China’s Ticking HIV/AIDS Time Bomb
They line the dusty roads outside the tiny villages of China’s Henan Province, several hours’ drive from Beijing—mounds of dirt funneled into crudely shaped cones, like a phalanx of earthen bamboo hats. To the uninitiated, they look like a clever new way of turning over fields—an agricultural innovation, perhaps, meant to increase crop yields. But the locals know the truth. Buried under the pyramids, which now number in the thousands, are their mothers and fathers, brothers, sisters, and cousins, all victims of AIDS. Like silent sentries, the dirt graves are a testament to China’s worst-kept secret.
—Time
“To the government, we [AIDS victims] are like bubbles. They know if they turn away and ignore us, we will soon pop and be gone.” But ignoring such people has become an increasingly difficult task as poor farmers, emboldened by desperation, are beginning to protest and speak out.
—New York Times
At present, it is India, not China, vying most ignominiously for the world reputation of worst future HIV crisis. Already, more than five million people have become infected in India. Because of a thriving heterosexual prostitution trade, strong cultural taboos against basic sex education, and widespread ignorance about prevention such as condom use, India’s epidemic is projected to grow even more serious over time.
That said, many experts also believe that China’s AIDS epidemic will eventually rival that of India’s and dwarf that of all other countries. The reason may be found in one of the most tragic and shameful tales in the annals of economic history—that of China’s “bloodheads.”
The tale of the bloodheads begins in China’s heartland in the early 1990s, in some of the most desperately poor rural provinces in the country—Anhui, Hebei, Hubei, Shandong, Shanxi, Shaanxi, and worst of all, Henan. Together, these seven provinces are home to more than 400 million people, and per-capita annual income hovers well below $500.
As part of China’s economic reforms, bureaucrats hatched a plan to address rural poverty by capitalizing on high demand and high prices in both the domestic and international markets for blood and blood plasma. Initially, the government’s efforts focused on simply collecting just blood, but they quickly realized that frequent donations dramatically increase the risk of anemia. To maximize profits—and to best boost peasant incomes—they discovered the best business model involved extracting the plasma from the peasants’ blood and then re-injecting the red and white blood cells and corpuscle material back into the peasants. This prevented anemia, allowing peasants to contribute plasma much more frequently—as often as four to six days in a row with a few days rest in between.
The problem with the plan was the way doctors and nurses returned the peasants’ blood after the plasma extraction. In Western hospital clinics, the plasma extraction can be done on an individual basis in a single pass. In China, however, it was a two-stage process in which blood was first drawn and the plasma separated. In the deadly second stage, doctors would combine the plasma-less blood into a common pool based on blood type. They would then draw from this common pool to re-inject blood into their donors. No more efficient way of spreading HIV, Hepatitis C, and other viruses has ever been created!
Now here is the even greater tragedy: When the Chinese bureaucracy figured out it was mass-producing HIV/AIDS victims as part of a poverty program, it stopped. However, the vacuum was filled by a cadre of entrepreneurs who had become, like the leaches of nineteenth-century medicine, part of the whole plasma business. These were the infamous bloodheads. As the Chinese bureaucracy rapidly retreated from its program, the bloodheads stepped in—and stepped up—the production of plasma and further accelerated the spread of the virus. This went on for years after the Chinese government outlawed the practice.
The net result of the bloodhead scandal has been to kill millions of Chinese and leave tens of thousands of children as orphans. It has also created a whole new class of disease spreaders. Combined with rapidly rising levels of intravenous drug use, the re-establishment of China’s once flourishing flesh trade, and a 1960s-style “sexual revolution” in China’s biggest cities—all of which constitute high-risk HIV/AIDS behaviors—the bloodheads have effectively set the stage for the worst AIDS crisis in the world.
According to the United Nations, China will have more HIV/AIDS victims than any other nation save perhaps India—as many as 10 to 15 million by 2010. This HIV/AIDS crisis will put a tremendous strain on a health-care system that as we have seen is already in tatters.
This compelling passage from the Washington Post illustrates the rage of China’s mass of AIDS victims and how the boot-to-the-neck response of China’s totalitarian government has only served to further inflame the Chinese countryside:
Xiong Jinglun was lying in bed on the night of the raid, resting his frail, AIDS-weakened body when the shouting outside jarred him awake. The 51-year-old farmer struggled to his feet and shuffled out of his shack to investigate, but someone had cut off the electricity in the village, and it was difficult to see in the pitch dark. Suddenly, several men wearing riot gear and military fatigues surrounded him, struck his head with a nightstick and knocked him to the ground. Xiong begged them to stop hitting him, crying out that he was an old man, that he had AIDS. But he heard one of the assailants shout: “Beat them! Beat them even if they have AIDS!” A few days earlier, residents of this AIDS-stricken Chinese village had staged a protest demanding better medical care, rolling two government vehicles into a ditch to vent their frustration. Now, local authorities here in central Henan Province, about 425 miles northwest of Shanghai, were answering their appeal for help. But instead of doctors, they sent the police. More than 500 officers, local officials, and hired thugs stormed the muddy hamlet of 600 residents on the night of June 21, shouting threats, smashing windows and randomly pummeling people who got in their way, witnesses said. Police jailed 18 villagers and injured more than a dozen others, including an eight-year-old boy who tried to defend his sick mother.