Killer Inspires Drive Against Hepatitis Bias

His father died when he was 12. His mother gave up the chance to remarry and sold tickets at the local cinema to put him through college.

Until a few months ago, Zhou Yichao’s goal -- to get a good job and support his mother -- seemed well within reach.

He had just taken the public servant exam in his hometown of Jiaxing city and scored among the very top.

His face-to-face interview could only help his prospects, he knew, because his potential employers also would be impressed by his tall, athletic build and preppy good manners.

Then something the 22-year-old couldn’t have anticipated changed everything.

His application was rejected on the basis that he tested positive for hepatitis B, a liver disease he never knew he had. With few exceptions, Chinese government agencies are legally permitted to weed out candidates based on the health of their livers.

Zhou bought a fruit carving knife, found the two officials who rejected his application and stabbed one to death and seriously wounded the other.

Today Zhou sits on death row. But instead of igniting outrage, he has inspired a national movement against discriminatory hiring practices and the lack of legal redress.

“The outcome of this case could affect the entire future of people with hepatitis in China,” said Bi Xuejun, Zhou’s lawyer, who is fighting to reduce the death sentence to life imprisonment. “Unfair discrimination against a whole segment of society could push some people to commit extreme antisocial acts. This is a serious social problem. Zhou has basically sacrificed his own life to bring attention to this issue.”

More than 120 million people, or about 10% of the Chinese population, are chronic carriers of the disease. Many, like Zhou, show no symptoms and should not pose a threat to their co-workers.

Hepatitis B is spread through the exchange of bodily fluids, such as with contaminated blood, unprotected sex, shared needles and infected-mother-to-newborn contact. It can’t be contracted through casual contact such as shaking hands.

Full-blown hepatitis B causes liver failure and death. More than a million people die from the disease every year, about a third of them Chinese.

Like HIV/AIDS, there is no cure for the illness. Unlike AIDS, however, hepatitis B is preventable with a simple vaccine. The Chinese government is stepping up efforts to immunize newborns and gradually reduce the overall infected population, but inoculating the entire population has proved far tougher than tolerating widespread discrimination, advocates say.

“Chinese know a lot more about AIDS because at least there are campaigns that teach people about how it is spread,” said Zhang Xianzhu, another recent college graduate rejected by a state employer after his hepatitis B test. “But there are no campaigns to educate them about hepatitis, how it’s caught and spread. And because it is not as deadly as AIDS, it has totally been neglected.”

As China begins to pay more attention to the plight of AIDS patients and public health in general after last year’s deadly SARS outbreak, hepatitis is beginning to inch toward the forefront of public debate.

Zhou’s shocking revenge killing and fear of more like it have stirred concern about health-related job discrimination and its potential to cause social instability as people who lose faith in the system take matters into their own hands.

“We are talking about people driven by the power of despair,” said a hepatitis B carrier who is afraid to reveal his real name for fear of jeopardizing his job. “Without work, how can we survive? Society has to do something to reduce the social pressure and preserve our basic human rights.”

Under the old cradle-to-grave socialist system, individuals were assigned to job units, and few employers bothered to check the medical health of someone they couldn’t fire anyway.

In China’s new capitalist-style economy, only the very best, or the physically fit, are chosen for jobs.

In 2003, some 2 million new college graduates were unleashed on a job market in which 100 million to 200 million people are out of work.

Height, marriage and health status can all be considered by employers in China.

To cope, some with hepatitis cheat, hiring healthy people to take the required physical, or hop from job to job to avoid detection. The lucky go overseas, where privacy laws forbid employers to ask such questions. Many more go back where they came from, usually rural areas where they try to forget they ever earned a college diploma. Some resign themselves to a life of farming or other manual labor.

But social discrimination and medical ignorance also go beyond the job market. A new Web site for hepatitis carriers is filled with horror stories. One mother who is a carrier and passed the disease to her child said her local kindergartens refused to accept anyone who tested positive for the virus. After several rejections, she had to send her 3-year-old to live with her grandmother in the countryside.

Another carrier wrote that her doctor was worried he might be contaminated if he touched the lab report with the positive test result on it. He used a pen to push it over to her. When the patient’s tears fell on his desk, he grabbed an alcohol wipe to disinfect the area.

Afraid to betray their health status, some carriers never date or marry. Others keep it from their spouses.

Zhang, rejected for a government job after his hepatitis B test in November, filed the country’s first discrimination lawsuit against the government.

“I wanted to do something for this community,” Zhang said. “I know it is not easy for the people to sue the government, and many people are afraid to do it. But I did it because there are so many people like me locked out of jobs and rotting in their little dark corners of the world. We face a crisis of survival.”

Also in November, 1,611 hepatitis B carriers signed a petition to the National People’s Congress, the State Council and three high-ranking officials, calling for an end to government job discrimination, which they say violates the Chinese constitution. Organizers say many more carriers would have signed but couldn’t risk making their names public.

That public outpouring is all that Zhou’s 51-year-old mother has to hang her hopes on.

Since Zhou was arrested in April, his mother has not been permitted to visit. She caught a glimpse of her son, with iron chains dragging from his ankles, during his trial in June. The verdict and death sentence came in September.

“I couldn’t handle it when I heard the sentence,” Ye Yushu said in a voice barely audible inside the cold and empty apartment where she had waited for her son to move back home after graduation. “We know what he did was wrong. But society has to share a little bit of the blame, too, so my son doesn’t have to bear all of this himself.”

Zhou’s lawyer, Bi, says reversing a death sentence is not easy and it could be some time before they hear back about it.

“China’s death penalty rate is the highest in the world,” Bi said. “An eye for an eye is an ancient practice. But the world is changing. It’s time for China to keep up with civilized development.”

These days, Ye said, the only reason she goes outside is to ride her old bicycle, rain or shine, to the local detention center, just to linger outside its high walls.

“My son is inside,” she whispered. “I just look from the outside. To feel close to him.”

*

Zhang Xiuying of The Times’ Shanghai Bureau contributed to this report.