The Blood of Yingzhou District

In the 1950s, the Chinese government established a blood donation system in the Henan Province. This system helped the government since it allowed the government to create revenue for rural health care, and in the 1990s the system helped them deal with a financial shortfall by encouraging villagers to sell blood and plasma for profit.[3] This was a very attractive deal to the villagers since they did not believe the blood-selling process to be dangerous or exhausting, so it seemed like easy money that these poverty-ridden Chinese people could not let pass by. This also seemed like easy money to the government since it had to spend close to nothing on infrastructure and labor. The stated purpose of the Henan government was to establish a ‘blood economy’ in order to ‘shake off poverty and attain prosperity’ and ‘make people rich and the nation strong.’ Nevertheless, this seemingly perfect deal soon began to show its down side. Greed took over and caused the desire for profits from blood products to be regarded as more important than safe blood and plasma donation practices. One of the most common unsafe practices included allowing the villagers to donate plasma multiple times in a day to attempt to maximize their profits even though it is recommended that people donate plasma once every two weeks at most. Another extremely common unsafe practice at the blood donation centers was the pooling of blood donated by all individuals in order to extract the plasma before injecting the pooled blood back into the donor. Moreover, these stations did not stress the importance of sterilizing materials used in the process of blood donation. These unsafe practices caused the risk of contracting AIDS to increase dramatically among those who made blood donation a common practice.[4] On January 1995, healthcare workers identified the first cases of AIDS in the Henan region and rapidly linked the development to the increase in blood-selling practices. However, the Henan government refused to accept this fact, and they asserted that there was no AIDS in their province. Unrecognized, the disease continued to spread among the people of the Henan Province until, in 2000, there were so many cases reported that the government could no longer hide the presence of AIDS in the province. It is estimated that by that time 500,000 to 700,000 people in the region had contracted AIDS because of the unsafe practices of the ‘blood economy.’

The moving images of the children from the Anhui Province who had been affected by the spread of AIDS, has inspired several charities and non-governmental organizations to step in.[7] In many cases, such organizations have aided in the spread of awareness about the nature of the ways in which HIV/AIDS is spread and how people should approach and treat the disease as well as those who have it. In addition, such organizations have helped provide opportunities to marginalized victims of AIDS by creating educational programs and by helping them find job opportunities. These efforts have improved the lives of victims of AIDS since possessing this misunderstood disease prevented them from being accepted among peers at school or by potential employers. Yang allows the public to have an inside look into the effects of the organizations' activism in The Blood of Yingzhou District Revisited. The results are promising, but there is still much work to be done to prevent further spread of the disease and to ensure victims can lead normal lives.