From Beijing to Hampstead: how tale of HIV whistleblower rattled Chinese state

Officials pile pressure on family of crusading doctor whose exposure of a 1990s cover-up is now hitting the stage

By Vanessa Thorpe

The King of Hell’s Palace, opening at the Hampstead Theatre, was inspired by Dr Shuping Wang’s true story.

Chinese security officials have been accused of targeting a whistleblower’s family and friends in a campaign to force a theatre to abandon a play based on her case.
Dr Shuping Wang, who exposed the spread of hepatitis and HIV infection through contaminated blood and plasma in China two decades ago, has said her relatives and former colleagues in Henan province are being told they should persuade her to drop the show at the London’s Hampstead Theatre.
She said the incident had revived memories of the original whistleblowing, but was determined that the show, The King of Hell’s Palace, should go ahead. 

“The only thing harder than standing up to the government and their security police is not giving in to pressure from friends and relatives who are threatened with their livelihoods, all because you are speaking out,” she said. 

“But even after all this time, I will still not be silenced, even though I am deeply sad that this intimidation is happening yet again.”
Wang said officials had also tried to obtain contact details for her daughter, in an attempt to exert pressure on her. 

“I am particularly concerned for my daughter, who is very scared about being approached,” she said, adding that former colleagues in Beijing were afraid to answer her phone calls and emails since high-level officials had visited. 

“Their reason is that this play will embarrass and damage the Chinese government and the reputations of specific officials.”

Shuping Wang.

The play, written by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig and due to open on Friday, is a thriller inspired by the true story of Wang’s “extraordinary mission to expose a cover-up of epic proportions”. 

Set in Henan province in 1992 and directed by Michael Boyd, former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, it centres on the danger a young ministry of health official finds herself in when she is recruited into a new medical trade in human blood and uncovers a terrible secret.
Boyd condemned the pressure that Wang’s relatives were under but said: “We will do what Shuping wants, and she really wants this play to go on.”

The plot closely follows the battle Wang and her colleagues waged to uncover the truth. 

“I first reported the HCV [hepatitis] epidemic among blood donors to the Ministry of Health of PRC [People’s Republic of China] in 1992,” said Wang. 

“Three years later, I discovered and reported a serious HIV epidemic among the plasma donors to the Health Bureau of Zhoukou Region and the ministry of health of the PRC ... Only after I reported my results to the central government in Beijing was any action taken. They requested that I falsify my information about the HIV epidemic situation among the plasma donors but I refused. To cover up the HIV epidemic situation, they broke up our clinical testing centre, hit me with a heavy stick and insulted me.”
Wang resisted pressure to close her laboratory, but the health bureau cut off the electricity and water supplies, forcing it to discard thousands of blood samples.
Wang, an American citizen, learned of the visits that were “causing panic” in her home town in a phone call from a relative last month.
The allegation of renewed pressure on Wang and her associates comes as both China’s government and its citizens become increasingly assertive internationally. 

The foreign policy maxim of the former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping – “hide your strength, bide your time” – has been cast aside as Chinese economic power and global influence has grown. 

Instead, shows of strength have attempted to influence how China is depicted internationally.
“It is worrying that China is not bothered that it will be seen to be doing this. It is a sign of its confidence,” said Boyd.
In her statement, Wang said punishing relatives and colleagues of people who spoke out against the leadership was commonplace inside China.
“With bullying and censorship, the government has covered up the HCV and HIV epidemics in China very successfully,” she said.
“Why, in 2019, do they worry so much about a play being produced in London, 24 years after the events it depicts?”

Sina Delenda Est: Coldblooded Nation

Heartless crowds do NOTHING to help woman knocked down by hit and run taxi in China… leaving her to be killed by a second car
By IAN JOHNSON

SHOCKING footage shows a woman being killed when she’s hit by a car and left lying in the street – then run over a second time after bystanders failed to stop and help.
Video of the double hit-and-run was released recently by authorities in the city of Zhumadian, China, and has caused outrage among viewers.

Police say the woman (pictured trying to cross the road before she was struck) died from the two accidents

The pedestrian was first hit by a taxi (top right) while trying to cross the road

CCTV captured her lying motionless on the road following the hit and run

She was then run over a second time after bystanders failed to come to her aid

BEIJING — An agonizing traffic accident caught on surveillance cameras has reignited a debate in China about a lack of values in society.
The episode took place on April 21 in Zhumadian, a city in the central province of Henan. 

The graphic video, which was posted online Wednesday, shows a woman trying to cross a street on a crosswalk during what appears to be a red light for pedestrians.
After crossing two lanes, she is struck by a taxi and tossed in the air before landing on the ground. Then the light turns green for pedestrians. 

People walk by but do not help, nor do the drivers who were stopped at the light. 

The woman lifts her head, but the traffic resumes and she is soon run over by an S.U.V. 

She later died from her injuries.

“If this case was only about the first driver running away after hitting the victim, it would just be a normal traffic accident,” said Zhang Xuebing, a lawyer and a former law professor at the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai. 

“But the reason it’s stirred up a heated discussion is because onlookers on site didn’t help the victim.”

The original video has been viewed 30 million times. 

On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media site, the original post has been shared 70,000 times and attracted 80,000 comments. 

On a report on the video by China News, a user called Zhuwu left this comment:
“It is not the onlookers but society that is coldblooded.”
Some say the problem is a legal one. 

In 2006, a man in Nanjing who helped an injured woman get to a hospital was held financially responsible for her treatment on the grounds that he would only have helped if he were responsible. In addition, many Chinese are wary of helping because of numerous scams where people purport to be victims of an injury in order to extract compensation.
“In the aftermath of the Nanjing case, many Chinese worry about the victims turning around to blame the helpers, and thus feel unable to offer direct help,” Dali L. Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has written about the lack of humanity in China, said in an interview.
That was the view of one poster named Ranmo: “If I helped her to get up and sent her to the hospital, doctors would ask you to pay the medical bill. Her relatives would come and beat you up indiscriminately. Traffic police would then ask you to submit the data in your automobile data recorder and write up your witness account. It would go on till the next morning. Then the relatives would casually say ‘Sorry and thank you’ and then you could finally go home, exhausted, and deal with the blood on the back seat of your car. Am I stupid?”

The police announced this week after the public outcry that the two drivers of the vehicles that hit the woman had been found. 

The police added that compensation had been paid to the victim’s family, but it was unclear who paid it.
A common concern is that society lacks a moral compass. 

Some commenters on Weibo noted that onlookers could have saved the woman simply by stopping the traffic. 

The Weibo user Jillna Chen wrote: “If someone went to halt the traffic and called the police — didn’t even have to help her get up — she wouldn’t have died. If one can leave a society that is this coldhearted, that may not be a bad thing.”
Concern about the state of morality is reinforced by the frequency of these reports. 

Last year, a woman was stuffed into the trunk of a car and apparently kidnapped while bystanders did nothing. 

Also last year, a woman was slashed in an alley, and no witnesses offered help.
The case that arguably started the discussion took place in 2011, when a 2-year-old girl was hit by two vans and pedestrians simply walked by. 

Ultimately, the girl was carried to the side of a road by a street sweeper — a person often seen as at the lowest rungs of society — which further added to the nation’s anguish. 

The girl died a week later in the hospital.

Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has made public "morality" a top priority. 

Online commentators, however, said those efforts had not yet borne fruit.

“There is a lack of citizenship in society,” said Qiao Mu, an independent scholar in Beijing. 

“People feel society is too cold.”

Mr. Zhang, the lawyer, said that government policies are to blame. 

Although the government preaches morality, its actions undermine that message.
“You need to pay attention to what our government has been doing,” Mr. Zhang said. 

“Our government sentences a father whose son gets kidney stones after drinking toxic milk powder for petitioning. It also demolishes the libraries set up by nonprofits in the countryside to help poor kids who don’t have a proper education.”

New satellite images show inside China’s ghost cities

By Gus Lubin

China still has a startling number of vacant real-estate developments, judging from new satellite analysis by DigitalGlobe and Business Insider.

Chinese ghost cities have made headlines for nearly a decade, with huge new real-estate developments sitting mostly empty for years. 

Some see them as a sign China is heading for a real-estate crash. 

Others see them as just the typical style of urban expansion for a giant state-run economy.
While some ghost cities are reportedly filling in, the problem isn’t going away. 

A recent Baidu study of phone data gave clear evidence of 50 cities with areas of high vacancy. 

And just this fall China's richest man called Chinese real estate "the biggest bubble in history."
We looked inside some ghost cities with the latest in satellite technology, including time-lapse images, to show what’s making progress and what isn’t. 

See the highlights below.
Chenggong District, Kunming, Yunnan Province,  was labeled a ghost city back in 2012, with reports of 100,000 vacant apartments. 

Five years later, the city still looks very empty — yet skyscrapers are still being built.

Chenggong has big plans, evident in an extensive road grid. 

But the roads are still mostly empty, and many city blocks are still farmland.

A closer look at some of Chenggong’s mostly vacant skyscrapers. 

Note the paved road that transitions to dirt as it moves to the left.

Chenggong, like other ambitious Chinese developments, has dramatic architecture — in this case surrounded by farmland.

Chenggong has several big new university campuses. 

This has sat mostly empty and unfinished for a while, according to DigitalGlobe.

Erenhot is a notorious ghost city in Inner Mongolia. 

Check out our time lapse of one development there: just dirt in 2013 …

... streets full of McMansions in 2015 …

... still-empty streets full of McMansions in 2017.

Ordos, another notorious ghost city in Inner Mongolia, is reportedly adding people but still has lots of unsold housing and unfinished construction. 

This beautiful stadium, for instance, has been sitting unfinished for a long time, according to DigitalGlobe.

Another cool building in Ordos sits dormant, no longer under construction and not in use, according to DigitalGlobe.

Dongsheng District (named by Baidu as a partial ghost city), Ordos City, has large developments like this one sitting dormant. 

The skyscrapers are apparently finished, but the construction equipment is gone, so it appears that work has stopped on the site, DigitalGlobe says.

This development in Dongsheng is up and running but appears to have very few residents.

Ghost city or future city? 

The giant Meixi Lake development, Hunan, looks eerie today, with skyscrapers going up by the dozens and not a lot of residents. 

Then again, prices are still rising in the area, and, according to DigitalGlobe, construction is still going rapidly.

Once called a ghost city, Zhengdong New Area, Henan is reportedly doing quite well. 

Still, the city is building new skyscrapers by the dozens.

Another shot of Zhengdong. 

Will people move in? 

Time will tell.

Whistle-Blowing AIDS Doctor Reflects on Roots of Epidemic in China

By LUO SILING

Dr. Gao Yaojie, who helped expose H.I.V.-tainted blood sales in Henan Province, in her apartment in New York last month.

In October, the pioneering Chinese AIDS fighter Gao Yaojie disclosed her wish to be cremated after death: “Please scatter my ashes in the Yellow River.”
But Dr. Gao, 88, a retired gynecologist who uncovered a major H.I.V. outbreak in central China in the late 1990s, also had a more pointed message: “I do not want what I have achieved in this life to become a tool for others to gain fame and profit.”
What she has achieved is considerable.
In 1996, she was called in to examine a female patient with mysterious symptoms at a hospital in Zhengzhou, Henan Province.
The woman had become infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, through a blood transfusion obtained from a blood bank.
Dr. Gao started her investigations and discovered an unsanitary blood collection and sales network, abetted by local officials, that had spread tainted blood throughout the region.
Many residents were selling their blood, which was pooled with blood from other donors.
After plasma was extracted, the rest of the pooled blood, now often carrying H.I.V. or other infections, was reinjected into donors, so they could give more frequently.
Dr. Gao’s work to expose the epidemic and help its victims won her international acclaim but harassment at home.
Her movements were increasingly restricted, her phone was tapped, and she was stalked when she ventured outdoors.
In 2009, she decided to leave China.
“It was because I want to tell the truth to the world,” she wrote in her memoir.
In 2010, she was appointed a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York, and she continues to live nearby. (Her husband, also a physician, died in 2006.)
She has written several books on AIDS as well as a collection of poetry.
In an interview before World AIDS Day on Thursday, Dr. Gao talked about her life in the United States and what she considers the still-untold truth about the AIDS epidemic in China.

Why did you release the statement about your wishes after death?
In 2005, as my husband was struggling with throat cancer, we thought about water burial.
Being buried in the ground was out of the question, because in Henan, the lease on a grave is only good for 20 years.
Afterward, you have to pay more to keep it.
I would like my son to carry out the water burial for me.
When he was 11, he was jailed for three years for being connected to me. [During the Cultural Revolution, Dr. Gao was denounced as being from a “landlord” family.]
After he was rehabilitated, he went on to university and became a professor.
Now that I’ve gone abroad, he’s become worried that the Gao clan might charge him with filial impiety if he “threw his mother into the water.”
So I wrote this statement.
After I die, my son will take my ashes and scatter them in the Yellow River.
Actually, that isn’t the chief problem.
It’s the fact that some people have used my name for their own advantage.
Some have used my name to raise money without my knowledge.

In 2009, you came to the United States and said you would tell the world the truth behind the AIDS epidemic in China. What is that truth?

People campaigning for AIDS awareness at a section of the Great Wall, in Tianjin, in September.

The root of AIDS in China was the plasma market, which was introduced not only in Henan but in other provinces as well.
Henan was severely affected, however.
From the late 1980s to early 1990s, the plasma market took off in several parts of Henan.
Then Liu Quanxi became director of the Henan Health Department and strongly pushed the policy, which encouraged farmers to sell their blood.
From 1992 to 1998, as a result of the administration of [the provincial party secretary] Li Changchun, blood-selling became an established “industry.”
In a few years, blood stations had spread everywhere in Henan.
Only about 230 of them were licensed.
There were countless illegal ones.
The places with the most blood stations then are the places with the most severe AIDS problem now. From 1998 to 2004, under [now Premier] Li Keqiang, who succeeded Li Changchun in Henan, the AIDS incubation period, which is five to eight years, passed, and a great number of people infected with H.I.V. began showing AIDS symptoms and died.
AIDS not only killed individuals but destroyed countless families.
This was a man-made catastrophe. 
Yet the people responsible for it have never been brought to account, nor have they uttered a single word of apology.
I am very angry now.
Why?
In 2004, the government, which had begun to acknowledge the existence of the AIDS epidemic, sent medical teams to 38 “AIDS villages” in Henan.
Yet there were so many other people in Henan who did not get the needed treatment, not to mention those in other provinces.
In 2004, the Chinese government began to register AIDS patients and put out this policy: Those with symptoms would get 200 renminbi each month.
Those who didn’t yet show symptoms would get 150 renminbi.
This came with a condition, however, which was that one must write “sexual transmission” under “cause of infection,” because the authorities had ordered that “blood transmission” not appear in the questionnaire.
They hid the truth from the public. 
They wouldn’t let the victims say it was blood transmission, only homosexual activity or drug use or prostitution.
Since the officials suppressed information about the epidemic while cracking down on anyone who tried to report the facts or go to Beijing to file petitions, the epidemic wasn’t contained in time but kept getting worse.
On Dec. 18, 2003, Vice Premier Wu Yi met with me and we spent three hours discussing the problem.
She said, “Someone told me that the main routes of AIDS infection in China are drug use and sex.”
I said, “That’s a lie. If you don’t believe me I can call a rickshaw and pull you there myself so you can see what’s happening.”
She finally believed me, but soon the toadies were around her again and telling her homosexuality and sex were the main causes.

Have official attitudes changed under Xi Jinping?
It must be said that the government indirectly admits the existence of the plasma disaster.
I have two pieces of evidence: One is Xi Jinping’s wife, Peng Liyuan.
In September 2015, in her speech at the United Nations, Peng mentioned a 5-year-old orphan named Gao Jun.
He is now 15 and is from Anhui Province.
His parents were infected with H.I.V. from selling blood.
He was the first person affected by the epidemic Peng had come into contact with after she became the [Health Ministry’s] ambassador for H.I.V./AIDS prevention [in 2006].
The other evidence is from December 2015, when the AIDS orphans project of Du Cong’s Chi Heng Foundation was awarded the China Charity Award by the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
Du Cong, who had came to China’s rural areas in 2002 for a work project, started to help orphans after seeing the situation in the AIDS villages.
So far, the foundation has raised about 200 million renminbi [$29 million] and helped more than 20,000 people, including more than 600 orphans.
On the other hand, the Central Committee’s Leading Group for Inspection Work sent a team to Henan in 2014 for a two-month investigation.
The first day that they stayed at the Yellow River Hotel in Zhengzhou, more than 300 plasma market victims gathered in front of the hotel to submit their complaints.
But they were warded off by officials and the police.

Is the blood disaster under control now?
In 1995, Henan Province began closing some blood-collecting stations.
However, illegal blood stations are still active.
Last year, I read four news reports about illegal blood stations, three in Beijing, one in Nanjing.
Of course, there must be some illegal blood stations that have not been detected.
And I think the spread of H.I.V. is not totally under control.
Last year, I read a report about a woman who was infected with H.I.V. through a blood transfusion during surgery in Tongxu County, in Henan, which indicates there are still problems with blood donors.
Unfortunately, the victims are farmers, and most of them are illiterate.
They don’t know what happened to them.
They don’t know how to speak up for themselves.
They think this happened because of an unavoidable fate.
In recent years, they have begun petitioning for their rights, but their situation is still very bad.

How is your life in America?
Because I can’t speak English, I don’t go out that often.
Every month I pay $2,000 for my apartment.
The money comes from funds Professor Andrew Nathan [of Columbia University] raised for me.
Since I didn’t work in the United States in my younger days or pay taxes, I feel rather uncomfortable asking the government for assistance.
But in fact I am being taken care of by the United States.
Every month I get $87 worth of food stamps.
All my renumerations and award money goes to buying copies of my books and donating them.
For some time, I’ve had high blood pressure and blood clots in my left leg.
In the past three years, I’ve hardly been able to walk.
A caretaker is with me 24 hours a day.
My life in the United States is busy.
I receive at least six letters a day.
And I have many visitors.