Blood, sweat & fears

TEN YEARS AGO, people known as 'bloodheads' roamed Henan province, offering farmers scraping a living off the crumbly Yellow River valley soil, 80 yuan for 800ml of their blood. Blood was good business: bloodheads could sell the stuff to hospitals for 10 times the amount they paid for it. Often driving to the fields where the farmers worked, they would extract the life-giving liquid with dirty needles, then help the dizzy individual recover by hoisting his legs above his head. But as giving blood was seen as a cultural no-no on the mainland (loss of blood implying loss of health), the bloodheads would go a step further: they pooled the blood, extracted the plasma, and then re-injected some of the liquid back into the grateful donors.

Some got more than blood back. In an attempt to squeeze out more profit, some bloodheads diluted the blood in tin washing bowls - with beer. Why? 'Because beer has bubbles in it, just like blood,' says author Yan Lianke. 'They couldn't use water as it wouldn't mix properly.'

A lot of people got something else entirely: they contracted HIV. And the release of Yan's novel Ding Village Dream marks the first time an author on the mainland has examined how this widespread practice of blood selling - originally initiated by local government officials - led to thousands, if not millions, of desperate people contracting the virus in some of China's most impoverished villages.

Although Yu Hua's 2003 novel Chronicle of a Blood Merchant dealt with the subject of bloodheads, Yan's novel is the first to show how entire villages in the 1990s grew rich off dealing in HIV-infected blood.

There is no way of knowing how many people developed Aids as the result of blood selling. Yan estimates that 95 per cent of all 25- to 40-year-olds in the northeast region of Henan sold their blood, representing hundreds of thousands of people. Blood selling took place in other provinces too. Initially, when villagers started falling ill, no one knew what was wrong - they called it 'fever sickness', says Yan. It took a couple of years before word spread that it was Aids.

'People died quietly at home because they were afraid it would affect their families' chances of finding marriage partners,' the 48-year-old writer says.