Building on the Past, Facing the Future

Abstract

In the three decades since the first AIDS case was identified in China, much has been tried and learned, and a great deal has changed, as we hope this book has shown. The wall of xenophobia that first greeted the disease was undermined by the discovery of domestic transmission among drug injectors and plasma sellers, but that in turn was quickly covered by the reluctance of the government at that time to acknowledge the problem lasting through much of the second decade of the epidemic. Now, in 2016, the picture looks very different indeed. China is open about its evolving HIV epidemic and is working actively and pragmatically to reduce the spread of the virus, including through the world’s largest methadone programme for former drug injectors. The country also operates the world’s largest HIV testing programme, performing some 144 million HIV tests in 2015, many of them in the groups most at risk of infection. It is this active testing programme that opened the door for another of the country’s great achievements: the provision of care and antiretroviral therapy to hundreds of thousands of citizens, many of them living in rural areas. The rapid progress in providing treatment and care for those infected has been truly astonishing.