She’s been dubbed “Grandma Courage.”

Gao Yaojie is China’s best known AIDS activist. A gynecologist, Gao is now 81 but still full of the spit and vinegar that led her to become a tenacious bulldog on the AIDS issue.

Gao has published an autobiography, The Soul of Gao Yaojie, in Chinese, and the South China Morning Post published exclusive extracts in English yesterday (behind a pay wall). China has come a long way on AIDS. It is not uncommon to see public AIDS awareness posters, and top political leaders visit AIDS patients each year.

But Gao’s story underscores how connivance between local officials and blood plasma sellers led to massive infections in central China’s Henan province, and how officialdom still resists a full accounting. Gao remains under constant police surveillance.

Here’s an excerpt:

After Lunar New Year 2000, I heard that reporters from The New York Times and other foreign media had asked to interview me but the provincial officials had repeatedly turned down their requests. Around the same time, I started to notice a knot of motorcyclists hanging around my housing development and keeping an eye on my apartment. One day, I boarded the bus to get to a meeting at the hospital and I saw the motorcycles following me. When I entered the hospital’s conference room, the bikers parked outside the building. Only then did it dawn on me that I was under surveillance.

A cold snap came and flurries of snow were flying. Everybody tried to stay indoors for warmth yet my young minders were leaning against their bikes, sipping bottled water and biting into stone-cold buns. I could see them clearly from the window by the fireplace inside my apartment. Every human being is born with compassion, as the old Chinese proverb goes, so I braved the snow, went downstairs and said: “It’s cold out here. Would you like to come up to warm yourselves and get some hot food?”

My young minders smiled, flicked the snowflakes off their coats, started their bikes and left the scene. Within 10 minutes, I could see from my window, they had come back.

As time passed I became acquainted with them. One day I asked: “Why are you here watching me? Who sent you?” One of them blurted out: “The party leaders sent us They’re concerned that you’re making the rounds and reporters and AIDS patients are coming.”

Then I realized that the officials objected to me helping patients and raising awareness about preventing AIDS. But why were they so intent on covering up the epidemic? This only steeled my resolve to visit the stricken villages and get to the bottom of it all.

The campaign against “vulgar” internet content is in full swing in China, and the timing couldn’t have come at a more interesting moment.

For one thing, the internet is abuzz with postings and photos of young Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi cavorting on a beach in the Caribbean with her fiancé. (Sorry, I’ll offer no links, just the photo you see of her here.) China Daily this morning calls the hubbub over the photos “an instant online carnival of voyeurism.”

Zhang, who was in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, was voted China’s most beautiful actress last month.

So just as some Chinese internet portals are apologizing for their “lewd” content, China is broadening the crackdown to include some U.S. companies, like MSN, operating in China. The crackdown has led to suggestions the anti-porn campaign is a cover for a broader crackdown on web companies. Indeed, among the platforms shut down today is Bullog.cn, the most influential liberal blog platform in China. The site hosts blogs of many pro-democracy intellectuals.

 But mostly, the crackdown seems targeted at domestic portals that seem to push the envelope in trying to get eyeballs.

As China Daily notes today in a column by Raymond Zhou: “Most portal sites in China look like a high school boy’s fantasy room, with half-naked women in all kinds of postures.”

Even the state media gets involved. One wag a few years ago used to call Xinhua, the state news agency, “Skin-hua” for its propensity to put cheesecake photos on its website.

The most interesting comment I saw about the crackdown, though, is on this website which interviewed Kaiser Kuo, the digital media maven at Ogilvy China. Here’s an excerpt of what he said:

“I don’t think it has a thing to do with dissent: It’s just what it is, a crackdown on porn. They targeted some of the biggest web properties in China (Sina, Sohu, Tencent, Netease) as well as many other smaller sites, and they’re just trying to get rid of porn, which is still pretty pervasive on the Chinese internet despite many similar crackdowns in years past. . . . Second-guessing the motivations of the Chinese state when it comes to internet policies reminds me of what Freud said. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Check out this video of people plunging into polar waters at the beginning of the annual Harbin ice festival (thanks to folks at Shanghaiist.com blog).

Harbin is China’s northernmost major city, and every year around this time they have an ice and snow sculpture competition. It draws large crowds but I have yet to attend.

Here’s more about the festival from the chinatravel.net website:

The focal point of the festival is Zhaolin Park, located next to the Songhua River. During the festival, Zhaolin Park becomes home to array of ice carvings ranging from figures of human, animal, and birds to mythical as well as historic and political characters and figurines of world renowned attractions such as the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower, and Taj Mahal.

In the evenings, the sculptures are lit up and ice-lantern park touring activities are held in many parks throughout the city.

The Harbin festival is one of the world's four largest ice and snow festivals, along with Japan's Sapporo Snow Festival, Canada's Quebec City Winter Carnival, and Norway's Ski Festival.

I can’t wait to pack my bathing suit and get up there.

The old joke about marriage goes something like this: At a social gathering, the long-married wife waxes on about her 30 years of matrimony, and her dutiful husband pipes up, “Yes, the 30 years seem like just 30 minutes!”

He then turns to his chum and whispers: “30 minutes under water!”

The normalization of Sino-U.S. diplomatic ties just passed the three-decade anniversary, and public reflections abound. Relations have become so routine that an item on the Xinhua news agency noting that President Bush and President Hu Jintao talked by telephone last Sunday hardly merited attention.

Such calls are common. If the leaders of the two countries don’t chat each month, Cabinet members are exchanging visits. I joke that it’s probably easier to see a U.S. Cabinet member in Beijing than in Washington.

Later today, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte will view a ping-pong tournament here in Beijing to commemorate the “ping-pong diplomacy” three decades ago between then-President Richard Nixon and Paramount leader Mao Zedong (photo above) that led to normalization of U.S.-China diplomatic relations.

The ordinariness of such visits led one prominent U.S. scholar this week to compare Sino-U.S. relations with a fundamentally strong and long-lasting marriage. David Shambaugh of George Washington University printed his views in the International Herald Tribune. Here is the key graph:

“After three, often rocky, decades of interaction, the United States and China seem to have settled into a ‘mature marriage,’ where mutual respect, mutual interests, and an awareness of the negative consequences of an adversarial relationship bind the two together. In this marriage divorce is not an option. Having achieved this level of interdependence, hopefully the next 30 years will bear real fruit of bilateral, regional, and global cooperation.”

This got me to thinking. I’ve often felt that ordinary Chinese and Americans share much that can bind them together, including a natural gregariousness, optimism in the future, and a bent for business. But one senses little personal warmth in the relationship between President Hu and President Bush. I might describe relations as “correct” and “complex” but not warm.

That might even describe China’s relations with most of its neighbors. After all, who are Beijing’s real allies? I often ask that of ordinary Chinese, and they have difficulty answering. Maybe they don’t need true allies when they account for one-sixth of humanity. Americans, for our part, can arguably say the Brits, the Aussies, the Kiwis and the Irish are true allies. I even recall former Secretary of State Colin Powell speaking at the U.N. earlier this decade, at the height of the “Freedom Fries” uproar and U.S. anger at France for its lack of support on Iraq, over the common values and shared history that bind France and the United States together. It was a timely reminder during an emotional period.

So the Sino-U.S. relationship still has a long way to go. Comedian Stephen Colbert suggested a couple of years ago that China is neither friend nor enemy. It’s a “frenemy.”

Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary who will play a key role in President-elect Barack Obama’s administration, said a couple of years ago that China and the United States were joined as Siamese twins across the Pacific Ocean, and any effort to harm the other would just backfire.

Harkening back to a term to describe mutual nuclear annihilation during the U.S.-USSR Cold War, Summers described Sino-U.S. economic interdependence as “mutually assured economic destruction.” Both China and the U.S. could inflict devastating economic destruction on each other, but they don’t do so. They are deterred. China needs U.S. consumers to spend freely because the output of Chinese factories largely goes to U.S. shores. Americans, for their part, save billions of dollars from cheap Chinese products.

That leaves what Summers called a Balance of Financial Terror. China buys U.S. bonds and finances the U.S. current account deficit because to do otherwise would slash U.S. imports of Chinese goods that keep Chinese factories humming. The two nations are joined at the hip, complementary but co-dependent.

It’s not an ideal marriage, but a functional one. Even if at times it feels like we are under water and gasping for air.