VULNERABLE: The government has taken measures to ensure migrant workers are not victimized by the economic slowdown (WU CHANGQING)

Help Makes a Difference

December 1 marked the 21st World Aids Day. According to the Ministry of Health, 700,000 Chinese people are living with HIV/AIDS, of whom 440,000 do not know they are infected.

The existence of 440,000 unknown HIV infected people poses a huge challenge to public health. Those who do not know they are already infected risk spreading the virus further, but the government has no target in dealing with this problem.

It is surprising that so many people living with HIV/AIDS in China are unaware of their health status. Why? A major reason is that many possible infectors are afraid of being discriminated against and so refuse to be examined. Moreover, a large number of people living with HIV/AIDS are involved in prostitution, drug addiction or homosexual affairs, and are marginalized by society. They are living under heavy psychological pressure. It's difficult for them to expose themselves to society.

Protection for people living with HIV/AIDS is still insufficient in China. If they make public their health status, these people risk losing their job and even their family is likely to look down on them. Because of this, some infected people who have already been in touch with health authorities eventually disappear.

The Chinese Government is intensifying its efforts to deal with HIV/AIDS. It is important to remove the public's misunderstandings of the disease and reduce discrimination against people living with the virus, so that the infected people have a better environment to live in.

The Beijing News

Short-lived Schools

In the late 1990s, when the nine-year compulsory education was basically universalized in China, Changyang County in central China's Hubei Province had 500 middle and primary schools, 76 of which were so-called Hope Schools that were built with charity money donated by people throughout the country. Within 10 years, the county's schools diminished to 94, of which 58 are Hope Schools yet. It is also reported that Changyang still has 17.8 million yuan ($2.6 million) in education loan to pay off. That is to say, in order to achieve the mandatory 99 percent enrollment rate for school-age children more than a decade ago, the impoverished county had to build hundreds of schools with borrowed money. But now most of them have stopped operating under the heavy loan pressure.