China's Deadly Cover-Up
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 29, 2002
ZHENGZHOU, China — China's catastrophic mismanagement of its AIDS crisis has come to this: Xie Yan is trying to give away her son.
"I don't want to give him away," said Ms. Xie, 35, as she watches the 4-year-old boy, her eyes filled with love and hurt. "But after I die, who will look after him?"
Ms. Xie's husband died last year of AIDS, and she has the virus as well. They are the victims of government-backed blood-selling schemes that have left about one million people infected here in Henan Province in central China.
Multiply Ms. Xie's heartache a millionfold, and you understand the cost of the Chinese government's cover-up of its AIDS crisis. If China continues to be more concerned with hiding the tragedy than confronting it, then today's Chinese leaders could kill millions of people over the next two decades. We in the West must exert strong pressure on China to act quickly to address the AIDS challenge.
Already, some two million people around China may have H.I.V., up from 10,000 a decade ago. U.N. officials have estimated that the figure could reach 10 million to 20 million by 2010. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute has developed a demographic model charting three scenarios for how AIDS could strike China over the next 25 years; the mildest leads to 19 million deaths from AIDS between 2000 and 2025.
"China is on the verge of a catastrophe that could result in unimaginable human suffering, economic loss and social devastation," a United Nations report warned in June.
Chinese officials are killing peasants every day through their denial and cover-up of the AIDS crisis. Instead of leading a campaign against the disease, they have arrested a leading doctor for speaking out about the disease, barred foreign and Chinese journalists from the area, prevented even Chinese doctors from visiting affected villages and banned humanitarian organizations from helping AIDS victims in Henan.
To sneak into Henan and talk to the individual victims is heartbreaking. Already peasants are going hungry because adults are too frail to plant crops or work for a living.
"Everybody in my house is too sick to work," said Zhang Hong, a 31-year-old woman. "My husband can't get out of bed and now is too sick to swallow a pill or even to eat food. We can barely afford any food."
In much of China, AIDS spread by drug use and prostitution. But in Henan, the government played an essential role by overseeing blood-collection programs that paid peasants for blood, pooled the blood and extracted the plasma, and then reinjected the blood back into the donors.
Pioneering articles by my Times colleague Elisabeth Rosenthal forced the Chinese government to acknowledge the importance of the AIDS issue. But the government's steps are so tentative that they are almost tantamount to murder.
Since it is responsible for making these people sick, the Chinese government owes them supplies of the antiretroviral drugs that combat the virus. If the Communist Party used the money squandered on billboards glorifying President Jiang Zemin on these drugs, it could save many thousands of lives.
If it wanted to, China could mobilize a national campaign against AIDS, just like the successful Thai effort. The leaders control the news media, and every village has a family planning officer who sometimes monitors each woman's menstrual cycle. If the authorities just committed themselves to attack AIDS as zealously as they fight unauthorized births, the battle could be won.
Alas, the opposite is happening. The cover-up continues and the authorities ban the suffering peasants from talking to outsiders. Those with the courage to speak up risk losing their inadequate medical subsidies and even having their children ejected from public school.
"They think it's a scandal that they must keep quiet," explained Rong Tiekui, a 30-year-old peasant who is infected along with his wife, both his parents, his brother and sister-in-law. "But this isn't some national secret that we're giving away. We're just sick."
Thirteen years ago I watched the Chinese Army turn its machine guns on pro-democracy protesters, killing hundreds and outraging the world. I couldn't imagine the Chinese government doing anything worse. But here in Henan, it looks like a slow-motion slaughter on an even more horrifying scale.