Li Suzhi’s story was heartbreaking. Her husband was a carpenter employed on construction sites in big cities. One day, years after selling his blood in the ’90s, he became ill and doctors had difficulty with the diagnosis. He had heard about AIDS in the big cities and told his wife that he would kill himself if he had been contaminated. He went to do some tests in a hospital, and his wife went to get the results. It was, indeed, AIDS. The doctors told her he only had a few weeks to live. To allow her husband to die peacefully without knowing he had been contaminated, she bribed them to give her a fake test result. She later met Wang Guofeng while petitioning for the rights of the villagers; they were arrested and harassed together. When I met them, they were a powerful couple, feared and respected for giving coherent expression to the peasants’ demand for justice. A few weeks after we met, they called me in Beijing, telling me they were about to come to the capital. But they never made it. They were arrested on their way, taken to a special prison, deprived of their foreign-manufactured ARVs obtained through an NGO, and sentenced to a year of house arrest.
At the same time, I came across an internal report written by an extremely courageous Chinese doctor, Zhang Ke, of Beijing You’an Infectious Diseases Hospital. He had become involved in the Henan crisis in the late ’90s, and was threatened with his life by the local authorities if he continued to put his nose in their business. But he continued, visiting Henan clandestinely numerous times, documenting the pandemic in a unique way, providing the only reliable data. In his report given to China’s central health authorities in January 2005, he gave his conclusions. He explained that the disaster could have been avoided if a few key conditions had been met.
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If there had been no paid blood donation at that time; if the government had not appealed to the public to go for the paid blood donation; if the paid blood donations had been stopped in 1994, when HIV was first detected, and effective control and prevention measures had been taken at that time; if control and prevention measures had been taken in 1999 at the peak of the fullblown AIDS cases; if the rural public health system was comparatively complete; if they had acted immediately. “None of the ‘ifs’ have been achieved today,” he wrote, “and our disaster is still going on.” Based on his fieldwork, Dr Zhang went on to estimate that 300,000 lives would probably be lost in this disaster. The original document I had received back in 2001 had estimated the total number at one million, and Henan authorities have given the official figure of some 25,000 cases. Dr Zhang is the only one who provides some scientific work to support his claim. He went on to say: “Nobody will be responsible for this disaster and nobody needs to be responsible for the disaster. The occurrence of a disaster has its objective historical background and historical inevitability, and our people have to gulp this cup of ‘bitter wine’ brewed by ourselves.” Dr Zhang, as a doctor, was ready to forget about responsibilities in order to get patients treated, and to put an end to unnecessary suffering. But ultimately there was no justice, and no end to the suffering. Last year I received an ominous message from a health worker who had returned to the AIDS villages. “Not much has changed since you wrote your book,” it said. The system was the winner. The blood scandal of Henan is only a footnote in China’s massive, historical transformation. A shameful and deadly footnote Pierre Haski was Libération’s China Bureau Chief from 2000 to 2006, and in 2007 he cofounded the website Rue89 with other former journalists from the newspaper. His book, China’s Blood Trade, is published by Grasset (Paris) and Susanna Lea Associates.
“Based on his fieldwork, Dr Zhang went on to estimate that 300,000 lives would prob ab ly be lost in this disaster.”