ABSTRACT

The global HIV/AIDS epidemic has multiple histories. Lab tests for HIV are universal and treatment protocols for AIDS largely established. But when, where, how, and who may contract HIV varies considerably. Variations in not only a country’s healthcare infrastructure but also its economic, political, and social systems contribute to very different national histories. Historical coverage is especially vulnerable to official cover-ups wherever an independent press is absent and whenever naming an AIDS epidemic is as much or more concerned with economic losses as it is with actual loss of human lives.

Naming HIV/AIDS is thus a powerful social diagnosis of the many problems that facilitated its spread in the first place. China’s unprecedented HIV–tainted blood scandal of the 1990s inextricably links issues of when, where, how, and who were affected to the particular confluence of failed health-care infrastructure, economic policies, and medical governance. This article examines the responses of a novelist, director, and documentary maker to the resulting AIDS epidemic in rural Henan during the decade (2005–2011) after it was first reported in 1995–96. Their blending of fiction, film, documentary, and public health campaign about the AIDS epidemic with participation from the Chinese Health Ministry and Film Bureau and people living with HIV/AIDS in China offers a unique case of speaking truth to power and making power accountable.