According to a May 21st New York Times article, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria has frozen its grants to China. This is an extremely embarrassing matter because China was unable to meet the standards of this international organization, yet many backward governments were.
China has been the Global Fund’s fourth largest recipient, following Ethiopia, India and Tanzania. Since 2003 China has received $539 million from the Global Fund, and another $295 million is on the way. And China has only contributed $16 million to the fund, compared with the $5.5 billion contributed by the United States. The question of whether China should also be a recipient has been the source of deep controversy. The Chinese government is known for its deep pockets: it spent $46 billion combined on the 2008 Olympic games and last year’s Shanghai Expo, and it also recently financed a $586 billion economic stimulus package. Dr. Jack Chow, who helped create the Global Fund, argues that China’s large appetite undermines the Global Fund’s foundation; at a time when the fund is struggling for contributions, donors will grow even more reluctant if they realize that substantial funds are being awarded to a country like China -- which can well afford to pay for its own health program.
But the embarrassing decision to withhold funds from China has nothing to do with eligibility. Instead, audits of last year’s distributions showed that China had failed to pass on 35% of a $283 million AIDS grant to community-based organizations, as it had pledged. According to a report from a non-governmental organization (NGO) called Global Fund Watch, China actually allocated less than 11% of their grant money to non-government groups. In fact an external audit discovered that community groups appeared to have been entirely left out of the strategy planning sessions.
Chinese officials justified their actions, claiming that many civil society groups could not be trusted to properly spend the Global Fund’s money, and that government agencies were more trustworthy. But according to human right activist Chang Kun, both government officials and “official NGOs” created by the government routinely pocketed more than half the grant money. An AIDS rights group that Chang Kun headed in Xinjiang received a grant of roughly $3,000, but then had to return it because the government disbanded his group. “They view our campaigning as troublemaking. They don’t like private NGOs, or people taking up an organizing role,” he said. “I have campaigned for AIDS patients for seven years now, and I rarely see people receiving any actual benefit from the Global Fund.”
In China there are organized “begging” gangs who abduct and disable children, make them panhandle in the streets, and then taking the money for themselves. Here the Chinese government plays a similar role: it uses NGOs to apply for grants, and then kicks them out after they are approved to receive funding. Not surprisingly, some of this pirated money then finds its way into the pockets of government officials.
The Chinese government has become used squandering people’s money away, any way it wishes. Writer Ai Weiwei was detained for investigating the whereabouts of donations made following the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. The Chinese people may not be able to stop the Communist regime from within, but if the regime tries to pull the same trick with money donated by international organizations, they cannot get away with it. This latest embarrassing incident, hitting up against the Global Fund wall, has once again exposed the corrupt nature of the Chinese communist regime and its hostility toward organized civil groups.
In Qiushi, a Communist Party journal, Zhou Benshun, Secretary General of the party’s political and legislative affairs commission, wrote that China “must guard against being misled to the point of falling into the trap of the so-called ‘civil society’ devised by certain Western countries.”
Well, at least for now, it seems we are stuck in the “animal farm” society devised by the Communist regime -- where some pigs are more equal than others. But for how much longer are we, the people, going to tolerate this abuse?
