Liu Ximei

Twenty years after China’s scandalous “Black Blood Economy,” when a million Chinese citizens were infected with HIV and countless died from AIDS, thousands of rural peasants still suffer the consequences, their plight hidden from the eyes of the world and strongly censored by Chinese authorities.

Liu Ximei was born in 1985 in Xincai County, Zhumadian City in Henan Province. Being born in violation of the one child policy, she was given up to be raised by relatives. In 1995, a ten year-old young lady, Ximei, was severely injured while harvesting wheat. Losing copious amounts of blood, she was given HIV contaminated blood and contracted AIDS while under treatment at a local hospital. According to 2011 official statistics, there are 850,000 AIDS sufferers in China, a majority of which contracted the illness as the result of an officially promoted plasma market. This film describes Liu Ximei's life in 2013.