The high cost of being a whistleblower in China
Al Jazeera
While the right to report wrongdoing is recognised in the Chinese constitution, it comes with strict limits.
New York – In the early 1990s, a mysterious illness began to spread rapidly among villagers across several provinces in central China.
At the time, HIV/AIDS had already emerged in other parts of the world, including Europe and the United States, where cases were transmitted mostly through sexual contact. In China, however, people were infected after selling their blood and plasma or receiving transfusions contaminated in the trade.
Over the following decade, as many as 300,000 people in Henan province, the epicentre of the trade, were infected – a scandal exposed by local retired gynaecologist Dr Gao Yaojie.
Long before eye doctor Li Wenliang sounded the alarm on COVID-19 and succumbed to the virus in early 2020, Dr Gao was China’s best-known whistleblower. Her decision to expose the source of China’s AIDS epidemic made her an exile for the last 14 years of her life. She died last December at the age of 95 in New York.
Despite official erasure (Baidubake, China’s Wikipedia equivalent, says Gao settled overseas on a visiting fellowship), Chinese netizens mourned Gao’s death on the same Weibo “wailing wall” page where they commemorated Li.
