Online Diary Describes Lonely Plight of People with AIDS in China

The 27-year-old man traces the beginning of his nightmare to a drunken night two years ago, when a colleague took him to one of Shanghai's dozens of illegal brothels disguised as beauty salons. Two months later, he learned he had the AIDS virus. Like many with AIDS in China, he has not told friends and family for fear of losing his job and shaming his parents. But many in China know about him anyway, because rather than suffer in silence, the university-educated engineer has begun chronicling his lonely struggle on the Internet. "My Final Battle," updated about twice a week on a Shanghai Web site, gives a rare look at life with AIDS in China. It also coincides with an abrupt switch of communist government policy from pretending there is no epidemic to confronting it head-on.

The diary of the man who calls himself Li Jiaming has created a sensation in online chat rooms and state media, drawing attention to discrimination against people with AIDS. The online diary has been visited 2.2 million times in a country with 27 million Internet users since the first entry appeared four months ago, the site's operators said. The writer tells of humiliations universally known in the world of AIDS, like the company that sacked a person with AIDS and then disinfected all the toilets, and of habits that evolve directly out of everyday Chinese life, such as not letting his lips touch his chopsticks when eating with friends from shared dishes. "I have learned special strategies that allow me to continue life with my friends," he said in a telephone interview arranged by the Web site's managers. He vows to live a normal life as long as possible, and then, "I will devise a way to make it look like I died a natural death. I can't bear to see my parents living under the accusing gaze of others." The site at www.rongshu.com requires Chinese character software.

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