For a country that officially bars many couples from having more than one children, you might think that China would promote contraception measures such as condoms. You would be mistaken. Believe it or not, The State Administration for Industry and Commerce has banned advertising for condoms since 1989 under regulations that prohibit “any products meant to cure sexual dysfunction or help improve people’s sex life.”
The ban is enforced to the point that when China Central Television ran a public service announcement in 1999 touting condoms for birth control and disease prevention, the ads were quickly taken off the air. One of the effects of such a bizarre policy is that China may be in the midst of a runaway HIV epidemic.
Officially there are already 600,000 HIV positive persons in China, though international health agencies suspect that number might be as high as 1 million. Moreover, the number of cases is quickly accelerating. The number of official cases jumped 67 percent from 2000 to 2001.
Surveys of Chinese attitudes toward HIV reveal that few people in China know much about the disease. In a study conducted in 2000 by the State Family Planning Commission, 20 percent of those surveyed had never heard of AIDS, and 50 percent did not know that the disease could be transmitted by sex.
Chinese media, including the official Communist Party organ The People’s Daily recently called for a lifting of the ban on condom advertising. Hopefully the government will follow suit and begin a massive education campaign about and allow such advertising, or China could face the sort of pandemic that is now afflicting sub-Saharan Africa.
Source:
With ignorance as the fuel, AIDS speeds across China. Elisabeth Rosenthal, The New York Times, December 30, 2001.
China lets condoms out of the closet. John Schauble, TheAge.Com, January 1, 2002.
It would be nice to see more of this.