Paper short abstract:

Based on 15 months of fieldwork among community-based organizations HIV-positive heroin users in Southwest China, this paper reflects over the deemed universal notion of patients' advocacy and on its actual articulation in the everyday practices of grassroots activism in contemporary China.

Paper long abstract:

Faced with the international criticism that followed the country's mismanagement of the SARS pandemic in 2003, China's government was left with little choice but to open its almost autarchic public health sector to the external support of aid money and ideas. In the wake of these facts, China's widely denied HIV/AIDS epidemic gained an unprecedented centrality among the concerns of international development agencies and NGOs. Drawing on the UN call to foster the Greater Involvement of People with AIDS (GIPA) in the management of HIV-related matters, international funds and programs begun to actively support the establishment of local patients' communities. Beside creating entirely new forms of (bio)sociality among before largely marginalized populations, these programs introduced new concepts and deemed universal styles of actions into the worlds of the people they addressed.

Based on 15 months of ethnographic work among community based organizations of current and former heroin users in Southwest China, this paper explores how a seemingly univocal concept such as patients' advocacy is actually taken up, reshaped and performed in the everyday lives of people that are supposed to engage with it. To this end, I follow the alternate vicissitudes of an advocacy project aimed at raising the Provincial insurance coverage for hepatitis C. Funded by a global network of HIV/AIDS activists, supervised by a large Chinese NGO, targeted at Yunnan's Provincial government and carried out by three local patients' organizations, this project becomes the ideal site to unravel the assemblage of agencies and meanings that shape development practice in context.