China Places AIDS Activist Under House Arrest

By Jim Yardley | The New York Times
February 6, 2007

BEIJING, Feb. 5 — A retired Chinese doctor acclaimed for helping people with AIDS has been placed under house arrest to stop her from traveling to the United States to receive an award from a nonprofit group connected to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a friend of the doctor said Monday.

The doctor, Gao Yaojie, has been confined to her apartment in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou since Feb. 1, according to her friend, Hu Jia, himself a well-known advocate for people with AIDS. Friends and family members who have tried to visit Dr. Gao have found police officers outside her apartment, Mr. Hu said. Dr. Gao, 79, is apparently being confined alone.

“Now, her phone is cut off,” said Mr. Hu, who has spoken to Dr. Gao’s relatives. “She can’t even call out for help if something goes wrong.”

Dr. Gao was notified in October that she would be honored by the Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nonprofit women’s advocacy group. She is one of four Chinese women being recognized at a March 14 ceremony in Washington, which will also honor women from India, Guatemala and Sudan. Mrs. Clinton, a New York Democrat, is an honorary co-chairwoman of the group, along with Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas.

Wenchi Yu Perkins, director of the group’s human rights program, said friends and acquaintances of Dr. Gao notified her on Monday of the house arrest. Ms. Perkins said she was surprised because Vital Voices had consulted with Chinese officials, including officials at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, about honoring Dr. Gao. No one had raised any objections, she said. “We hope this is a misunderstanding,” she added.

Dr. Gao was supposed to fly to Beijing on Sunday for a Monday appointment at the United States Embassy to process a visa to travel to Washington. But Susan Stevenson, a spokeswoman at the embassy, said Dr. Gao missed her appointment.

“We have raised Dr. Gao’s case with China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” Ms. Stevenson said.

Dr. Gao gained international attention after she helped expose a blood-selling program in central China that infected tens of thousands of farmers with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, during the 1990s. She spent years traveling to villages in her native Henan Province, handing out information about AIDS, helping orphans and dispensing medicine. She is among a handful of advocates whose work is credited with helping to force the Chinese government to confront the spread of H.I.V.

Her work has also made her a marked woman, at times. Until a few years ago, security agents from Henan often followed her. In past interviews, she said she assumed that her telephone was tapped. In 2001, she was not allowed to travel to Washington to receive an international award for her work on AIDS.

More recently, though, the pressure had eased, a shift that coincided with more open central government attitudes toward AIDS. She has been allowed to speak at medical conferences and has been regularly profiled in the Chinese news media.

But Henan officials apparently did not want her to attend a prominent event like the one in Washington. “They tried to persuade her not to go to America and meet Hillary Clinton,” Mr. Hu said. “She refused, and then the police appeared.”

A spokesman for the Zhengzhou Public Security Bureau declined to comment. A Henan provincial spokesman said, “I don’t know about this.”