Dream of Ding Village

This is a novel about an HIV epidemic that spread across many provinces of China in the early 1990s, when the government decided to develop its own blood-plasma market and launched a campaign called “donor economics.” All over the country, numerous “blood centers” opened; in villages, “blood elders” appeared. Enticed by the slogan “Donate blood and get rich,” impoverished peasants rushed to donate blood and, due to unsanitary conditions, were mass-infected with HIV. Soon after, a deadly wave of the epidemic swept across the country, devastating entire villages.

The book is the result of three years of the author’s “undercover” work—after taking a job as an assistant to a well-known Beijing anthropologist, he gained the opportunity to study the history of one of the villages that had disappeared.