Chinese prostitutes shun condoms

BEIJING - MORE than half of Beijing's prostitutes do not use condoms despite sexual transmission having replaced drug use as the most common infection route for HIV, state media said on Tuesday.
Just 47 per cent of the 90,000 sex workers in China's capital used condoms, the official Xinhua news agency quoted Mr Fang Laiying, director of the municipal public health bureau, as saying.
Sexual transmission has also replaced intravenous drug use as the most common transmission route for the HIV virus for the first time in Beijing, accounting for 55 per cent of infections, the report said.But the infection rate among the city's prostitutes was unknown as Beijing does not provide a testing programme.
Free condoms are already provided in 22,000 venues in China's capital, including hotels and holiday resorts, and nearly 3,000 vending machines have been installed in entertainment sites, Xinhua said.
Condom machines are also to be installed at construction sites which employ more than 500 workers by the end of the year, the director was quoted as saying.
Beijing had reported 5,635 instances of people living with Aids or HIV by Nov 1 since the first case was reported in 1985, of which 75 per cent were from other regions in China, Xinhua said.
At the end of 2007, China had around 700,000 people living with HIV, including an estimated 85,000 who had developed Aids, according to Xinhua.
Campaigners have previously warned that the true figure could be up to 10 times higher.
Thousands were infected during the 1990s through tainted transfusions at illegal blood collection stations, but the focus of attention is now shifting to high risk groups such as gay men and sex.

Japan:No compensation for Chinese 'comfort women'

A Japanese court on Friday rejected appeals by two Chinese women forced to serve as sex slaves for Japan's army during World War II, when both were teenagers.
An exhibition of chinese comfort women who were forced to serve Japanese army during World War. [Newsphoto]The two women, Guo Xicui and Hou Qiaolian from China's Shanxi province, filed the original suit in 1996, seeking 20 million yen (US$190,000) in compensation for their suffering, saying they were repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers posted in China during the war.
Guo was 15 years old at the time, and Hou was 13.
Hou died four years ago, and a relative has taken over her legal action.
On Friday, the Tokyo High Court upheld an earlier district court ruling rejecting their demands, said court spokesman Koji Suwabe. He refused to give further details.
High court Judge Hiromu Emi supported the 2002 district court ruling that the Japanese government does not have to pay them damages because China had waived a right to seek compensation from Japan under a 1952 peace treaty, Kyodo news agency reported.
A 20-year statute of limitations on such cases has also expired, Kyodo said.
The case could still be appealed in Japan's Supreme Court, the island country's highest, but it was not clear on Friday whether the plaintiffs planned to try.
In 2002, the Tokyo District Court had ruled that Japan's current government is not responsible for what wartime rulers had done under the prewar constitution.
The two women claim the Japanese army abducted them in 1942 during Japan's occupation of China and other parts of Asia, confined and raped them every day for about a month.
The district court judge had acknowledged that the brutality has left the women with post-traumatic stress disorder, Kyodo reported.
But on Friday, the high court judge said what the sexual assault against them was not systematically conducted or authorized by the Japanese government.
Historians say the Japanese forced up to 200,000 women, mostly Koreans but also Filipinos, Chinese and Dutch, into sexual slavery during World War II.
Dozens of court cases seeking compensation from Asia's World War II-era sex slaves and forced laborers are still pending in Japan.

Gays Living in Secrecy

BEIJING (UPI) -- Like most Chinese homosexuals, Han Yue strives to keep his secret from all but a close circle of gay friends. Like others, his biggest fear is that someone, someday, might find out he is gay.
``I've lived with this deep fear of discovery for years, and it knocks all the self-confidence out of you,'' he says, looking much older than his 32 years. ``Now I just feel inferior.''
Han Yue, a pseudonym, has been arrested twice. Once the police beat him and then informed his boss, costing him a promising job as a clerk at the Ministry of Culture.
His first homosexual encounter at 16 was snatched in the dark during a violent earthquake in 1976 that knocked out Beijing's electricity supply.
Subsequent encounters took place in parks, toilets and once at the so-called ``Democracy Wall'' in Beijing which, he says, was a favored meeting point for homosexuals during the brief democracy movement in 1979.
Han Yue is unsure of how many sexual partners he has had, but he knows the figure is high. He knows he has never used a condom and he knows, but does not care, about AIDS.
``Most of us think, 'The sooner I get it, the sooner I'll be dead,''' he said. ``We wouldn't think like that if we hadn't been hurt so badly.''
Now he shares a cramped Beijing flat with his mother. But he leaves every Lunar New Year -- China's equivalent of Christmas when families come together -- because his elder brother a few years back stumbled across a private diary recording his homosexual encounters.
``If I'm there at New Year my brother will eat, then he'll drink, then he could start talking about me and I would be finished,'' he says.
In secret, he attends ``Men's World,'' China's first support group for gay men set up in late 1992. But he is skeptical of recent official attempts to publicize the existence of homosexuality in China.
``The newspapers talk about how hard it is abroad, about how gays in America and Europe are mistreated, but they never talk about how hard it is for Chinese homosexuals,'' he said. ``We don't live like human beings. We live the life of ghosts.''
``The Forest of Ghosts'' also is the title for a book Han Yue has written recalling his experiences and those of gay friends. Stories of arrest and beatings at the hands of the police that, he says, happen every day.
The book includes a particularly disturbing passage describing the arrest and rape of one of his gay companions by members of the People's Militia, the volunteer civilian force that often patrols homosexual haunts.
``It broke him,'' Han Yue recalls. ``He wanted to commit suicide.'' ``The Forest of Ghosts'' has attracted the interest of a state-run publishing firm in south China's freewheeling Hainan Province, but so far the company's managers say the book is too sensitive to put on the market.
To Han Yue, their decision comes as little surprise. ``This is still China,'' he said. ``I really love my country like I love my mother, but she's not perfect and in some respects I hate her with all my heart.''