Guo Weigui, a trained doctor, spends most of his time visiting beauty salons, bars, massage parlors and saunas where he tries to ensure that hospitality industry workers use condoms.

Guo works for the disease control and prevention center of Beihai, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region that receives about four million tourists a year.

He also leads a 15-member AIDS prevention team that hands out condoms and leaflets on how to prevent AIDS and venereal diseases.

"Our team covers 90 percent of the hospitality services in downtown Beihai and 80 percent of their workers," said Guo. "We make sure each worker is visited at least once every two months."

Beihai reported its first HIV infection in 1998 and the official number of HIV-positive people had risen to 93 by last October.

"The figure is the lowest for the 14 cities in Guangxi, because we started intervention earlier than others," said Guo.

Guo said 73 percent of the hospitality industry workers they visit use condoms now, compared with 30 percent when they started to intervene in 1999.

Cold response

But initially their actions drew a very poor welcome.

"Some people were hostile and even tore up the leaflets we handed out right under our noses," he said. "When I first visited a beauty salon with a colleague, no one looked up at us from the mahjong table. We waited for an hour, then left and came back the next day."

They visited the salon at least five times before one of the girls broke the ice with "why don't you take a seat and leave your leaflets on the table?"

"So step by step, they softened," said Guo. "When they understood we were there for their good, the girls abandoned their hostile attitude."

Today, Guo and his colleagues can drop in at any time for friendly chats with the girls, some of whom have followed their advice to take regular checkups.

Many other Chinese cities have laid down the law for prostitutes, insisting on 100 percent condom use to stop the spread of AIDS.

Harbin in northeastern Heilongjiang Province went one step further: It provided an AIDS prevention training program last year to 180 sex workers.