Li Dan bravely documented the destruction caused by China’s AIDS epidemic and helps pressure the government to respond. Despite harassment, he works to help AIDS orphans who have been rejected by their communities.

While an astrophysics student in Beijing, Li Dan explored the properties of the sun: solar luminosity, coronal mass ejections, and sunspot cycles. Yet as he was studying the brightest object in view he felt his attention pulling to the shadows, where hundreds of thousands of his fellow Chinese were suffering from HIV/AIDS.

Since 1985, when China announced its first case of AIDS, the government has resisted acknowledging the scope of the epidemic. The cost of this resistance has been most obvious in the Henan province, where as many as one million people were exposed to HIV because of unhygienic, government-sanctioned blood selling in the 1990s. These people, mostly peasants, face the enormous challenge of trying to provide for themselves and their children without adequate assistance from the government and in an atmosphere rife with stigmatization and discrimination.

When Li Dan learned about the crisis, he traveled to Henan to see how he could help. There he met an elderly man whose son had died of AIDS. Villagers, fearing contamination, had pressured the father to bury his son immediately. They refused to help him build a coffin or conduct funeral rites, so the father wrapped his son in a bamboo mat, hoisted him on his back, and trudged to his watermelon field. There he dug a hole, lowered his child into it, and heaped dirt over the body.

“The Chinese place great emphasis on the funeral ceremony and the appearance of graves because they reveal not only a family’s status but also its respect for the dead,” Li Dan says.  “But this didn’t even look like a grave, just a messy mound of dirt.  When that young man was alive he wasn’t treated with respect, and now that he’s dead he is treated with so little dignity.”

The more Li Dan learned about the plight of infected people in Henan the less important his prestigious doctoral program seemed. Despite being told he was one of the most promising astrophysics students in the history of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Li Dan abandoned his studies to devote his life to fighting for the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS. First, he filmed a documentary and shared the footage with the Ministry of Health and journalists, raising awareness both in China and internationally of the situation in Henan.

Then he adopted the goal of helping Henan’s more than 100,000 AIDS orphans, many of whom face rejection by their communities and schools. Li Dan opened the Dongzhen School and Orphanage for AIDS orphans but was forced by local officials to close it down. After he appeared on a popular news show to discuss the school and the AIDS epidemic, police detained and beat him. Undeterred, Li Dan continues to provide support for AIDS orphans and to lobby the Chinese government to respond to the country’s escalating HIV epidemic.

“I saw the extreme poverty those villagers were already living in before they developed AIDS,” Li Dan says. “I witnessed children becoming homeless. I watched people dying painful and gruesome deaths. All that despair overwhelmed me; but ultimately it has also inspired me. Rather than turning my back on this horrible situation I want to do everything I can to protect the rights of people affected by HIV/AIDS in China.”