In more than two decades as China's most prominent anti-AIDS crusader, Wan Yanhai, 47, has been forced from his job in the federal health ministry and regularly harassed by government agents for boldly challenging the official secrecy and human-rights abuses of the ruling Communist Party. Wan fled China with his wife and young daughter last week to take refuge in Philadelphia at the home of an AIDS activist he met years ago on a visit to America.
Wan is the face, and voice, of Aizhixing, the Beijing institute he founded in 1994 to promote AIDS prevention and government accountability. In 2002, after Aizhixing spotlighted China's tainted blood banks, Wan was arrested on suspicion of "leaking state secrets," having published online a government report documenting the transfusion-borne spread of AIDS in Henan province. He was jailed for a month, but never formally charged.
In 2006, he was detained, and again released, ahead of a planned workshop on "Blood Safety, AIDS, and Legal Human Rights," which he was forced to cancel. He returned to work at Aizhixing under the government's ever-watchful eye.
He earned a bachelor of medicine degree in public health from Shanghai Medical University in the 1980s. From 1988 to 1994, he worked for the Chinese government, coordinating an AIDS hotline in the National Ministry of Health. He was driven from that job, he said, because he disagreed with Beijing's attempts to restrict distribution of information about the disease.
Wan and his wife, Wang Li Xuan, had contemplated going to another country in Asia, possibly India, but they settled on the United States because they already had multi-entry business visas to come here. (Source: Michael Matza, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 14, 2010).