China's Top AIDS Activist Missing; Arrest Is Suspected

China's most prominent AIDS activist, Dr. Wan Yanhai, has disappeared and is believed to have been detained by police, relatives and human rights groups say. Wan, a former Chinese health official who was fired after he took up the causes of gay rights and AIDS in the mid-1990's, was instrumental in exposing the AIDS epidemic centered in Henan Province, where as many as a million poor farmers were infected through unsanitary blood collections schemes.

Wan divides his time between China and the United States, where his wife is a student. He was last seen attending a gay and lesbian film screening Saturday in Beijing. Friends have gone to the Public Security Bureau there to demand his release, according to the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Hong Kong. All attempts by his wife, Su Zhaosheng, to contact him by telephone and e-mail have been fruitless.

This summer, Wan and his few volunteers in China have come under increasing surveillance and harassment as his projects became more ambitious -- for example, helping groups of people with AIDS organize petitions pushing the government to provide treatment. Security personnel have sometimes questioned those with even brief contact with Wan, and his group, AIDS Action Project, was forced to vacate its office at a Beijing academic institute.

Wan may have given State Security authorities an excuse to take further action last week by posting on his Web site an internal document by health authorities in Henan that included statistics of the HIV epidemic there. The authorities might contend that the document was a state secret, speculated some experts involved with HIV issues in China. Last week, the Health Ministry received two petitions, which Wan's group helped to prepare, from farmers with AIDS in rural China demanding treatment. Villagers, having sold their blood at the behest of local medical authorities at government-approved blood stations, had a right to compensation, the petition said.

If Wan has been detained under state secrets charges, he could be held for a long period without explanation or an attorney. Convictions on such charges almost always carry long prison terms.

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