New School doctoral candidate Carol Wang, supervised by Dr. Miriam Ticktin, will investigate China's transition to a liberal market economy, a subject of much scholarly and popular discussion, given its wide-reaching impact on individuals, the environment, and global exchange. This research considers the effects of China's economic transition through AIDS activism, a phenomenon that links the rise of consumer entitlements, the spread of contagious disease, and the influence of international public health and human rights in post-reform China. The research will focus on the emergence of politically engaged HIV-positive individuals and the ways in which they are drawing from international discourses to reframe an epidemiological concern as a problem of human and legal rights.
The project will utilize social science methods, including twelve months of participant observation in Beijing and other China locations; structured and semi-structured interviews with Chinese HIV/AIDS activists, Euro-American human rights trainers, and others; and textual analysis of written materials. These methods will allow the researcher to address the multi-directional interconnections between HIV/AIDS and human rights, two global forces that have crossed China's borders as indirect results of state economic policy.
This research will bring law and medicine into the same field of inquiry, and will examine how these two overlapping and yet often contradictory regimes of expertise come together as civil society groups engage in processes of professionalization. This research will also illustrate the evolution of China's health care and legal systems during economic liberalization. By examining the situation through the eyes of those who must navigate these bureaucracies, this study may be helpful to national policymakers as well as international agencies invested in the development of these systems. This research is co-funded by the Cultural Anthropology program and the Law and Social Sciences program and will contribute to the training of a graduate student.
The Chinese AIDS epidemic’s unusual trajectory played a significant role in shaping the limits and possibilities of activism in reform-era China, even beyond AIDS. As a result of the surge of international interest and AIDS funding into China, AIDS became the aegis of mobilization on issues beyond its immediate scope. The LGBT movement fed from the "AIDS rice bowl," as did organizers around discrimination and criminalized populations such as sex workers and injecting drug users. Idealistic young college graduates, searching for vocations with meaning, cut their teeth on HIV/AIDS. Many activists who are well known today for their wide-ranging work on disability, environmental pollution, housing, and eviction got their start here. Foreign funders interested in promoting democracy and the growth of civil society in China directed their grants to AIDS groups, further cementing the linkages between money, political activism, and the epidemic. My interest in China began with activism, and activism led me to AIDS. But AIDS, and the activism it generated, turned out to be about much more than just a story about contention on the margins. First, AIDS activism does inform us richly about what motivates those who are intentionally political, in a time when most are not. As one of the most highly developed spheres of activism in reform-era China, it includes a spectrum of mobilization activities that range in scope from the personal and local to the collective and national. These varied contexts provide ample opportunities to explore the complex and often contradictory motivations, ideals, and inevitabilities that propel people towards, and then to remain in, activism. But it also does much more. It shows us that to be political during this time is a complex matter, and demonstrates vividly the ways that activism exists within and responds to the demands of economic reality. AIDS activism offers a unique glimpse into the role of market incentives in political activism, and the ways that they are entangled with personal, emotional, or communal aspirations. There are two dominant bodies of literature about individuals in reform-era China: one that puts forth a vision of the wealth-driven, apolitical lives of the growing middle class, and another dedicated to the ongoing political struggles that persist among the underclasses. This project, an ethnography of Chinese AIDS activism, seems to fit easily into this latter category: it is about people who are outcasts, and those who have chosen an uneasy path of dissent that most try hard to avoid. It is situated in a period of market ascendancy in Chinese history, but focuses on the abuses of the sovereign and the weapons available to those who would fight back. It is, on the face of it, a story of political mobilization rather than private or economic self-actualization. But the individuals in these political communities are not anchored to their identities as activists to the exclusion of their other selves. They too are embodiments of self-enterprising, desiring, and consumer subjects. Neither are they isolated by their political undertakings; their active participation in popular culture, market trends and leisure activities show that contention is but one aspect of their lives. In this sense, the world of AIDS activism is that of Chinese society writ in miniature: it is people living in uncertain times attempting to define who they are and what matters to them. It is a struggle to understand the limits of political engagement and inquiry, but in a way that remains open to the possibilities for dissent made imaginable by the era of the market and its profit-driven activities. It provides us an opportunity to look beyond bifurcated frames to gain a more tactile understanding of the present moment.
