Justice tough to find for Chinese who got HIV/AIDS through tainted blood
Tian Xi's father, Tian Demin, and mother, Cheng Minggui, in their one-room home in Xincai, Henan Province.
Reporting from Xincai, China —
It was just a small bump on the head, the result of one boy pushing another against a desk. It was such an unremarkable occurrence in a third-grade classroom that it should have been forgotten a day later, buried in the recesses of childhood memory.
Who could have imagined that it would dictate the course of Tian Xi's life and of those around him?
After the incident, the 9-year-old was sent home from school to rest. That night he threw up, so his mother took him to Xincai People's Hospital No. 1, where a young doctor fresh out of medical school diagnosed a mild concussion and recommended a transfusion for a quicker recovery.
His parents collected their savings, the equivalent of six months' salary, to buy four bags of blood. They didn't want their son, a top student who they were sure would be the first in their family to attend a university, to miss too much school.
It was April 1996, and few people in this small city in Henan province had ever heard of HIV/AIDS.
Now 23 years old and weighing only 112 pounds — the result of the early stages of AIDS — Tian is confined to a detention center in Henan province. He is charged with storming uninvited into the offices of the director of the hospital where he was infected with human immunodeficiency virus and sweeping everything off the top of the desk with his arm. A fax machine, computer and water cooler were broken in the Aug. 2 incident. He is to be sentenced soon.
Tian Xi is one of perhaps 1 million Chinese infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, as a result of blood transfusions at government-run hospitals. About 1 million more people were infected through the process of donating blood. Although the cases date back to the 1990s, the Chinese government has yet to offer an apology or investigate a massive coverup that allowed the disease to spread exponentially after it was well known that the blood supply was tainted.
Besides free retroviral drugs, victims have received almost no compensation. When they've tried to file lawsuits, courts have in most cases either rejected their claims or refused to accept the cases. As a result, victims usually petition officials — an archaic system dating back to imperial times in which the aggrieved would travel to the capital to implore the emperor for help.
Li did get compensation eventually (she is prohibited from disclosing the amount), but only after repeated petitions to President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, a stint in prison, another under house arrest and suicide threats.
"If you don't fight, you'll get nothing," Li said. "It would be better for the government to come up with a plan for all us who are sick or who lost children."
China now has a capitalist economy with a communist government, the worst of both worlds with each at constant odds with the other, the yin and yang of its eternal existence. In China, the infected are already dead as society will treat them as such. They should form a HIV Boxer Rebellion and take matters into their own hands. The government could care less about them, there are billions more to take their place. With the current Chinese government, you have to shame them into action and a million+ infected rebelling against these corrupted-simple-minded-short-sighted-quick-fix-backward thinkers would do just that.
There are a lot of injustices in the world, I am really glad the story of Tian Xi is known globally, giving Tian a platform to disclose his side of the story, his emotions, and his frustrations. I believe in many readers’ eyes, Tian is not causing destruction, but showing a very human side, releasing the anger and frustration returning to the very place and the people that have infected him with aids and completely disregard his plight.
