Strange circulations: the blood economy in rural China

Abstract The commodification of blood in the Chinese countryside in the 1990s led to the rapid spread of HIV infection among rural villages in Henan Province where the sale of blood had became an important source of household revenue. The unsanitary practices in semi-official and illegal blood collection stations that led to the spread of HIV have now been revealed in the domestic and international media. But what needs to be dramatized more fully is what this strange new circulatory system can tell us about the transformed terms of exchange between the agricultural economy and schemes of ‘national development’ that set up the ‘rationalities’ putting these economic actors into motion in an economic restructuring of opportunity and despair.