Reported cases of HIV in China are rising rapidly

WANG XIAOSHUAI, a gay man in the central city of Hefei, used to believe that only people who injected drugs could contract HIV. But then a man he had sex with revealed that he had tested HIV-positive. Mr Wang visited a local NGO and took a pinprick test to determine whether he, too, was infected. Happily, he was not. But the experience was terrifying. “It never occurred to me that someone around me could actually get HIV,” he says.

Many others are less fortunate. In November China’s Centre for Disease Control said that 850,000 people were known to be HIV-positive, 12% more than a year earlier and almost three times the number in 2010. An official study found that new cases of HIV among students aged between 15 and 24 rose by more than one-third every year in 2011-15, mostly as a result of gay sex.