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.