The Blood of Yingzhou District (; translation: The Children of Yingzhou) is a 2006 short film documentary directed by Ruby Yang and produced by Thomas F. Lennon. The film is about the effect of AIDS on orphans in Yingzhou District of Fuyang, Anhui, China. It won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject).
The film documents the plight of young orphans in Anhui whose parents have died after contracting AIDS as a result of infection while donating blood to earn income, and who sometimes do not receive care in their village since many people in the villages are terrified that they may be infected as a result of contact with the children.
Background
In June 1985, the first case of AIDS was reported in China. At first, the disease was largely considered a disease of foreigners since most of the people diagnosed from 1985 to 1988 were either foreigners or Chinese people who had recently been overseas. The Chinese government took quick action by immediately banning all import of blood products. However, this action did not have the desired effect since AIDS continued to spread throughout China. From 1988 to 1993 most of those being diagnosed were intravenous drug users, and it was also common for new cases to be in the Yunnan among sex workers, people seeking treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and Chinese people who had been employed abroad. Unfortunately, by 1998 AIDS had spread beyond coastal cities and Yunnan to all the regions of China.
AIDS in the Henan Province
In the 1950s, the Chinese government established a blood donation system in the Henan Province. This system helped the government since it allowed the government to create revenue for rural health care, and in the 1990s the system helped them deal with a financial shortfall by encouraging villagers to sell blood and plasma for profit. This was a very attractive deal to the villagers since they did not believe the blood-selling process to be dangerous or exhausting, so it seemed like easy money that these poverty-ridden Chinese people could not let pass by. This also seemed like easy money to the government since it had to spend close to nothing on infrastructure and labor. The stated purpose of the Henan government was to establish a ‘blood economy’ in order to ‘shake off poverty and attain prosperity’ and ‘make people rich and the nation strong.’ Nevertheless, this seemingly perfect deal soon began to show its down side. Greed took over and caused the desire for profits from blood products to be regarded as more important than safe blood and plasma donation practices. One of the most common unsafe practices included allowing the villagers to donate plasma multiple times in a day to attempt to maximize their profits even though it is recommended that people donate plasma once every two weeks at most. Another extremely common unsafe practice at the blood donation centers was the pooling of blood donated by all individuals in order to extract the plasma before injecting the pooled blood back into the donor. Moreover, these stations did not stress the importance of sterilizing materials used in the process of blood donation. These unsafe practices caused the risk of contracting AIDS to increase dramatically among those who made blood donation a common practice. In January 1995, healthcare workers identified the first cases of AIDS in the Henan region and rapidly linked the development to the increase in blood-selling practices. However, the Henan government refused to accept this fact, and they asserted that there was no AIDS in their province. Unrecognized, the disease continued to spread among the people of the Henan Province until, in 2000, there were so many cases reported that the government could no longer hide the presence of AIDS in the province. It is estimated that by that time 500,000 to 700,000 people in the region had contracted AIDS because of the unsafe practices of the ‘blood economy.’