China's
blood donation system is largely monetarily driven, and while attempts had been made in the 1980s to move to a voluntary system, they were mostly unsuccessful. In the early 1990s, China restricted the import of blood products, while calling for local investment by foreign pharmaceutical companies, especially to the province of
Henan, where numerous plasmapheresis stations were built. The selling of blood plasma were seen by locals as a method to reduce poverty. They turned to their own blood as a ready source of cash income that would allow them to participate in China’s newly liberalized market economy. In
plasmapheresis, blood plasma is taken from donors, while the remaining blood constituents such as
red blood cells are returned to the donor. The blood plasma is then sold to pharmaceutical companies to produce blood-based products. As a cost-cutting measure, some stations mixed several bloods in the same centrifuge, resulting in large-scale blood contamination. In 2004, China admitted that the commercial collection of plasma accounted for a quarter of all cases of HIV infection in China and that the epidemic had reached far beyond Henan Province. HIV/AIDS activist
Yan Lianke's 2005 book
Dream of Ding Village is based on the incident. A full-length play ''The King of Hell's Palace'' premiered at London's
Hampstead Theatre on 5 September 2019, and gave a dramatisation of the events of the plasma economy scandal in Henan Province in the 1990s. It was written by
Frances Ya-Cha Cowig, and directed by
Michael Boyd. ==See also==