Legacy Program
Liang Shan Project
The majority of reported HIV infections in China are among rural people living in the southwest and among ethnic minorities.
What It Was
Providing community and educational support to AIDS and HIV affected children and orphans of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan.
The Region
One of the Hardest-Hit Areas in China
Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan occupies China’s Southwest Mountain Range and hosts the country’s largest traditional settlement of the Yi ethnic minority, with over two million inhabitants. The region ranks among China’s most impoverished areas and sits along a major drug trafficking corridor from the Golden Triangle, one of the world’s largest illicit heroin production centers. Since the 1990s, the influx of drugs and the resulting HIV/AIDS epidemic devastated the region, making it one of the hardest-hit HIV infected areas in China.
The effects were severe — disability, imprisonment, abandonment, migration and death — leading to widespread family collapse and children left without parental support or economic resources.
Most orphaned children live with elderly relatives and experience severe food and nutrition shortages. Basic needs including food, clothing and shelter often go unmet. Many face dropping out of school, or never attend at all. Increasingly, orphaned children wander city streets unsupervised.
Approximately 8,000 orphans lived in Liangshan in 2011. The project established a base at Zhaojue County National Middle School in Zhaojue County, one of China’s most impoverished counties, alongside relief and mobile rescue service centers.
Educational Support for HIV Children
Where Government Funding Stops
China provides free education through junior high school, but students must still cover the cost of meals and supplies — and government funding does not extend past junior high at all.
Most HIV-affected children in the region are orphans living with relatives who receive minimal support. The project supplied the materials and resources those students needed to stay in school and take a productive part in their community, strengthened by an international pen pal program connecting them with students in New York.
See the full history →From the Region
The Children This Work Reached
Two decades of this work.
Liang Shan was one of several programs run as China AIDs Fund before the foundation refocused on Asian American youth in New York.
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