ABSTRACT
Civil society organizations (CSOs) today and in the past have played and con-
tinue to play a key role as advocates in promoting positive social change. This
chapter addresses the question of what role China’s civil society has played and
will play in the struggle against China’s rapidly growing epidemic. The role of
civil society is especially important as we have seen in Chapter 6 given the fail-
ure of the Chinese government to provide an adequate health system to meet the
needs of its citizens, namely in the rural areas. Thus, there is substantial room
for CSOs to offer their expertise in areas such as health education. There are
over 50 nationally registered Chinese CSOs targeting HIV/AIDS and perhaps
hundreds of thousands more (registered and unregistered) focusing on a wide
range of issues from basic health to environmental issues. Accordingly, the cen-
tral question of concern here is the extent to which these CSOs can contribute to
the curbing the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The growth of civil society and organiza-
tions within this sphere is certainly encouraging. Nonetheless, due to government
regulations, this nascent sector still faces significant challenges.
