By Benjamin Kang Lim
BEIJING, Nov 29- China has agreed to let state television air an acclaimed foreign documentary on AIDS after an interview with Tibet’s Dalai Lama was removed, the film’s American director said on Wednesday.
China vies with the Dalai Lama for Tibetan hearts and minds and zealously seeks to curb his influence. The Himalayan region’s god-king won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, three decades after an abortive uprising forced him to flee into exile in India.
After two years of negotiations and with the blessings of the Chinese Health Ministry, CCTV will air an abridged version of “A Closer Walk”, a documentary featuring interviews with AIDS patients, doctors, activists and world leaders, on Friday, to coincide with World AIDS Day, and Saturday.
Two 30-minute segments, featuring an interview with Chinese Vice Health Minister Wang Longde but minus two terse soundbites by the Dalai Lama on the importance of human compassion, are to be shown on CCTV channel 10.
“I felt that the point that the Dalai Lama made in the film is made in many places by many people,” director Robert Bilheimer told Reuters when asked why he had bowed to censorship demands.
“And I felt that the advantage of bringing the film’s message of dignity, compassion and hope and helping the Chinese people contextualise the global AIDS epidemic far outweighed sticking to my guns on that issue and not showing the film here at all.”
AIDS was a taboo subject in China until recent years. The government’s slowness to acknowledge the existence of the epidemic contributed to its spread, especially in the central province of Henan where millions of people sold blood to unsanitary clinics in the 1990s.
The number of reported HIV/AIDS cases in China has jumped by nearly 30 percent to more than 183,000 so far this year, according to the Health Ministry which said the virus seemed to be spreading from high-risk groups to the general public.
A recent survey showed that HIV patients in China were still ostracised from society and discriminated against despite greater public awareness, the official Xinhua news agency said.
The abridged documentary will rerun on CCTV’s mainstay channel 1 on Sunday and Monday, with viewership in the world’s most populous nation estimated at 300-400 million.
A 15-minute preview will be shown at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, where Chinese leaders honour visiting dignitaries, on Wednesday.
The 75-minute documentary, narrated by Will Smith and Glenn Close, premiered in January 2003 and has so far been viewed by up to 15 million people from Africa to Asia to America and Europe.
“I think it’s incredibly encouraging that the Ministry of Health decided to put this film on the air,” said Bilheimer, 62, Oscar nominee for his 1989 movie “The Cry of Reason: Beyers Naude – an Afrikaner speaks out” about South African anti-apartheid activist Beyers Naude.
“I think it’s a recognition that one of the biggest challenges that remains in China is the awareness challenge.” (Additional reporting by Guo Shipeng)
