The Blood of Yingzhou District

What is the worse fate for a child, to be infected with HIV and dying a slow death or to be completely by ostracized by family and friends who are too afraid of contracting the disease? In one very poor district in China many children have lost both parents to AIDS. Poverty led the parents to selling their blood and the clinic simply removed the plasma, mixed the cells from several donors and gave them back to the individuals. With parents dead, children are left to fend for themselves - even close relatives are afraid of social ostracism for themselves and their families and will not be seen with these kids.

Particularly heartrending is the story of Gao Jun - a toddler who is cared for by his mentally unstable grandmother.. Eventually she dies and the child is locked away with a pig and three chickens for company. Traumatized, he is unable to talk and you see him wandering around aimlessly in his backyard. The plight of that kid made me want to rail at the vagaries of fate and scream at the cruelty of human beings. The stories of two other sets of children are folded in. The theme is the same - due to complete illiteracy and lack of knowledge of how AIDS spreads, people want to have nothing to do with these kids.

A charitable organizations steps in and tries to find a home for Gao Jun in another HIV positive family. After a period of happiness he starts to deteriorate and the family is unable to keep him, so he is moved again...

One is left with a sense of utter desolation and the feeling that this cannot be happening in China - a country that considers itself a super power and a legitimate player in the high stakes game of world politics. The disconnect between the apparent wealth and consumerism one sees in the large centers and the pitiable condition and lack of social services in rural areas is stunning.

The film is not for the faint of heart...

Well, I am here in China and I see a preview of the documentary on YouTube and I think that I feel ashamed to ignore the miserable fate of that infected kid. What is all my education these years about? Only exams.repeated exams In college, artificial situations make it impossible for me even to try to understand others and every day is spent doing my own business totally oblivious of what others' joy and sorrow.This is too terrible!In fact, this night when i got the plots of this documentary, i still feel it is very far away from me .So unreal. Maybe the State media will not publish the award of that great courageous director but any way I feel some relief in finding that those kids are not left behind by others like me. God be with them.

The subject is AIDS in China. Specifically in Anhui province. The victims are poor families. The adults donated blood in evidently unsanitary conditions: one individual apparently connected to the blood drawing procedure describes combining the donated blood of fifty individuals and then re-injecting a little bit of the mixture into the veins of the donors. It is hard to believe that China's health system would be so primitive! The consequence is not surprising. The donors get AIDS. In the absence of treatment to slow down the progression of the disease, they die quickly. Many had children. They are now orphans. Some of the kids are contaminated themselves. This documentary short is about those kids.

The most poignant case is that of Gao Jun, a toddler sick with the disease and being taken care by an uncle. Fear of the disease by the local community segregates the kid to his own backyard, prohibited from playing with other kids, a trio of chickens his only companions. The uncle finds that keeping a kid with AIDS in his home crimps his social life. Finding a wife is not going to be easy. The solution is to have another family adopt Gao, one where the adults are HIV positive. For Gao this is a solution of sorts, but his health is deteriorating and eventually the state (unclear) takes him away, only one of very few that receive such attention.

In Miao Zhuang Village, what's left of the Huang family are three children. Though uninfected, they suffer discrimination from a local community that is ignorant about how the virus is transmitted.

Health officials do make an appearance in this rural province. They distribute leaflets about AIDS awareness.

In Guo Zhuang Village, Nan Nan, a young infected girl is taking medicines. Her uninfected older sister is about to get married. She vows not to tell the groom about her sibling's disease.

Though the film is primarily concerned about the social conditions of those children, political issues are indirectly raised. One can't help but be underwhelmed by China's social services. At one point, a charity organization comes to help. In my book, charity and communism are antithetical; the latter, if properly applied, obviates the first. The inescapable conclusion is that China's CP is "C" only in name, the lofty communist principles of the past now abandoned. "People's Republic" now an oxymoron.

I haven't seen this movie, but when I was in China I heard about this kind of stories in TV and in newspaper. How to say, many parts of China is still quite poor. In some villages, farmers lives so poorly that people from developed countries will never imagine, in fact, I couldn't imagine myself (I grown up in the southeastern China, which is the richest place in China). These farmers are not well-educated, and they see that selling blood is the quickest way to make some money. But if they go to the official places for donating, it will be fine. And this wouldn't happen. They go to some underground or unofficial sites, where the purpose of the owners of those sites is to make money while to pay little.

I think the main problem in China is that now the southeastern provinces are too rich, whereas the western ones are too poor. There are two extremes.