Stigma And Discrimination: The Case Of HIV/AIDS In China

Up to now, few sociological studies have been conducted in China that systematically examines the impact of stigma and discrimination upon People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWAs). This is partly because sociological studies of AIDS in China were a tabooed area of research until three years ago and partly because such studies still remain difficult to conduct. China has an estimated number of one million HIV infections accumulatively, but less than 10 percent of these infections are clinically tested. While the absolutely majority of HIV carriers in China are unknowing, the patients who actually have been informed of their HIV-positive status are unwilling to talk with social researchers about their illness. I became involved in social research on AIDS in 2001 and have managed to interviewed more than 30 PLWAs over time. On the basis of my face-to-face interviews with PLWAs in Beijing, Hubei, and Anhui, I explore in this thesis two major issues. First, I explore the socio-cultural construction of a dominant AIDS discourse that breeds stigma and discrimination. Second, I explore the impact of sigma and discrimination upon people living with HIV/AIDS. While my first attempt constitutes a discursive analysis, my second attempt is an analysis of illness narratives. Put differently, my thesis is a qualitative study. In explaining how China's dominant AIDS discourse has developed and what effect it has inserted upon AIDS patients in specific and society in general, I single out four major issues for detailed discussion: fear, concealment, resistance, and revenge. Specifically, I try to answer how patients perceive AIDS as a threat to their lives and reputation, how patients attempt to hide their HIV/-positive status, how patients resist stigmatization, and how patients are painted in public rumors as a collectivity of revengeful individuals. My main argument in this thesis is that the fear on the part of the patients I interviewed goes far beyond biological implications and that it is in fact a socio-biological panic. Therefore, the attempt by patients to hide their HIV-positive status and their resistance to stigmatization is a response to a danger that threatens to end not only their biological existence but also their social existence. More importantly, my analysis demonstrates China's medical community, mass media, and public policies contributed in an undeniable fashion not only to the configuration of the socio-biological fear and attempts of concealment but also to the public imagination that AIDS patients are bound to take revenge against society. The theoretical frameworks guiding my analysis of stigma are my applications of a set of concepts and analytical methods developed by Erving Goffman in the 1960s and Bruce Link more recently.