Aibai Culture and Education Centre, a Beijing-based group serving the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, launched a Chinese language website (www.aibai.cn) at the end of March after access to a similar site, hosted on an overseas server, was blocked last year.
Aibai (爱白) is the initiative of a Chinese gay couple who, in 1999, created a personal weblog, ‘Aiqing Baipishu’ (爱情白皮书, ‘White Paper on Love’) to share their story with the wider gay community, and then began also to post Chinese translations of material from international publications.
This developed into the www.gaychinese.net website, which reportedly received 50-60,000 visitors a day, but was operated from a server in the USA and became inaccessible on China’s mainland last April. The blocking of the site was reported by international media but, Aibai staff told China Development Brief, they never received any official notification or enquiries from the Chinese authorities.
However, the group followed China’s official procedures for registering the new site with the authorities, and have been duly allocated an Internet Content Provider number.
Like its predecessor, the new Aibai site provides a mix of news, literature, legal and health information and some archives documenting the gay and lesbian movement in China.
In 2003, the Aibai founders established a non-profit Information Clearinghouse for Chinese Gays and Lesbians (ICCGL) in the United States to create a legal identity for the group, which hasn’t yet secured any legal status in China, and to raise funds.
In October 2005, after the blocking of the original site, Aibai set up an office in Beijing, now staffed by thirty part-time volunteers, with a core group of eight serving as an executive board, appointed by ICCGL. The office includes a small, public resource centre with several hundred Chinese language books, thousands of electronic documents and several hundred films, and is welcoming donations of English language materials.
The UK-based Barry and Martin’s Trust has provided small grants (USD 1,500 per year) to cover some operating costs of the website, but the website has in the past largely relied on a worldwide volunteer network.
Meanwhile, this February, Aibai set up a gay youth centre in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, with support from the AIDS Relief Fund for China, a US-based group that makes small grants to grassroots NGOs in China. A grant from the fund covers rental for an apartment which houses resource materials and is available for meetings of student groups. Aibai is now considering opening a similar centre in Hangzhou.
Contact: Jiang Hui（江晖）+86 (0)10 6496 8273 gaychinese.net@gmail.com
Report by Tina Qian, April 5 2006