In China, an About-Face on AIDS Prevention: Once-Reluctant Government Increasingly Promoting Efforts to Battle Spread of Disease by Edward Cody:

As late as the 1990s, statistics showed the disease was largely confined to intravenous drug users and a group of peasants who became infected when they sold their blood. But the number of those known to be infected by HIV has climbed by 75 percent annually over the last four years, reaching an officially estimated 840,000 and, specialists say, probably many more.

More alarming, they say, the proportion infected through sexual contact has also risen sharply, presenting a danger that AIDS will break into the general population -- the world's largest -- and spread in a pattern seen with devastating consequences in Africa. If that happens, the Joint United Nations Program on AIDS has warned, China could have 10 million to 20 million people infected with HIV by 2010.

Openly combating AIDS has not come easily to the governing Communist Party. Since taking over in 1949, it had largely eradicated prostitution, imposing a civic code in which drug use or sexual promiscuity were taboo. Even to deal with AIDS, officials at all levels have found it hard to acknowledge that prostitution is now booming, as are intravenous drug use and promiscuity.

In addition, discussing prostitution and condom use is out of place in much of the country's traditional rural society. The 60 percent of the population that lives in villages and small towns includes millions who travel to big cities temporarily to look for work, often as single men.

A Health Ministry survey issued last month showed that only a fraction of the population understands how AIDS is transmitted and that fewer than half are aware of the role of condoms in reducing the risk of infection. About 59 percent of those queried said they would not work with an HIV-infected colleague for fear of contracting the disease, the ministry reported.

Peasants are not alone in their attitudes. An announcement by Beijing municipal authorities that they would hand out free condoms on college campuses generated immediate counter-announcements by Beijing University and Tsinghua University. Officials at the country's two most prestigious universities said they would not allow condoms to be distributed on campus because it would be tantamount to authorizing premarital sex.