User Comments - xiao_liang

Posted on: Can You Use Chopsticks?

我真不喜欢我门去中国饭店和服务员不给筷子！

wǒ zhēn bù xǐ huan wǒ men qù zhōng guó fàn diàn hě fú wù yuán bù gěi wǒ kuài ze! 

Posted on: He's boring

hmn. 我的工作很无聊。。。所以我有时代替听Chinesepod :-p

wǒdegōngzuòwúliáo... suǒyǐwǒyǒushídàitìtīng Chinesepod 

Not sure of the use of 代替 there...

Posted on: Waiting for Food

Am I right in thinking you can say " 爱死你了" (ài sǐ nǐ le) - love you to death! 

But it's less grim than it sounds?

Posted on: The Left-handed Child

Love this story :)

Posted on: The Shanghai Literary Festival

Jeez. I just commented on what I thought was the reason (which you've agreed with here), then wrote up a piece of writing I mentioned I'd got it from. Why the attack? Just calm down. I'm not attacking China, not any government, I'm not interested in that. Stop being so reactionary. Of course people will look at a different culture through their own glasses. That's the only pair they've got. And the fact that this is a language learning site doesn't stop people posting facts, that's a ridiculous statement.

I think I'll just stick to learning Chinese eh.

Posted on: The Shanghai Literary Festival

To clarify. The tragedy is not that "less than a million" people have AIDS, it's that 300,000 people were given the disease by a botched government programme, which was covered up and denied.

And to bring it back on point, that sensitivity to AIDS may have been behind the reason for this author's denial of entry.

Posted on: The Shanghai Literary Festival

So you think the journalist who wrote that book after living for 20 years in China made up the facts already corroborated by several other posters in this list?

Posted on: The Shanghai Literary Festival

I think what's saddest about it, is the authorities will just have to play a waiting game. HIV is incredibly persistant and has an extreme morbidity rate. If they can control the spread of the disease through sexual transmission, all they will have to do is wait, and eventually the problem will "go away".

Posted on: Finishing Work for the Weekend

True. I suppose the english equivalent would be something like "well, I'm going to head off now"

Posted on: The Shanghai Literary Festival

Warning: depressing stuff ahead.

Extract from "China Road - One Man's Journey into the Heart of Modern China" by Rob Gifford.

"I'm heading for what are known as the AIDS villages of southern Henan. Foreign non-governmental organisations estimate that there are at least 300,000 people infected with HIV in Henan province alone, and the epidemic has been entirely caused, exascerbated and then covered up by the local Communist Party government.

AIDS is a problem that, in the Western mind, has not been largely associated with China. The epidemic that has decimated southern Africa has not yet reached such proportions in Asia, although the United Nations has warned that there could be 10 million cases in China by 2010 unless serious action is taken. China does have problems similar to those of the rest of the world when it comes to the drugs and sex trades, which are both growing rapidly. But Henan province has been the centre of another, perhaps even more shocking, source of HIV/AIDS: government-run schemes encouraging farmers to sell their blood.

When central government subsidies came to an end as China moved from the planned economy towards a more market economy in the early 1990s, local governments has to think of ways to raise their own money. The Department of Health in Henan came up with the idea of paying ordinary farmers to give blood, from which plasma could be extracted and sold to Western and Chinese pharmaceutical companies, who use it for making vaccines. The schemes were set up in other provinces too, but Henan's was on the largest scale, and consequently the worst affected.

Blood-selling stations were set up in small towns, and large mobile clinics travelled to villages, where farmers discovered they could make more money than they earned in a month every time they sold their blood. The news spread like wildfire. Unfortunately, so did the HIV virus.

A farmer would be taken into the blood donation van, and a needle would be placed in his arm. The extracted blood would go directly into a vat in the middle, where it would be mixed and the plasma extracted. Then, because Chinese people traditionally do not like to lose blood from their bodies, the blood would be pumped back into his arm.

When, in the late 1990s, strange rashes began appearing on the farmers' skin, local health workers had no idea what they were. Then, in 2000 and 2001, these peasants started to die. The local government would not allow any media coverage of what was going on, but in China's more open social climate, it is much more difficult these days for government officials to keep secets. A few reports were published by the more daring Chinese media, and soon foreign journalists, including myself, were visiting the villages undercover and gaining interviews with the AIDS sufferers. For several years, the central government refused to accept that there was a problem, but suddenly, at the end of 2004, the leaders in Beijing changed their stance and launched an initiative to tackle the problem head-on. That, however, has by no means solved the AIDS issue in Henan, because of the age-old difficulty of enforcing central government policies at the local level. Henan authorities don't want to look bad, so they do all they can to restrict any kind of access to the AIDS villages, even trying to stop doctors and officials sent by Beijing from doing their work."

There follows a rather harrowing account of his visit to the villages.