Securitizing HIV/AIDS: a game changer in state-societal relations in China?

Lo, Catherine Yuk-ping

The Chinese government started addressing the HIV/ AIDS problem after years of denial and underestimation of the HIV/AIDS prevalence in the country, especially among the most-at-risk populations (MARPs) including injecting drug users (IDUs), female sex workers (FSW), and men who have sex with men (MSM) [8] . However, national HIV/AIDS policies in the early years were very much driven in a top-down manner with government institutions (i.e. mainly the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [China CDC hereinafter] ) playing a leading role and with limited engagement of the "third sector" [9, 10] . Given the association of the disease with behaviors that are legally or socially unacceptable in the country (i.e., commercial sex work, injecting drug use, and men having sex with men), HIV/AIDS high-risk individuals refrain from using the related services provided by the government agencies because they wish to avoid being seized or humiliated by public security officials or by thugs hired by local officials [11] . In this regard, GÃ¥semyr claimed that the emergence of HIV/AIDS-focused non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 1 in China during the early 1990s could fill the capacity gap of the government by implementing national HIV/AIDS policies and providing the related services for those MARPs that are hard to reach by the authorities [12] . Considering the low priority of health policies since the economic reform, the limitation of the "third sector" activity permitted in authoritarian China, together with the political sensitivity of the HIV/AIDS problem in the country, it is believed that the involvement of HIV/AIDS-related NGOs in China would be largely limited. This is however not the case. Over the last 15 years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of HIV/AIDS-focused NGOs operating in China. While GÃ¥semyr argued that the growth of HIV/ AIDS-related NGOs is mainly attributed to the devastating health crisis of SARS in China and the new Chinese leadership in 2003 [12] , the previous work cannot explain why a high degree of political recognition was observed in solely HIV/AIDS NGOs, instead of other health NGOs, such as TB or cancer NGOs in China. This article aims to fill this research gap with regard to the proliferation of HIV/AIDS-focused NGOs in China with the use of the securitization framework in the field of IR.