In a vast country of 1.3 billion people ruled by a powerful Communist dictatorship, how could one old lady possibly make a difference?
Meet Dr. Gao Yaojie, 77. Her best blouse is 15 years old, she lives in a dusty, rundown apartment in a provincial capital far from Beijing and she has changed the face of AIDS in China.
After years of intimidation and harassment by Chinese authorities, Dr. Gao is winning her long, lonely crusade to focus public attention on AIDS -- in particular, on a horrifying AIDS catastrophe that has swept through hundreds of villages in her home province, Henan.
State media now clamour to tell her story, she wins awards abroad and last December, none other than Deputy Prime Minister Wu Yi came calling.
"There are no Henan officials here. Tell me what is going on," Ms. Wu implored.
The turnaround has been remarkable. Not so long ago, Dr. Gao was shadowed by police wherever she went. Her telephone was tapped. Members of her family were persecuted. When she dared to visit one of Henan's stricken villages, she was more often than not thrown out by officials determined to keep the AIDS tragedy there under wraps.
But suddenly, China is waking up the threat of AIDS and HIV. Beijing has committed itself to an ambitious program aimed at curbing the spread of the dreaded virus and treating those already infected.
The national AIDS budget has tripled from two years ago. Drugs and anonymous HIV testing are available free of charge. Condom machines are increasingly plentiful.
Most important, China's relatively new leaders have embraced the need for a huge AIDS information campaign to reach a public that remains frightfully misinformed. AIDS prevention will soon be part of the education curriculum across the country.
The end to a decade of denial and misinformation has not come a moment too soon. According to the United Nations, China is headed for the world's largest HIV-infected population -- 10 million people by 2010 -- unless preventive steps are taken.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao signalled the shift on World AIDS Day last December, with a highly publicized visit to a hospital ward. There, he shook hands with a young AIDS patient, a significant gesture in a country where fear-based discrimination against HIV patients is a major problem.
Basketball superstar Yao Ming is also on board.
"You don't get AIDS from hugging or shaking hands or from eating together," the Chinese centre says in a television ad. "Don't be afraid. Don't discriminate."
This is a huge change from years past, when AIDS statistics were considered a state secret. Activists who uncovered and disclosed them were routinely jailed.
"You cannot solve the problem by arresting people and hiding facts," says Dr. Zhao Pengfei, AIDS co-ordinator for the Beijing office of the World Health Organization. "I am confident that China will not repeat the disaster of South Africa. The momentum is there."
The country's small band of determined AIDS activists is also applauding.
"The direction is good. The resources are big," says Hu Jia, a 31-year-old environmentalist who was previously jailed and beaten for trying to help AIDS victims.
Yet even now, the venerable Dr. Gao is still not totally free from harassment. Chinese officials have prevented her from leaving the country to receive her humanitarian awards, including Asia's version of the Nobel Prize.
For an interview with The Globe and Mail, she insists on cloak and dagger. Take a taxi, she instructs over the telephone. Park a few blocks away from her home, and she will come.
After the interview, she says: "Did you see those two guys outside? Security."
Dr. Gao was not solely responsible for the government's dramatic new attitude. Credit the wake-up call from severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), when official lies and indifference allowed the lethal new virus to cut a swath through the population.
Never again, Chinese leaders said. They looked around for the next potential trouble spot and found AIDS, and Dr. Gao. Her heroic effort to aid the tens of thousands of impoverished Henan villagers stricken with the AIDS virus was already an underground legend.
The villagers were infected in the 1990s. Attracted by the lure of easy money, they lined up to donate blood for the equivalent of $6 each.
In order to donate as often as four times a day, the villagers allowed their blood to be re-infused after its valuable plasma was extracted. The unhygienic operating techniques employed by the "blood heads" who paid them caused a huge number of infections.
Activists familiar with the situation say as many as one million villagers may be HIV-positive. Some experts question that estimate, but no one except Henan officials dispute that something terrible happened on a massive scale. It is considered one of the world's worst AIDS outbreaks in a concentrated area.
For instance, in the village of Wenlou, at least one-third of the 3,000 adult residents are infected with HIV. Many have died, and it is not possible to go for a walk without seeing someone likely to die soon. Infection rates are higher in smaller villages -- entire families are being wiped out.
Hu Jia, the AIDS activist, describes a chilling scene from his first visit to one of Henan's death villages. It might have come from an early movie by Ingmar Bergman.
"The air was frozen. It was Christmas. We woke up at 1 a.m. and stepped out onto the icy, muddy road. Suddenly I heard fire crackers," Mr. Hu recounts.
"Four men drove by in a wooden cart. On the cart was a body. A woman was there, too. She was crying without any sound. The body was her husband's. They were so young and it was so cold. We watched them until they disappeared. None of us spoke. We felt death was everywhere in the air."
Dr. Gao tells similar tales of horror, punctuated by angry outbursts: No one in Henan has been punished, charged, or even investigated for a catastrophe that resulted directly from official neglect.
The slowly unfolding tragedy has taken over her life. Early on, she used her own money to print thousands of AIDS information leaflets. She would spend hours outside local bus depots handing them to travellers.
Then she began to help village children left orphaned by AIDS, draining her savings and looking for places to house them, including her home. Despite her advancing years and obstacles erected by Henan authorities, Dr. Gao never wavered.
"If no one tells the public about this, it will get worse and worse," she says.
Whenever she could slip in under the cover of darkness, she visited villagers' homes, giving them comfort in their final hours.
"It's a horrible thing to see. When AIDS patients are about to die, they always wonder: 'What about my children; what will they do?' It's their last thought, and then they die. It's a terrible, terrible tragedy."
Finally, on orders from Beijing, government help is on the way. Clinics have opened, public-health officials have been posted to 80 villages at the heart of the epidemic and villagers have access to powerful, life-prolonging medicine.
But Dr. Gao isn't slowing down. She just published a book -- again at her own expense -- full of heartbreaking letters from villagers. The first printing sold out.
"She is a great lady," says Dr. Zhao of the WHO. "She has been fighting for the rights of AIDS patients and to ease their suffering for a long time. Now, finally, it is much better. I've never met her. But personally, I respect her very much."
The Globe's interview with Dr. Gao takes place in a private room, away from prying ears and eyes, at the fanciest restaurant in Zhengzhou. It seems incongruous to hear her reliving the apocalypse of AIDS villages as sleek waitresses glide in and out, dressed in flowery red qipaos.
During the long conversation, Dr. Gao's dedication and determination to keep on fighting flags only once, when she recounts the sad personal toll her campaign has taken.
Resentful Henan officials made it difficult for her daughter to get a good job because of Dr. Gao's activities. The daughter left for Canada, taking Dr. Gao's granddaughter with her, and has not been heard from since.
"My granddaughter is 15-½ now. I don't know where she is. Her name is Lu Xiaohui. Maybe you can help," the doctor begs. "I miss her so much, but I cannot give up my work. I have had to forgo my own small one, to take this on. To help others."
The strong, fierce old woman bows her head and cries.