In the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of people in Henan, one of China’s poorest provinces, sold their blood as part of a government sponsored programme. It was bought not just by clinics but also unregulated agents to sell to pharmaceutical manufacturers. Unsterilized equipment was often used and, in some instances, blood was pooled together, its plasma extracted and the remaining soup of different donors’ blood was reinjected into them, supposedly to prevent them becoming anemic.
While Henan officials were slow to admit it, HIV spread quickly. “Dream of Ding Village” is a fictionalised account of this tragedy.
The story is told from the perspective of Ding Qiang, a 12-year-old boy poisoned in revenge for his father’s deadly dealings trading blood. Qiang’s ghost watches as the village’s AIDS victims continue to pursue romance, power and status despite the rapid progression of their disease. He witnesses the village’s decline and his father’s corresponding rise as he profits first by selling blood and then by embezzling state-provided coffins and making posthumous marriage matches to ease parents’ worries about their children’s social afterlives.
The author, Yan Lianke, has a reputation as a satirist. His initial plan for the novel included massive pipelines filled with Chinese blood flowing all the way to the West, a parable of rampant exploitation, but he obliged censors by removing that material. The book was banned anyway when it was published in China in 2006.
The finished version, recently translated into English, is sadly lacking in the hyperbole we expect from satire. It’s not sad for the novel, which is all the more powerful for its plausibility, but for those people in Henan who really did have relief resources – including sacks of flour – stolen from them by corrupt officials.
This article originally appeared in The New Zealand Listener