories of triumphs and failures.

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Born After the War

Posted on August 6, 2013 | Leave a comment

(“Hiroshima Day”, August 6, is not much celebrated in the U.S., though  I’ve been told that in Japan it is the occasion for solemn remembrances. In 2000, I had a chance to visit Hiroshima and see the A-Bomb dome, the Peace Museum, and the millions of paper cranes, symbols of peace and hope, sent there by school children from around the world. This musing was prompted by that visit.)

On its anniversary a decade ago, I gave a short commemorative presentation about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima–the first use of atomic weapons–on August 6, 1945.  My audience was attentive.  We all squirmed uncomfortably. After the subsequent silence, people began sharing their stories. Some older attendees had known A-bomb survivors personally.  Most remembered exactly what they were doing when they got news of the bombing–like those of my generation remember the JFK and MLK assassinations, or my children remember the Challenger spaceship disaster.

I’ve sometimes felt both gifted and cheated by the timing of my appearance in 1947, when the worst of World War II damage was starting to be hidden beneath sprouting weeds and aid programs, although the aftershocks were felt in the growing belligerence among former allies that later came to be called the “Cold War.”  During a 1950’s period of postwar U.S. uneasiness,  hunts were carried out for Communists, domestic and foreign. Perhaps their existence would help explain why, after our recent great resounding victories, so many felt so empty.

One of my grandfathers, the Rebel one, was also born not long after a war, in 1869. His early childhood was spent in a house occupied by Union troops who’d temporarily expropriated a Southern landscape almost as desolate as postwar Hiroshima.  As his brain softened with age, he sometimes relived that childhood, becoming again the scared white boy who dreaded the “n— down the road who carried a pistol for me.”

Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of those of us born after wars.  We are often the pampered progeny of parents determined to keep us out of harm’s way. They don’t want us to suffer through what they did.  Laudable as their efforts were and are, there are downside risks. Absent at least some suffering, we are all too apt to blunder through life, expecting all obstacles to be removed, planting the seeds of the next wars by blaming each other when stubborn boulders of prejudice, ego and ideology refuse to budge without great effort.

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Jonah’s Dilemma (The Curse of Being Heeded)

Posted on June 15, 2013 | Leave a comment

Jonah’s Dilemma (The Curse of Being Heeded)

(This entry is based partly on Bible stories I heard as a child, partly on a paraphrase of the original Biblical tale by Anne Herbert that I first read in the 1981 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog.  One of the downsides of being reform-minded is that we often don’t know how to react if/when the reforms we are so passionate about do get implemented.)

The Bible poses thorny problems, new to us over and over.
Take the story of Jonah. As children, we reveled in his adventures–
Being swallowed by a big fish, then spit out, alive
On a faraway shore.  Wow!

It’s not until much later (and sometimes never) that Jonah’s ethical problems
Begin to grab us.  Like the whale’s digestive system, they gnaw at us,
Leaching nourishment into our souls.

Most other Biblical prophets ranted at a reluctant public
Who refused to heed their warnings, getting their just desserts
In due season: being pulled apart by dogs, like Jezebel,
Or exiled to Babylon, like the Jews, or…
We’re pretty good at filling in the blanks.

Jonah didn’t want to rant and rave. He could see retribution coming
For Nineveh, and he did not want to risk being prophetic.

But being a prophet is a calling not dismissed easily.
Despite Jonah’s best efforts at evasion,
He was thrown among the people he was meant to warn.
He stuttered off his message, finding to his great surprise
That his audience was receptive.  What’s more, they were willing,
Even eager, to mend their ways.

They repented.

Which left Jonah in the lurch even worse than being barfed up
By a whale.  Where is the paragraph in the prophets’ manual
That explains what to do with a repentant public?
Jonah had no role models.
He did what most of us do when thoroughly frustrated–
He threw a tantrum, venting much of his stored up
Invective at a God who once again surpasses our
Addiction to pat solutions.

And God replied with a question, an important one:
Is there a possibility that someday, somehow, we, too

Can surpass our addiction to pat solutions?

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so……

Posted on April 12, 2013 | Comments Off on so……

This site, started in 2013, contains a variety of short and longer poems, along with some essays and travel narratives. Some were written for a specific occasion or about a specific person or place. Others were intended to be more general and to have a longer shelf life.  I post irregularly, but try to get an entry in at least every month or so. From time to time, I “prune” the blog to remove outdated entries and to update some which would be clearer with a few style changes. I hope an entry here or there may resonate with your experiences. Enjoy!

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