‘Loving Capitalism Disease’: Aids and Ideology in the People’s Republic of China, 1984–2000*

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interpreted HIV/AIDS in the period from 1984, when the Chinese government first introduced policies reacting to the disease’s emergence, to 2000, when China’s devastating epidemic began to receive worldwide media attention. Important new sources show how the CCP cast HIV/AIDS as a staging ground for debates about the risks of liberalization and an evolving metaphor for deviance from socialism even in an era of capitalistic changes. Just as anti-capitalist ideology shaped official understandings of HIV/AIDS, so too did HIV/AIDS shape official views about the perils of China’s ‘reform and opening’ and the risks of capitalism to China. This two-way flow of meanings, which carried epidemiological and human consequences, illustrates the need for scholars of this period to foreground the evolving official ideology and forms of resistance to global capitalism — in politics, culture, society and even public health — rather than only the more common and sanguine narrative of rapid growth and economic development. Far more than previously understood, the interplay between AIDS and CCP ideology in this period reveals crucial dynamics in the evolution of China’s ongoing encounter with global capitalism.