Society
Blood selling tells bitter story of poverty in China
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2010-09-22 22:42
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BEIJING - To raise their four children, the last thing the couple could sell was their blood.
"We have been selling blood for five years," said Lu Yunjie from Xinfei village of Weining Yi Hui and Miao autonomous county in Southwest China's Guizhou province.
Lu is 37, but her sun-tanned face appears much older. The couple's four children are all at primary school, two in junior middle school and one in senior middle school.
They receive 900 yuan ($132.4) a year as a basic living allowance from the local government.
Lu grows corn and buckwheat at home as food, and her husband goes out to seek work in the neighboring town. When he can find work, he earns 10 to 30 yuan a day. But this doesn't happen everyday.
Each month he sells his blood twice, earning a total of 240 yuan.
"With this money, we can buy 25 kilograms of rice, two packs of salt, a kilogram of pepper, a bag of washing powder. The rest is used for transport and electricity bills," Lu says, counting with her finger.
According to Wang Xian, head of the Xinfei village, the population of the village is 1,770. Land in the village is arid and more than 700 people don't have any arable land. Without a road, many villagers have to trek five kilometers to get drinking water.
"Lu's family was not alone," he said. "More than 200 people in our village live on blood selling."
Blood for money
To many people living in poverty, selling blood is seen as a good way to earn money.
The business saw its peak at the end of 1980s and the beginning of 1990s. Back then, to help donors recover quickly so that they could sell more, the "blood heads" pooled all the donated blood, spun it through a centrifuge to separate out the plasma, then pumped the residue back into the donors' bodies.
This resulted in the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS among farmers in Central China especially in the populous Henan province.
Blood selling was officially banned in 1998 when the Law of Blood Donation was enacted. The law stipulates that a donor can give no more than 400 milliliters of blood at one time and has to wait for at least half a year to donate again.
But the requirement for donating plasma is more lax. People can still donate regularly so long as their blood is not pooled together.
In the Yunxian county of South China's Hubei province, people can always see a boat on the Hanshui River, which farmers have dubbed the "blood ship." It transports farmers to a plasma station to "donate."
Each time a farmer can sell 600 cubic centimeters to get 160 yuan of "nutrition fee" and eight yuan of traffic fare.
Although the needle used in the station is "as thick as one to give injection to cattle" and the sight of it makes her dizzy, 52-year-old Gao Congfen still chooses to get on the boat.
Her son went to a senior middle school in 2000 when Gao started to sell blood. When he went to college, the tuition a year was 5,000 yuan, hence the mother continued the practice.
"I thought that we could stop the business when he graduated. But he didn't find a job," the woman complained.
Each time Gao sells blood, she sweats so much that her clothes become soaked. "It really hurts and I know it (selling blood) is bad for health, but I have no other choice."
Li Guangcheng, head of the plasma station, said "we abide by laws and make sure diseases are not spread through the transmissions."
While in Weining of Guizhou, officials didn't want to talk too much about about the illegal blood selling. "AIDS? I don't know. Can I get the disease?" Lu Yunjie the farmer asked.
Shadow of the miracle
Although China's economy, ranking second in the world, has long been described as a "miracle," poverty is still widespread.
The country currently has a staggering 150 million people living below the United Nations' poverty line-one dollar a day, according to the National Development and Reform Commission. The number is even larger than the entire population of Japan.
A World Bank report shows that China's gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was $3,700 last year, about 10 percent of that in Japan.
According to the State of the World's Children report by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), China's national income per capita in 2008, $2,770, was about the same as, if not lower than, the average for all developing countries worldwide, which stood at $2,778, said Dr. Yin Yin Nwe, UNICEF Representative to China.
"China is still very much a developing country with tens of millions of people living below the poverty line," she said.
She talked about children especially. "They are younger and more vulnerable and their minds and bodies are growing and developing," she said, noting that during her past four years in China, she saw many of the country's poorest children suffering from malnutrition and poor health, lack of access to quality schooling, lack of access to basic services and greater risk of being marginalized, exploited or abused.
Too many low-income people have held back the development of China's economy, said Wu Zhongmin, a sociology professor with the Party School of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.
"In China the medium and low income group covered 70 percent of the population," he said. "They have desire to buy but without the capability to push up the domestic consumption."
Poverty also generates crime
In the remote Songtao Miao autonomous county of Guizhou province where villagers' average per capita annual income is barely 400 yuan, some villagers are so poor that they risk making and selling illegal weapons.
A police officer who told Xinhua on a condition of anonymity that "we shed tears sometimes while nabbing the suspects...They are just too poor."
In the Taiping village of the county, 1,439 people share 33.3 hectares of arable land. Nearly 95 percent of the houses in the village were made half a century ago of wood.
"A man we caught selling guns was called Luo Qiang, whose extended family of 16 were squeezed in a shack about ten square meters in size. His youngest kid died of illness because they didn't have money to go to hospital," the policeman said.
Efforts to alleviate
The Chinese government has made concerted efforts to lift the poor out of poverty by developing China's economy over the past decade.
Over 481 poverty-stricken counties obtained support from 241 central ministries and companies by 2009, with 8.48 billion yuan involved as direct investment and 29.2 billion yuan in funds from domestic and overseas sources.
China's GDP per capita was $3,700 last year, more than 4.6 times of that in 2000.
In 2009, the annual urban per capita disposable income and rural per capita net income reached 17,175 yuan and 5,153 yuan respectively, up 9.8 percent and 8.5 percent from the previous year, said the Report on China's National Economic, Social Development Plan this March.
However, due to the size of the population, vastness of the country and disasters, poverty alleviation work has met with difficulties.
There is a Chinese saying "if you want to be rich, build the road first."
"In the mountainous Guizhou province the roads are always rugged. It is hard for farmers to bring their agricultural products to markets. We have planned to build a road in a village," said Yang Zaiqiao, vice director of the Poverty Alleviation Office of Songtao county.
"Construction of the road cost some 400,000 to 500,000 yuan, but we could only get some ten thousand yuan," he complained.
Farmers have been encouraged to get bank loans. But as many couldn't pay back the money in time, local banks are now reluctant to lend more.
