In 2006, China banned Lou Ye from shooting movies for five years after he screened “Summer Palace” at the Cannes Film Festival without government approval. In the film Lou tackled the Chinese military’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy student protesters at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people are believed to have been killed.

But he defied the ban, secretly shooting the love story “Spring Fever” with small, digital cameras in the eastern city Nanjing last year. He also entered it at Cannes this year, where it won best screenplay in May.

In “Spring Fever,” he takes on homosexuality – another taboo in China – with graphic gay sex scenes. The 115-minute movie is about a private investigator hired to spy on a married man having a gay affair. But the investigator falls into a love triangle with his own girlfriend and the boyfriend of the husband he is investigating.

Commercial distributors have bought “Spring Fever” for release in Russia, South Korea, France, and the U.S., but not so in China. It was only screened in four showings at an independent film festival in Nanjing last month.

On Friday it screened as one of the two opening movies at this year’s Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. But a Chinese distribution deal is unlikely, given Lou’s status.

Lou said, however, that Chinese film officials have turned a blind eye to his supposedly illegal activities, including for shooting “Spring Fever” and showing it at the independent film festival in Nanjing.

He has also been allowed to travel freely in and out of China, but he wants the ban lifted so his films can be screened more widely in China.

“It’s regrettable that this film won’t be released in the Chinese market,” Lou told The Associated Press in an interview before the Hong Kong screening.

Lou, whose credits also include “Suzhou River” and “Purple Butterfly,” urged the Chinese government to shorten his ban.

“Everyone should be able to make movies. I hope this ban will be canceled earlier and I hope the government won’t impose any more bans on other directors,” the 45-year-old director said.

Lou arrived in Hong Kong on Friday from Paris, where he was preparing for his next project, his foreign-language debut – a French film about a Chinese student’s romance in Paris.

“I told them they might not like us, but they can’t stop us from coming here,” said AIDS activist Xiao Mu, who was handing out condoms and pamphlets about safe sex when the police arrived on Aug. 25. “We have a right to be in the park.”

Though mostly ignored by state-run media, news of the incident in the southern city of Guangzhou – also known as Canton – spread quickly on the Internet and became a hot topic in gay chat forums nationwide. Some in China’s gay community see it as a sign of a new sense of empowerment and a burgeoning awareness of their rights.

Members of the community have had minor confrontations with the authorities before in other cities. But usually the disputes play out in a low-key way, without much resistance to sweeps, said Lu Jun, founder of a Beijing-based group that fights discrimination against people with hepatitis B.

“I’ve never heard of something like this happening anywhere else,” Lu said about the Guangzhou incident. “I think what happened marks great progress for homosexuals.”

Gay activist Dao Dao in Shanghai also applauded those in Guangzhou for standing up for their rights. But he said he doubted it was the right long-term strategy. He favors striving for wider acceptance by being model citizens, rather than being outspoken and confrontational.

“We don’t do any harm to the society. I think that’s the best way to show all the people that we are good people and nothing different,” said Dao Dao, who works in finance and also helps organize gay parties, sporting events and other activities.

Gay rights have come a long way since the years just after the 1949 communist revolution when homosexuality was considered a disease from the decadent West and feudal societies, and gay people were persecuted. China waited until 1997 to decriminalize sodomy. Homosexuality was finally removed from the official list of mental disorders in 2001. But still, there are no widely accepted estimates of the number of gay people in China.

This year has already been an eventful one for gay rights. In June, the first gay pride festival was held in Shanghai, the nation’s commercial capital. Later in the month, the five-day Beijing Queer Film Festival was held – an event that police blocked in 2001 and 2005.

But as those cities showed signs of being more tolerant, Guangzhou authorities were starting to crack down in People’s Park – a shady oasis of trees and gazebos in the middle of the muggy, traffic-congested city. The park is popular with youngsters who play badminton or retirees practicing their ballroom-dancing moves to stereos blasting out tunes like “Sukiyaki,” the Japanese ballad that became a hit in the U.S. in the 1960s.

For years, the park has also been a favorite hangout for gay men, especially among the young or working-class who can’t afford the bars and restaurants around town that cater to the community. The men – many dressed in tank tops and tight jeans – stroll around the park or sit together on a long line of stone benches. Nearby is a public restroom, where some men have sex – a source of much of the friction with the police.

On Aug, 25, the police moved in. “They told us, ‘You just leave and don’t come back. This is People’s Park, not Homosexual Park,’” said Xiao, the AIDS activist, who is a short and thin and wears large black-framed glasses. “That made me extremely mad. He was saying gays aren’t human.”

Xiao said several men quietly walked away, but he stood his ground and people gathered around as he argued with police. Some who left wandered back after a few minutes, and Xiao estimated the crowd swelled to about 100 people, including several heterosexual passers-by who supported him.

The police declined to be interviewed. An officer at the front desk of the neighborhood’s main police station grew agitated when asked about the incident, and with a loud voice he ordered an Associated Press reporter to leave the station.

A park policeman, who declined to give his name because he’s not authorized to speak to the media, denied the police were unfair or discriminating against gays.

“The problem is that they do things in the public bathroom. Some of them will grope each other on the park benches,” the policeman said. “People see them doing these things and it makes them feel uncomfortable. Then they call the police.”

The officer added that those who have been asked to leave the park or have been taken to the station for questioning are repeat offenders who constantly cause trouble.

But gay activist Ah Qiang disagrees with the police. He said in March police started rounding up random groups of men in the park. They were marched to the police station where they would be forced to write a statement about their activities before being released without being charged, he said.

Police often called the men “gay lao” or “ji lao” – a pejorative term in the local Cantonese dialect, he said.

However, the activist acknowledged that some people do misbehave in public. But he added, “The police should deal with individual cases. They shouldn’t punish a whole group of people.”

There’s a deep division within the gay community about who is to blame.

Shi Heng, a gay hotel worker who hangs out at the park, found himself in the middle of a fierce debate with younger men during a recent afternoon when he insisted that the cause of the trouble is the men who have sex in the restrooms.

“People are being too crude. We simply can’t behave like this in a public place,” said the 47-year-old man.

But another man in his 20s disagreed with Shi and said young men like him had few options.

“We can’t afford to rent a room, and many of us live with our parents,” said the man, who declined to be named because he feared it would cause trouble at home and work. “Where are we supposed to have sex?”

The petition, asking the government to remove a law enacted in 1998 banning the gay community from donating blood, has drawn 540 signatures from lesbians and aims to reach 1,000, the official China Daily reported.

A vast majority of China’s gay and lesbian population face discrimination and stigmatization, and most remain deeply closeted in a highly conservative society. Gay Web sites are often blocked by the government’s Internet firewalls.

China bars potential blood donors from giving blood once they have ticked the gay and lesbian box on the application form, according to a spokeswoman for the Beijing Red Cross Blood Center, who refused to be named citing policy.

“It’s a practical law because the gay community has much higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases. We must take our precautions wisely,” she said. “Even if they lie on the form and say they are straight, everyone’s blood will go through a final screening test for diseases.”

The newspaper report said there are about 30 million gays and lesbians in China, but it did not give numbers on how many of those have HIV/AIDS.

The government and UNAIDS estimate the number of people living with HIV in China is about 700,000, and of those, about 85,000 have AIDS.

The HIV virus that causes AIDS gained a foothold in China largely because of unsanitary blood plasma-buying schemes and tainted transfusions in hospitals.

The government remains sensitive about the disease, regularly cracking down on activists and patients who seek more support and rights.

But this Wednesday, Cui and other organizers managed to pull off the opening to the five-day Beijing Queer Film Festival with no police and no disruptions – drawing only an appreciative and low-key crowd to the Songzhuang Art District on the city’s outskirts.

For China’s gay community, this week’s film festival and an art exhibition on sexual diversity in Beijing, along with last week’s first gay pride festival in Shanghai, are quiet steps forward after years of slow but unmistakable progress.

Cui, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy, said the events mark a significant moment for China’s fledgling gay movement.

“The biggest change is that I’m not the only one doing this,” he said. “There’s more support from the gay community. Society has become more relaxed and open-minded in its thinking.”

But he sounded a note of caution that progress is often accompanied by setbacks, saying organizers would not consider the events a success unless they make it to their closing ceremony Sunday unscathed.

“In China, we were the first to put on queer events. In those events, we’ve had interference and that had lasting influences,” Cui said.

“(Now) we’ve had a successful opening and if we can also achieve a successful closing to the event, it will have another kind of impact,” he said.

China has indeed eased its control over some aspects of gay life. In 1997, sodomy was removed from the country’s list of crimes, although homosexuality was not taken off the list of mental disorders until 2001.

In recent years, the gay community in China has gone from being virtually invisible to establishing a small foothold in society. In large cities, gay bars have opened and gay and lesbian activist and support groups have sprouted. Internet access to gay groups online has helped ease the isolation for those who live in rural areas.

Even so, the vast majority of the country’s gay and lesbian population continues to face discrimination and stigmatization. Most remain deeply closeted in a still highly conservative society. Gay Web sites are often blocked by the government’s Internet firewalls.

Still, community organizers see progress in the fact that gay-themed events that would have been banned outright even a few years ago are now being permitted.

“Ten years ago, this would have been completely impossible,” said curator Yang Ziguang, who helped put together the Beijing art show, the first in the country to explore sexual diversity and gender issues. The works by 16 artists include explicit explorations of gay and gender issues.

The auditorium for the film festival’s opening movie – a story of a Chinese man who searches for the soul of his dead Swiss lover – was packed with a lively crowd of about 100 people, mostly young and proudly gay.

Others who came were simply curious to know more about gay issues, a segment sought out by organizers who wanted to encourage dialogue between the gay community and the wider public.

“I don’t know that much about the lifestyle so I was curious,” said Du Jie, 30, an artist who lives in the area. “I really liked the movie. You see on-screen the raw emotions in the relationship between them. It’s a very good opportunity for the public to better understand the gay community.”

That’s not to say that everything has gone smoothly. The art show curators ran into problems with local authorities just before opening day last Sunday.

“I used to think China was becoming more and more open. On TV, movies and magazines, you hear more and more about these issues,” said Gogo, a second curator who goes by one name. “But before the exhibit started, they came and told us ‘You can’t do this.’ That changed my mind a little about how ready China really is.”

Furious negotiations followed, and in the end only four works were removed – including one photo showing a man holding a fish over his crotch and a painting depicting two naked men in a sexual act. Organizers decided to leave the empty white frames hanging on the wall as a statement on censorship.

Despite the initial problems, the exhibit’s opening drew an estimated 500 people – an enthusiastic public response that left its organizers pleasantly shocked.

The organizers said they made a concerted effort to keep the events low profile to ward off unwanted attention. There were no fliers or public advertisements for the events – only announcements circulated on Web sites. And they chose to hold it in the remote Songzhuang Art District, almost an hour’s drive from downtown Beijing.

“If we were to advertise this all over the place, then we would only cause problems for ourselves,” said Zhu Rikun, another film festival organizer.

The same low-key approach was taken by organizers of the country’s first gay pride festival last week in Shanghai, China’s commercial hub. They carefully planned a week’s worth of movie screenings, art shows and sports events – all held in private venues instead of public spaces, said festival spokesman Kenneth Tan.

Despite the attempt to avoid problems, several events still ended up getting delayed or canceled by authorities who claimed organizers didn’t have the correct permits, said Tan.

Still the festival got high praise from the China Daily, the country’s official English-language newspaper, which ran a front-page article lauding organizers for sending a strong signal about “greater acceptance and tolerance.”

Overall, China has been slowly moving in a direction of more openness toward the gay community, Tan said.

“I think the government has given a lot of space for the local gay community to grow and flourish,” he said. “I’ve been in China for seven years and the changes I’ve seen in the Shanghai gay scene is tremendous. It’s a metamorphosis.”

The proposed guidelines, posted Tuesday, say candidates for surgery must show an agreement from police to change their sex on their identification cards once the procedure is complete.

The ministry posted the draft guidelines to invite public and professional opinions before July 10. China has no laws against sex change surgery, and the ministry says the guidelines are necessary to regulate the procedure.

One bioethicist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in an interview with state media, criticized the proposed requirements for police agreement and for patients to live openly in their desired gender for at least two years before surgery.

“As long as a person meets the physical and mental requirements, she or he should be granted the permit to have the surgery. … The police should change the sex of the receiver on the identity card accordingly,” Qiu Renzhong was quoted as saying by the official China Daily newspaper in its report Wednesday.

Although attitudes about sex in China have become increasingly relaxed, especially in big cities, the country remains a conservative society where sexual identity issues are not freely discussed.

Sex change surgery is one treatment available for gender identity disorder, a condition defined by strong feelings of discomfort with a person’s sex at birth and identification with the opposite gender.

Experts estimate that nearly 2,000 Chinese have undergone sex change surgery while 100,000 to 400,000 people are “considering it,” the China Daily said. It said no official statistics on transsexuals in China are available.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health recommends that sex change surgery candidates undergo hormone therapy and counseling and live in their desired gender roles for at least a year before the procedure.

China’s proposed guidelines also say candidates must show they have no record of criminal offenses and have told their immediate family that they are undergoing the operation. Patients also must be over 20, single, and have undergone psychological therapy for at least a year.

Although the government says the software is aimed at blocking violence and pornography, users who have tried it say it prevents access to a wide range of topics, from discussions of homosexuality to images of comic book characters such as Garfield the cat.

Chinese authorities rarely feel compelled to justify their tight controls on the world’s largest population of Internet users. They are quick to block content challenging the ruling Communist Party’s positions on democratic reforms, religious freedom and policies toward Tibet.

Put on the defensive, state broadcaster CCTV announced on its noon news program Thursday that a “vast number of parents and experts” had endorsed the “Green Dam-Youth Escort” filtering software that must be packaged with all computers sold in China from July 1.

The official Communist Party newspaper Guangming Daily ran an almost identical report and praised the software as a breakthrough in the drive for “civilized Internet management and access.”

The government has told computer makers the software must either be installed on the hard drive or enclosed on a compact disc. PC makers will be required to tell authorities how many computers they have shipped with the software, which is made by a Chinese developer under contract with the government.

Many industry experts have privately questioned the security of computers and stored information exposed to the software. The Washington-based Computer & Communications Industry Association has said that while blocking pornography is understandable, the technology can easily be expanded into more general censorship.

“The main difference is that it takes censorship down to the level of the individual computer,” said Rebecca Mackinnon, a professor at the University of Hong Kong who studies censorship in the Chinese media and online.

That step “very directly affects the individual, and what the individual can do on their computer, how they interface with the Internet,” Mackinnon said.

Although porn sites are initially targeted, the program could be used to block other Web sites, including those based on keywords rather than specific Web addresses. Its developer said users could disable blocking of any site or even uninstall the software altogether.

A Ministry of Industry and Information Technology official went on CCTV Wednesday night to deny claims that the software incorporated monitoring or information-gathering functions.

“If there is sexual, violent or other sorts of content unsuitable for young people, then that content will be blocked,” said Chen Ying, vice director of the ministry’s department of software services industry.

However, the software requirement has prompted widespread derision among China’s more than 250 million Internet users, who either accept government controls or have learned to evade them.

Users also mocked a temporary block on networking and image-sharing Web sites such as Twitter and Flickr last week over the 20th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests. An earlier attempt to ban foreign video content from Chinese sites fizzled with little fanfare.

The new software’s blocking of content about homosexuality prompted a letter of protest from a coalition of Chinese advocacy groups representing gays and AIDS sufferers in the country.

Such content is crucial for psychological and emotional health, and it is “absolutely reasonable and beneficial, as a result, to see the sites accessible over the Internet,” the groups said in an open letter e-mailed to journalists.

The move to require the new software “is turning out to be more controversial and unwelcome than decision-makers would like to believe,” the official English-language newspaper China Daily said in an editorial Thursday under the headline “Questionable Move.”

“The stigma and discrimination against homosexuals in Chinese society have prevented gay men from revealing their sexual orientation or taking HIV/AIDS tests and treatments, holding back the efforts to curb the disease,” Prof. Zhang Beichuan of Qingdao University told the official Xinhua news agency.

With the help of LGBT groups in nine major cities, Zhang polled men in gay bars and bath houses. Of the 2,250 gay men surveyed, 20.7 percent were married to women.

Other surveys have found that as many as 90 percent of China’s gay population is closeted.

“In western countries, only a fraction of homosexuals would get into heterosexual marriages. But in China, about 70 to 80 percent of gay men had the intention of marrying a woman sooner or later,” Zhang told Xinhua.

The survey found that about half of the men polled had looked for strangers to have sex. More than 18 percent participated in group sex and 13 percent said they paid for sex.

When questioned about sexually transmitted diseases, more than 20 percent said they had experienced an STD during the past six months. Less than a quarter had taken an HIV/AIDS test, with 2.2 percent positive.

Zhang told Xunhua that society needs to show a greater understanding and tolerance toward gays. He also said the government needs to provide better access to HIV/AIDS education.

The epidemic will worsen dramatically in coming years unless there is better education and stronger political will to combat the disease, warned Massimo Ghidinelli, the World Health Organization’s regional adviser on HIV/AIDS.

His comments came at a news conference after a seminar in Hong Kong at which regional AIDS experts discussed the growing trend.

Asia is believed to have the world’s largest number of men who have sex with other men, with a preliminary estimate of 10 million, according to WHO.

While describing the figure as “extraordinary high,” Ghidinelli said it still appeared to be conservative because of the stigmatization of male-to-male sex.

WHO said fragmentary information from the region indicated a rapid spread of HIV among gay and bisexual men, but that full data weren’t available. The seminar was called to strengthen efforts to study and address the problem, it said.

Ghidinelli said low condom use among younger men in male-to-male relationships was fueling the transmission of HIV.

“Younger men engaging in sex with men are entering into a sexual arena without the same level of awareness and without taking the same level of protection that the older generation was taking,” Ghidinelli told a news conference.

Ghidinelli said the AIDS experts agreed at the conference to set up a regional task force to collect information on male-to-male transmission and to strengthen measures to fight the disease.

The number of confirmed HIV infections also rose from 135,630 in 2005 to 264,302 from January to September 2008, Xinhua News Agency said, citing the Ministry of Health.

The government and UNAIDS estimate the number of people living with HIV in China is actually about 700,000 – much higher than the confirmed number of infections, in part because people are reluctant to be tested. The government estimates that 85,000 of those have full-blown AIDS.

AIDS was previously the third deadliest infectious disease in China; it is now followed by tuberculosis, rabies, hepatitis and infant’s tetanus, the Xinhua report late Tuesday said.

The government says 34,864 people have died of AIDS since it reported its first death from the disease in 1985.

China denied for years that AIDS was a problem – accounting in part for the low number of reported deaths – but leaders have shifted gears in recent years, confronting the disease more openly and promising anonymous testing, free treatment for the poor and a ban on discrimination against people with the virus. Nevertheless, the government regularly cracks down on activists and patients seeking more support and rights.

The HIV virus that causes AIDS gained a foothold in China largely due to unsanitary blood plasma-buying schemes and tainted transfusions in hospitals. Last year, health authorities said sex had overtaken drug abuse as the main cause of HIV infections.

Zeng Jinyan said she was told of the restriction during a telephone call Thursday from the Beijing Municipal Prison, where her husband, Hu Jia, is being held on a sedition charge.

“State security police told the prison to cancel my visit that had been scheduled for next Monday,” Zeng said in an online posting. “No one is allowed to see him.”

No reason was given for the change of plans, she said.

A man who answered the telephone at the prison said he was “unclear” about Hu’s case and his visiting hours. Like many Chinese officials, he refused to give his name.

The move comes a day after Hu was honored in Strasbourg, France, as the winner of this year’s 50,000 euro ($72,000) Sakharov Prize.

Because Hu, 35, is in prison, his name was placed in front of an empty seat. He received a minute-long standing ovation from the parliament.

Initially an advocate for the rights of HIV/AIDS patients, Hu expanded his focus to cover other human rights issues, using the Internet and telephone to publicize the harassment and arrests of other dissidents.

Hu’s charge of sedition stems from police accusations that he had planned to work with foreigners to disturb the Olympic Games in August.

The award signals the EU assembly’s dismay with what it sees as the authoritarian and repressive nature of the Chinese government. Beijing, however, sees the prize as interference and support for someone it considers a criminal.

Zeng said she hopes to use the prize money to start a foundation to support the families of other activists.

She said the idea had been a longtime wish of Hu, who meticulously chronicled the harassment of activists and their loved ones by authorities in China before being sentenced in April to a 3 1/2-year prison term.

“He has often said he would like to set up a support network … to provide moral support for the families, to ease their mental and life pressures so that they can be strong enough to face the pressure from authorities,” Zeng said in a video message played during Wednesday’s award ceremony.

It was one of the rare occasions she has been publicly seen since Hu’s arrest.

It’s not immediately clear how Zeng will go about setting up the support group. She has been under strict surveillance since Hu was whisked away by security agents who swarmed the couple’s apartment in the “Freedom City” complex on Dec. 27, 2007.

Her phone is monitored and often disconnected. Plainclothes security agents dog her movements.

Zeng, a waiflike 25-year-old with a heart condition, has herself become a fierce human rights advocate, using her blog to bring attention to abuses. In 2007, she was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.