A Chinese AIDS activist says authorities have forced her to leave Beijing and return to her home province after she attended ceremonies marking World AIDS Day in the capital.
Li Xige tells VOA (Mandarin Service) that authorities forcibly removed her from her hotel in Beijing, and police escorted her home to central Henan province on Tuesday.
Li says she remains under house arrest and is unable to leave her home. Li, who campaigns for compensation for victims of infected blood transfusions in Henan, says she will continue her work for Chinese AIDS victims there. If necessary, she says she will find a way to escape from her home again.
That was how she got to attend this week's World AIDS Day event in Bejing. She also traveled to the capital to try and petition courts on behalf of AIDS patients in Henan.
Li is HIV positive and contracted the disease in 1995 through a blood transfusion.
She passed the disease on to her daughters, one of whom died of AIDS.
Henan is one of the epicenters of China's AIDS epidemic, where tens of thousands of villagers were infected with HIV in the 1990s by an unsanitary blood-buying industry.
Chinese officials say they are being more open in their handling of the disease, but AIDS still remains a sensitive issue.
Wan Yanhai, director of an AIDS awareness and education group in Beijing, criticized authorities for putting so much effort into going after a law-abiding citizen. Wan says this is one of the biggest obstacles to the AIDS prevention efforts in China.
གཟའ་ཕུར་བུ། ༢༠༢༤/༠༤/༢༥