HIV AIDS, Health and the Media in China by Hood Johanna;

Author:Hood, Johanna; [Hood, Johanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Yuanshi as ‘primitive reproduction'

As sexual conduct is linked to reproduction within contemporary China, it is understood as something that needs to be governed. This is especially relevant within the HIV/AIDS narrative as the disease is mainly understood in China as an STD, whereby the sexual transmission path of HIV requires a certain type of behavior (sex without a condom and often outside marriage) expected of irrational people within primitive societies.

The Chinese media often portray Africa as inhabited by disordered, uncivilized, black, homogeneous masses which serve as the primitive agents and naturalized site for the reproduction of disease and human life. This presentation of Africans' reproductive capacity as somehow intrinsically primitive is closely linked to the supposedly ungovernable nature of the black body, and to yuanshi in the senses of ‘the origin of disease’ and ‘natural origins.’ In other words, yuanshi becomes sexualized when articulated on the black body. According to the Chinese media, this is especially true of black Africans, whom they present as sexually promiscuous, and thus it “makes sense” that they have a special relationship to disease transmission.

It is important to understand that yuanshi in the sense of ‘primitive reproduction’ applies unevenly to African men and women when HIV is involved, in that women are portrayed as playing a more significant role in HIV transmission. To understand how this perception of the black female subject's relationship to HIV transmission developed in China, it is important to understand how one of HIV's four biomedical transmission paths came to dominate the media presentation of the virus. Upon its introduction to Chinese society, HIV was classified as a venereal disease (VD), a term that is associated with the sexually transmitted disease experiences of its painful semi-colonial past. Although HIV now is described as an STD, this transmission path occurs through sexual intercourse – notably undisciplined and unorthodox sexual intercourse – and not necessarily through the exchange of other bodily fluids. This understanding means that the virus also carries ideological and moral baggage through its association with a “foreign-influenced” deregulation of social and sexual mores in China.78 HIV is widely seen as emerging from societies which:

began to evolve from sexual repression to “sexual emancipation” and “sexual liberation.” STDs began to develop and spread, especially from the practices of those dissolute young men and women, who in various aspects of sex experimented with “multiple sexual partners,” and “group sex.” As everybody already knows, almost all “AIDS men” found in several areas were infected by homosexual practices.

(Li and Bi 1995, p237)

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