ABSTRACT
This chapter further looks at whether a better understanding of certain social
inequalities, particularly income and, to a lesser extent, gender inequalities, may
help explain China’s rapidly growing and evolving HIV/AIDS epidemic. The
second chapter framed China’s HIV/AIDS epidemic within the development pro-
cess it is experiencing. This was done so as to provide background beyond that
given in many biomedical descriptions of HIV/AIDS epidemics. As noted, these
focus mainly on prevalence and incidence rates among different population
groups. Moving now to a more specific area, we look to shed more light, in this
and future chapters, on how certain inequalities may play a role in the evolving
HIV/AIDS epidemic in China. We believe such inequalities are particularly
important. This insight builds from a range of studies, spanning a variety of dis-
ciplines and using different methods, which argue that social and economic
inequalities have a strong impact on population health (Farmer, 1999; Gandy
and Zumla, 2002; Wilkinson, 2005). Income inequality, moreover, has been
found to have a particularly strong association with health, in both the developed
and developing world (Pei and Rodriguez, 2006: 1069; Wilkinson and Pickett,
2006). Additionally, it is of importance to note that a growing body of quite
recent research also finds a very strong empirical association between HIV/
AIDS prevalence and income inequality (Holtgrave and Crosby, 2003; Drain
et al., 2004; Nepal, 2007; Talbott, 2007).1 Other studies, using different methods,
also make very similar arguments (Barnett and Whiteside, 2006; Craddock,
2004; Schoepf, 2004).
