Between Blood and Sex: The Contradictory Impact of Transnational AIDS Institutions on State Repression in China

Civil society engagement is widely considered essential for creating effective programs to end major diseases. Transnational health organizations have invested heavily on opening up participation to non-state actors in health policies and decision-making. Despite concerted transnational efforts to promote civil society advocacy, their impact on decreasing repressive governmental responses against community-based organizations has been limited. Dr. Long will present an analysis of the transformation of repression against AIDS activism in China. Drawing on a combination of archival, ethnographic, and interview data, Dr. Long will illustrate the intervention of transnational AIDS institutions has not only constrained the operation of traditional hard repression, but has also facilitated the formation of new soft repression. The results have unexpected implications for setting priorities for national AIDS programs. 

 

Yan Long is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University. Her research examines the evolution of transnational health institutions and their impact on the political and social determinants of inequality in health at the local level. Her book project, Side Effects: The Transnational Doing and Undoing of AIDS Politics in China, demonstrates how transnational AIDS institutions’ endeavors to build community-based AIDS governance in China have alternately sustained, disrupted, and transformed the traditional forms of domination and resistance in public health between 1989 and 2013. Long’s work has won the 2014 American Sociological Association Dissertation Award and the 2013 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award. She received a joint PhD in Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan in 2013. This fall she will begin a position as assistant professor of the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University.