The following is a cross post from the great people at The China Beat. The site provides context and criticism on contemporary China from China scholars and journalists.
By Mike Frick
“Since you have gone, the house is empty, it has been three seasons now
Extinguish the lamps, let the twilight come, we must endure the setting sun”
Extinguish the lamps, let the twilight come, we must endure the setting sun”
–Chinese funeral couplet
In 2000-2001, Elisabeth Rosenthal published a series of reports in the New York Times that alerted the world to a startling AIDS epidemic among farmers in central China. Beginning in the early 1990s, thousands of farmers in the Yellow River provinces of Henan, Hebei, Hubei, and Shanxi had contracted HIV through commercial blood selling. Local government officials in Henan promoted blood and plasma selling as a rural development scheme that would lift farmers out of poverty.
