Empire of Lies

by Guy Sorman

  Gao immediately alerted the health authorities in Henan. She was told to keep her mouth shut: in 1994, AIDS was a state secret. The handful of doctors who had stumbled on it and the rare journalists who had dared to talk of it were safely behind bars. Gao found herself under police surveillance; she still is. Party cadres told her that if the presence of AIDS was confirmed, Henan would lose face. Henan was not the only province affected; there were others, too, so why should Henan be the first to admit it? If the fact became public, no one would buy Henan’s agricultural produce, no Guangzhou factory would recruit its inhabitants, and none of its children would be able to join the army. What the cadres failed to tell Gao was that from the early Eighties on, the blood trade had been a lucrative business. The “blood heads” (the press uses the term “serpent heads” to refer to the organizers of the immigrant worker trade) more often than not had links with Party bosses in Henan and had made their fortune by selling blood. Many have escaped to the United States.

  An argument often heard is that the victims were in it for the money, too, and they got what was coming to them. But Shangcai is one of the poorest districts in Henan. Selling one’s blood became the main source of income for those who couldn’t immigrate to the east. What they were paid, one dollar for forty centiliters, was just about enough to subsist in the village and pay the taxes that drain Chinese peasants.

  Several victims told me that they used blood money to pay the fines slapped on them by the family-planning department when they had more than two children. Family-planning officials are more rapacious than taxmen. They keep a close watch on expectant mothers and ask them to abort the child even in the sixth month. They confiscate the property of couples if they have a third child. They can be bought over with blood money. Is there anyone who is not corrupt in Henan? The novelist Zhang Yu, author of a famous thriller series set in Zhengzhou, created a comical character, a policeman who had no future because he was honest. Not being corrupt, Zhang said, was to be suspect. His hero, a kind of Inspector Maigret of Henan, could spot a thief just by looking at him. Yet instead of being feared, he had become the laughingstock of the area, all because he refused to take bribes.

  Gao decided to go to the Shangcai district to locate donors who were infected and find out how blood was taken. It transpired that a single syringe was used to collect the blood, which was centrifuged on the spot with equipment transported in a tractor. Only the plasma was conserved, with the globules and platelets then being injected back into the donors, who also had to pay for the operation. They were told that it would restore their strength and that they could sell their blood twice a week or even more often. Donors had to give back half of what they had earned for this transfusion.

  When did the “blood heads” and the authorities in Henan realize they were spreading AIDS? Its mode of transmission was known in the West since 1986; the Chinese leadership must have been apprised of the reality no later than 1990. Yet the blood trade was so lucrative that six years passed before it was finally stopped in 1996. The ban was not the result of any introspection on the Party’s part but of a sustained campaign by Gao, who finally found the right lever to manipulate: the international press. The New York Times and the French Libération investigated the matter; it was their reporting that compelled leaders in Beijing to order a total ban on the sale and purchase of blood.

  Apart from the horror, the story is also illustrative of the Party’s methods. Any wrongdoing is necessarily foreign; if exposed, it has to be stoutly denied. The bearers of bad tidings must be silenced; wild grass must be weeded out. But under no circumstances should one lose face in front of Westerners, who hold the key to economic development.

  Dr. Gao had an uphill task ahead of her: helping the victims to cope. The Party decided that the simplest course was to isolate AIDS-AFFECTED villages and let the sick die. The police barred entry to these villages. New maps of Henan appeared without showing the contaminated districts: it was as if entire villages and their inhabitants had vanished! Neither Dr. Gao nor the foreign journalists let themselves be intimidated. AIDS was spreading at an alarming rate all over the country. In 2000, the Chinese government finally admitted the existence of the disease, less out of genuine concern than from the fear of driving away foreign investors. While introducing tritherapy, public information was kept to a bare minimum. On New Year’s Day in 2005, the prime minister visited an AIDS-affected village in the Shangcai district and shook hands with several victims in front of television cameras. He said the district was a wonderful example of how to prevent and treat the disease—a “model” Chinese village. The hand of the Propaganda Department was evident: a horror story, slickly presented in a positive, humane light. The media played along, showing cheering images of people restored to health by tritherapy; a spanking-new dispensary set up in Shangcai also flashed frequently on the television screens. Every village in the district received a water tower; peasants now had access to running water even though it was not fit for drinking. Still, running water is a luxury in this poverty-stricken region where, if you don’t have AIDS, you have dysentery and hepatitis. Each water tower bears the clearly visible inscription in blood-red pictograms: “With water, the government is bringing you happiness.” Sadly, the people in the neighboring areas see these monuments to the glory of the Party as an AIDS border behind which are modern-day leper houses where the healthy dare not venture. The foreign press, of course, moved on to other stories. But Dr. Gao carried on undaunted.

  I went with her to the Shangcai district. An asphalted path provided easy access to the first village. Wenlou was a model village with a model dispensary, a model doctor, and model social workers. These “model” workers sent from the capital built themselves palatial houses, easily recognizable by their bizarre Grecian porticos, a sign of Westernization, perhaps. They never stirred from their houses. Even for the educated, those who suffered from AIDS were not normal.

  It was here that the former American president Bill Clinton came in the summer of 2005. Supposedly active against AIDS, he was all smiles as cameras clicked away, taking pictures of him with carefully selected AIDS orphans. Clinton’s visit was part of the pact between Western leaders and the Communist authorities. The anti-AIDS foundation that he heads was allowed to work in Henan, provided that he did not go to the worst-hit areas. Because of the photo session with Clinton, the foundation could donate medicines to the local health authorities but could not monitor their distribution. The authorities made a mess of things, and many HIV-positive children died in the weeks that followed. The world got to see a smiling Clinton but will never get to see the victims.

  Leaving behind the farce of Wenlou, we moved on to Nandawu. The path was no longer fit for vehicles. There was a police checkpoint at the entrance, but foreigners could get past it easily by hiding under a tarpaulin on a tractor trailer. You had to set out at dawn, though: policemen in China are not known to rise early. Once inside the village, there was no danger. The police were too frightened of AIDS to go in. Out of 3,500 inhabitants, 300 had died already, 600 were infected, and probably more, as screening was haphazard and many were too afraid to admit their symptoms. Gao talked to them at length, trying to rid them of their anxiety. Previously, she would come armed with medicines, but Party workers spread the rumor that they were poisoned. The simple, gullible peasants believed them. So now she only distributes clothes. The people lived in abject poverty: the sale of blood was banned, and the neighboring markets refused to buy their vegetables. Migrating to the city was the only way out, but this required getting fake identity papers, for no employer would ever recruit anyone from Henan. In the village, a few pigs and the kitchen garden provided the sole sustenance. Though small, these gardens, enriched with human excreta, yielded a good crop thanks to the skill of Chinese gardeners. In the village center stood a large modern house, protected by high brick walls and a wrought-iron gate. I wondered who owned it—a rich peasant or an official? The villagers laughed. They told me it belonged to a
peasant like them who went to Guangzhou and made his fortune begging. He was looking for a bride in the village but couldn’t find one because begging was looked down upon. Social hierarchy had to be maintained, epidemic or no epidemic: better to die in poverty than to lose face.

  Did the victims receive any compensation? The Beijing government said they did, a claim backed by the media. Every patient supposedly received 120 yuan, or the equivalent of twelve dollars a month. This was a fair amount, but in truth, the villagers only got ten yuan, or one dollar. What happened to the rest? It went into the pockets of Party cadres who are not entitled to any official remuneration. This is common practice in China.

  Eighty percent of the families were struck by AIDS; in every house, every hovel, a bedridden invalid lay dying. A Nazi death camp was my first reaction: real faces superimposed on memories of old photographs. Most of the sufferers did not have any medicine to give them relief. As for tritherapy, it requires constant monitoring, unthinkable in the village. A woman was putting a drip on her husband, bedridden for two years and covered with bedsores. She was clumsy and hurt him. What did the bottle contain? She did not know. The label said glucose. Why was she doing this? Because she felt she had to do something: “I saw in the hospital and on television that sick people had to be put on the drip.”

  Was there no doctor to come to see her husband? Yes, but he was very busy. What about the “village doctor”? Dr. Gao shrugged her shoulders. Just then, he appeared. He was one of the few the disease had spared. He said: “I’m a Christian, and the Bible forbids the sale of blood.” Of Christianity he knew little more. How did he become a Christian? “It’s in the family,” he replied. His knowledge of medicine was as limited as his knowledge of the Gospel. He had done a three-week course at the Zhengzhou hospital and produced a certificate to prove his medical credentials. He was not a fool, though, and joked about the progress of Chinese medicine. In Mao’s time, his training had lasted only three days, after which the rank of barefoot doctor had been conferred on him. From three days to three weeks, China had moved forward. He said his main task was to be with the dying and console the survivors. Soon, only orphans would be left. They wouldn’t go to school; no parent would survive to pay for their studies—free in principle—and no school would take them in. Teachers and families who remained unscathed refused to accept these children. A charitable organization run by a young Beijing democrat, Li Dan, tried to open a school for AIDS orphans, but the authorities closed it down. Li Dan said the orphans were a painful reminder of a story that the Party was doing its best to erase from public memory.

  Yet AIDS cannot be wished away. It will continue to spread through the blood sold by the villagers. Gao single-handedly carries on her work of detecting new cases outside the officially declared contaminated zone. The Henan government decided that thirty-seven villages were affected and had to be quarantined. It arbitrarily fixed the number of victims at 25,000, whereas the number of people afflicted in the province itself had risen to at least 250,000. The central government acted in much the same way, declaring that China had no more than a million AIDS victims, an absurd figure considering that each year hospitals register an additional million new patients. To compound matters, a large number of villagers migrate from Henan to Beijing and Guangzhou, spreading the virus. Then there are all those who have received Henan blood transfusions. The trade continued unabated several years after its ban and persists even today. In 1998, two years after the ban, Gao identified stocks of contaminated blood collected from Henan. A hospital in Xian had rejected the blood, but another in Shanghai bought it cheap and used it. As the media refused to publish these well-established facts, Gao posted them on the Internet. She did this to save lives, she said; she had no wish to politicize her struggle. But there are others, “wild grass,” who are ready to do battle.

  The moral generation is taking over

  Despite the horror of the blood trade and the countless victims abandoned by society, not much solidarity was generated in Henan. The dogma of individual enrichment has no place for compassion. In Beijing, however, some students, learning of the tragedy, decided to give up their studies and careers to work with Gao and her patients. Two of them, Li Dan and Hu Jia, sacrificed a lot more than their vacations. The two young men became disciples of Dr. Gao, who treats them like her children. She constantly fusses over them and tells them to take care of their health. Henan has a difficult climate and almost no hygiene. The frequent night journeys by train and the police harassment, detention, and threats all take their toll. In 2004, when he was twenty-four, Li Dan dropped out of Beijing University, where he was studying astronomy, to set up an NGO to look after AIDS orphans. Though legal, there were hardly any NGOs in China when he started out. Hardly much older, thirty-one-year-old Hu Jia also heads an association for the sick in the villages. So far, he has not managed to register his association as an NGO. In the eyes of the law, his is a capitalist company liable to taxation, even though it makes no profit. The authorities like dealing with companies; the company is a clear-cut entity, unlike the nebulous NGO—especially one with suspiciously pro-democratic leanings.

  Having converted to Buddhism and become a disciple of the Dalai Lama, Hu Jia is deeply compassionate, a quality sadly lacking in China. He had the courage to link the Henan tragedy to the nature of the political regime. Despite his youth, Hu Jia has been a democratic activist for many years. On June 4, 1990, when he was only fifteen, he celebrated alone the first anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, wearing a black suit borrowed from his father with a white flower in the button hole. On June 4, 2004, the fifteenth anniversary of Tiananmen, he went alone once again to the square, to be met by thousands of policemen and arrested immediately. Hu Jia comes down heavily on the Henan leaders for first encouraging the blood trade and later denying its horrendous consequences, a denial they persist in even today. He wonders why no one has been accused or prosecuted. The few attempts to get compensation from the Henan courts have been thrown out by the magistrates for lack of proof on the orders of the Party. Li Changchun, the governor of Henan in the Nineties when the blood trade was at its peak, is doing very well for himself and has reached the top of the Party ladder. In 2004, he was made a member of the Politburo, becoming number eight in the supreme hierarchy of China. He is presently in charge of propaganda.

  The temptation to see the blood trade as a metaphor for the real nature of Chinese communism is powerful. How is it that the Party has not eliminated Hu Jia, the only one to have raised his voice against this terrifying fact? Why has this wild grass not been weeded out? His fame in the West acts as a protective shield. Arresting him on the eve of the Beijing Olympics would range the entire American media against the Chinese government.2 We have to save Hu Jia, Li Dan, and Madam Gao. They are three wisps of straw struggling to stay afloat on a sea of blood. They are China’s honor, perhaps its future.

  Yan: a lone journalist fighting the censors

  Yan offers a novel explanation for the corruption of the Chinese leaders: they are the only ones who know what is really happening in the country, and have come to the conclusion that the days of the Communist Party are numbered. They are trying to get rich as quickly as possible and stash away their money abroad, preferably in the United States. In fact, they now own entire Chinese localities in San Francisco, Hawaii, and Vancouver.

  Yan ought to know: he is a seasoned, well-informed journalist. He also leads a dual existence. He is a columnist for a provincial daily and edits an internal reference publication for the Communist Party. The internal reference publication is a curious feature of Chinese journalism. In China, there are two kinds of newspapers, the first meant for public consumption and the other for Party cadres. One, intended for the masses, publishes only propaganda. Communist cadres know that whatever is published is pure fabrication because they have written the stories. But they do want to know the truth. For them, Yan selects reports from Chinese and foreign agencies, articles that cannot be published i
n China, extracts from the foreign press, and information from the Internet. All this is put together, photocopied, and circulated among the upper echelons of the administration. Cadres in China, depending on their rank and locality, receive copies of these internal reference publications. The main subjects deal with peasant uprisings, workers’ revolts, assaults on cadres and policemen, factory managers killed by the workers, Falun Gong demonstrations in the United States, Chinese banks on the verge of bankruptcy, ecological disasters, and imminent epidemics. Had the press been free, Party cadres would have been able to put things in perspective and become inured to criticism. Since the press is anything but free, the divergence between the official version and reality is so sharp that leaders tend to lose their balance. Anticipating the future, the apparatchiks, say Yan, see the true facts as their death knell.

  The contrast between the internal publication and public information is indeed striking. The public is presented with a rosy picture: dynamism, vitality, and enthusiasm are the keywords. Whenever a scandal is unearthed, it is used to exercise a salutary effect on society and prove the determination of the Party to root out corruption. The Propaganda Department orchestrates the entire show. Every ten days, it sends a note to news editors with a list of subjects to be taken up, the manner in which they are to be dealt with, and a list of subjects that are taboo. It also contains the names of heroes to be lauded, both past and present. This note is usually displayed prominently in newspaper offices. To keep their jobs, journalists have no choice but to yield. The most daring among them look for ways and means of circumventing these directives. Small news items revealing the cruelty of Chinese society find a place in the papers. Of course, there is no attempt to look at the deeper causes of the underlying malaise. Nonetheless, thanks to these intrepid reporters, the local press, the nearest to investigative field journalism, manages to publish a collection of reports of deception, trafficking, and extortion, providing an impressionistic sketch of a violent society that shows no mercy for the meek.