94 The EconomistOctober 12th 2019
A
swarm ofbattered bicycles and pedicabs, cramming the nar-
row street, was usually the first sight that greeted Shuping
Wang at the Zhoukou Anti-Epidemic Station, in Henan province.
Most belonged to poor farmers who had ridden into the city in the
small hours, eager to give blood. Every day around 500 would
come. They were recruited from their mud-brick villages by local
cadres, called bloodheads, who organised them into groups. The
aim of this programme, run by the government, was to build up
China’s stocks of blood and plasma so that tainted blood was not
brought in from abroad. How ironic that would seem, in time.
Naturally the government looked to Henan, where Dr Wang had
been born: in central China south of Beijing, a remote place of poor
but supposedly pure-blooded people. Farmers there struggled to
make any sort of living. For each cow or lamb they raised local offi-
cials took a fee, and for each infringement of regulations—failing
to grow tobacco and cotton together, having more than one child—
they imposed a fine. For anyone worried and in debt, as many
were, giving blood was easy money. As the official slogan said: Lie
down, hold out your arm, make a fist, earn 53 yuan.
When Dr Wang started at the blood bank in 1991, excited to be a
front-line doctor like her mother, it had only just opened. The
equipment was good and the rules were followed; she saw to that.
But blood-collection stations were popping up in Henan like
mushrooms, and procedures in some were shocking. There were
no preliminary blood tests for donors, though many were coming
back several times a week. Tubing, syringes and centrifuges were
sterilised only once a day. Blood from several donors, once the
plasma had been extracted, was mixed in tubs before it was rein-
jected. Even in her own clinic nurses messed up, going too fast. At
medical school in Beijing in 1988 she had taken a course in field
epidemiology run by America’s Centres for Disease Control; she
knew the dangers of tainted blood by heart. By taking random sam-ples from 64 donors in 1992, she found a hepatitis C infection rate
of 34%; locally, more than 80%.
She reported this back to local medical officers, as well as the
Ministry of Health in Beijing. She wanted all deficient blood sta-
tions cleaned up or closed. Staff should be trained medically and,
as important, morally. For blood collection, far from being “sa-
cred” and “glorious” as the government claimed, was just a money
machine, not least for the local medical and government officials
who sold the plasma to pharma companies. They had no interest in
monitoring for disease or bad practices, saying it was too costly,
fearing too for their jobs. In the end she was kicked out of the blood
bank for being trouble. She had to use her own savings to buy test-
ing kits and to set up a testing centre of her own. But she did it glad-
ly to save the people of Henan—because if hepatitis C was being
transmitted, then hiv, leading to aids, was clearly coming too.
Here, though, she could make no headway. At least, when it
came to hepatitis, the central government introduced screening
for all donors from July 1993. But hiv, which she first found in early
1995 in a Mr Guo who had given blood in several stations, was a dif-
ferent story. This was seen as a Western infection, a foreign disease
that could not be admitted to. And here she was, a young woman
whose father had fought with nationalist forces against Mao Ze-
dong, a spy’s daughter, expelled from school, reporting an hivin-
fection rate in 1994-95 of 13% in the Zhoukou region. Worse than
gathering the data, she had taken them to Beijing, when officials
both there and in Henan wanted them well hidden. This time offi-
cers not only trashed her research, but drove her out of meetings
and sent a man to wreck her testing clinic with a birdcage pole.
She was not easily discouraged. Her own name for herself was
“Sunshine”: a maker of demon-hot sauce with an exuberant laugh,
a fondness for jazzy socks and a habit of tickling her much too seri-
ous husband. Yet these encounters left her in tears. With her job
prospects in Henan demolished, she left for Beijing to do research
with the one person there who had treated her warmly, Zeng Yi, the
head of the Institute of Virology at the National Academy of Sci-
ences. As a doctor she had to go on helping people, whether anyone
liked what she did, and said, or not.
The farmers of Henan stayed on her mind. As central govern-
ment slowly began to own up to hivand the aidsthat followed, il-
legal blood stations continued to flourish down those forgotten,
dusty tracks, and officials raked off their money. She had ceaseless-
ly visited the villagers for years, and she went on going in secret,
buying cough syrup and diarrhoea medicine to ease their symp-
toms, though she could not cure them. She also gathered evidence,
partly clinical, partly pictorial, for she keenly took photographs
anywhere. In several the villagers returned her happy grin. In oth-
ers, sick and skeletal figures merely stared at her.
She kept none of this to herself. In Beijing she passed her find-
ings carefully to journalists and to officers from the American em-
bassy, explaining too which articles they should read and whom
they should see, slipping them secret government reports. She also
passed data to Gao Yaojie, a gynaecologist 30 years her senior who
was now the public face of the hiv/aidscampaign in China. Dr
Gao, who became a dear friend, wrote the books and pamphlets
and spoke out; Dr Wang, under cover, provided much of the evi-
dence that underpinned her certainty. Then in 2001, when she
could no longer return to Henan, she left for America.
Everything there was new: the culture, the language, the tech-
niques. She found a new husband, and a new field of research at the
University of Utah. Two things, however, were grimly familiar.
Whenever her name was publicly attached to hiv/aidsin Chi-
na—as to a play, based on her career, being staged in London this
autumn—Chinese state security would begin to pester. And not far
from her house in Salt Lake City, under Mount Olympus which she
loved and painted, donors would sit in their cars pressing cotton
wads to their forearms, outside a blood clinic that offered cash bo-
nuses and never closed, even on Sundays. 7Shuping Wang, the first doctor to expose the hivscandal in
central China, died on September 21st, aged 59The truth-teller of Henan
Obituary Shuping Wang