China’s brand-name battle against AIDS

Trainer Ma Guohui has just introduced a roomful of young hairstylists to the chemistry of hair. Next up: HIV/AIDS.

Ma is on the front line of an international business campaign aimed at helping stop the spread of the deadly disease. In addition to promoting L’Oreal products, the immaculately coiffed Ma hopes to turn her Chinese students into scissor-wielding ambassadors for safe sex and tolerance. Words such as “condom” and “intravenous drug use” roll off her tongue as easily as the names of popular L’Oreal items.

Less than 15 years ago, the Chinese government still claimed acquired immune deficiency syndrome was a foreigner’s illness. People called it aizhibing, or “love capitalism disease.”

But the numbers eventually became impossible to ignore. Though the percentage of China’s population infected with the human immunodeficiency virus is relatively small, the caseload has been growing rapidly, according to the United Nations’ latest report on HIV/AIDS. China reported 183,733 new cases of HIV in the year ending Oct. 31, 2006, a 30% increase over the previous year.

Embarrassed by criticism of their handling of the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and intent on averting an AIDS crisis similar to that facing such countries as South Africa, officials in Beijing have shifted gears. Now, they are aggressively recruiting foreign companies, grass-roots organizations and trade unions to join the battle against AIDS, encouraging such programs as L’Oreal’s recently launched Red Ribbon campaign for HIV/AIDS.

By enlisting organizations that have influence with consumers or have large workforces, the government hopes it can reach vulnerable groups more quickly. This has also enabled global companies to introduce China to corporate social activism, a concept that is well developed in other parts of the world but new to this country.

“The Chinese government is much more open than before,” said Lan Zhenzhen, a L’Oreal spokeswoman based in Shanghai. It was shortly after the SARS outbreak that the Chinese government launched an aggressive AIDS education campaign and began offering free retroviral drugs, voluntary counseling and testing, and drugs to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission.

Thanks to that publicity blitz, many Chinese understand the basics of HIV and how the disease is transmitted, said Richard Howard, chief technical advisor for the Beijing office of the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency devoted to worker issues. The Chinese government’s most pressing concern is slowing the spread of the disease from high-risk groups such as prostitutes and intravenous drug users to the general population.

Some issues remain off-limits, though the lines aren’t always clear. After reportedly being held under virtual house arrest for weeks, prominent AIDS activist Gao Yaojie was allowed to travel to Beijing last month to apply for a visa to visit the United States, according to media reports.

She had been invited to Washington by Vital Voices Global Partnership, an international women’s group, to be honored for her pioneering AIDS work.

Gao played a key role in exposing a blood-selling scheme in which thousands of poor villagers in Henan province were infected with HIV in the late 1990s.

Local officials had tried to prevent her from making the trip to the U.S. The blood-selling scandal remains a politically sensitive subject for China’s leaders because it exposed the seamier side of a booming economy that has left the poorest slice of the population without jobs or adequate healthcare.

In other ways, however, the government is tackling the issue. Last year, it passed a regulation prohibiting the firing of employees who are HIV-positive or have AIDS. China Railway Construction Corp., which has more than 200,000 employees, was the first state-owned company to establish a policy against AIDS discrimination and set up AIDS education programs at some work sites, Howard said.

The Chinese government, in partnership with the International Labor Organization, the Chinese Enterprise Confederation and the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions, launched a program in January to make AIDS education available in the workplace. The U.S. Department of Labor provided a $3.5-million grant to support the program, which will focus initially on migrant workers from rural China, who are more likely to engage in risky activities such as unprotected sex.

“There are 200 million people moving from rural to urban areas to get jobs,” Howard said. “There’s the potential for a huge jump from high-risk groups to the rest of the population.”

In the past, people infected with AIDS have been kicked out of their homes and shunned by their co-workers, said Thomas Cai, the founder of AIDS Care China, a nonprofit group that helps AIDS patients find treatment and housing. Cai said that when he tried to set up an AIDS hospice in the southern city of Guangzhou, he was forced to move three times in three months after neighbors, sometimes aided by the police, protested to local officials.

“In China, on the issue of HIV/AIDS, the initial progress was made in Beijing because people in the ministries were working with U.N. people and the international community,” said Cai, a retired businessman. “When you get down to the lower level, people still have a different mind-set.”

Having well-known companies such as L’Oreal join the AIDS campaign could be helpful, Cai said, because they can reach a different slice of the population, such as wealthy Chinese businessmen who pay for sex. Though prostitution is illegal in China, it is a growth industry, particularly in the booming coastal areas.

L’Oreal belongs to the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, a nonprofit group based in New York. The coalition got its start in South Africa, where companies including the De Beers Group, the diamond giant, began establishing AIDS education and treatment programs after their work forces were devastated by HIV. There, the economic toll was impossible to ignore: Companies had to hire two people to fill each job because the death rate was so high.

Tailoring programs to individual countries is critical, said Michael Shiu, head of the coalition’s China program, which was launched in 2005. His office has organized AIDS education sessions at construction sites and produced public service announcements using spokesmen such as basketball legend Magic Johnson, a leading AIDS activist since he tested positive for HIV in 1991, and Yao Ming, the Chinese NBA star. It is raising funds to produce playing cards imprinted with AIDS information that will be distributed to the million-plus migrant workers expected to head home for a major holiday in May.

“If we give them fliers, they’ll throw them away,” said Shiu, a retired businessman. “If we give them bars of soap, they’ll discard them. But playing cards, they will keep them and play with them.... It might have some lasting effect.”

Privately owned Chinese firms are also slowly starting to get involved in these efforts, often at the urging of their foreign business partners, said Neeraj Mistry, the coalition’s New York-based technical director. He said Gap, the San Francisco-based clothing firm, has helped its Chinese-owned suppliers in Lesotho, one of Africa’s hardest-hit countries, establish AIDS treatment programs.

China’s beauty salons, where customers can get a shampoo, a head and shoulder massage and a haircut for less than $10, provide an extensive network for spreading the news. Though most are legitimate operations, beauty salons, massage parlors and karaoke clubs sometimes operate as fronts for prostitution.

In addition to providing HIV/AIDS training to new stylists, L’Oreal, which has introduced the program in other countries, has begun distributing name tags and posters emblazoned with a red-ribbon logo to the 11,000 high-end salons using its products in China. The company hopes the publicity will make it easier for its hairstylists, more than half of whom are men, to broach sensitive topics such as homosexuality or safe sex with their largely female clientele.

“Having the posters in the salon, this creates a safe atmosphere,” said Lan, the L’Oreal spokeswoman. “People can ask questions. They can talk about AIDS.”

Yu Kai, a stylist who runs a sleek, upscale retro-Chinese salon in Beijing, with a clientele including singer-actress A Duo and contestants from the popular “Super Girls” television show, says he used to be afraid of AIDS. The 36-year-old Yu, sporting a striking angular haircut, said he welcomed the chance to use his celebrity status, including four salons and a hairstyling school, to share what he’d learned with others.

“People are still very scared,” he said. “I do think if we can open up a space for it, and they are encouraged to talk about it, that will change.”

evelyn.iritani@latimes.com