Discourses are power in two senses. They are power because by shaping how people define and view social reality, they constitute such reality. They are power because the making of discourses underlies existing power inequalities between social classes, racial categories and so on. By exploring how and why the media produce HIV knowledge in China through the appropriation of the images of “black Africans,” Johanna Hood's book tells a story of these two meanings of power. The author argues that, on the one hand, connecting HIV/AIDs with images and stories of African suffering in the Chinese media creates the impression that HIV/AIDs in China is a foreign disease that cannot be contracted by the local people. On the other hand, the representations of black people in the HIV/AIDs discourse in China reflect deep-seated racial prejudices against Africa and its people. In these representations, the place of Africa is often linked to ideas of the primitive and anti-modern, whereas images of its people are deployed to tell stories of poverty, danger, diseases and disasters. The interrogation of these two meanings of power thus locates the book and its implications beyond the Chinese border to a more general question of how regional inequalities between Africa and other parts of the world have been played out globally and inscribed in our (both East and West's) understandings of diseases and health.
In addition to the two introductory chapters, the book has four substantive chapters. Chapter three traces the multiple negative meanings of “black” and “blackness” in daily languages, disease and disaster narratives in urban China. Using documents and texts collected through multiple channels, chapter four provides a fascinating account of the ways through which the black bodies are mobilized for the production of a HIV/AIDs discourse that serves to define the disease as non-Chinese in China. Chapter five extends the analysis to examine the intricate framing of places, cultures, people and diseases in China within the concept of “yuanshi” (primitive) and shows how this framing has played into the fear of losing control in the China's quest for modernization. Chapter six reverses the analysis by contrasting the portrayal in the Chinese media of black powerlessness against diseases with the media's depiction of China's scientific vigour in combating diseases.
Overall, the book provides an intriguing account that questions the very validity and legitimacy of disease narratives and health knowledge in urban China. Scholarly studies on HIV/AIDs in China have been dominated by the Health Belief Model that takes health knowledge as its starting point of analysis and have seldom questioned the socio-political contexts and power inequalities within which this knowledge is produced and whom it will serve. Johanna Hood's book is therefore a very timely contribution to HIV/AIDs studies in China. It problematizes the foundation of the dominant paradigm and shows the limitations of a Health Belief Model in helping us understand HIV/AIDs in China. More generally, the book contributes to our understanding of how racial and regional inequalities are being produced through the construction of daily discourses of diseases, health, nation, identity, modernization and development in China and elsewhere. I particularly appreciate the contrast of chapters four and five with chapter six, which on the surface may show how proud China is about its economic achievement, but has nonetheless drawn attention to the sense of insecurity and fear China and its people have amid their pursuit of rapid development. Because the book is full of concrete examples and detailed analyses of different texts (particularly in chapters four, five and six), I believe it will be an excellent material for students of medical sociology and medical anthropology. Moreover, it will also be suitable for students and scholars of Chinese studies. For the book is not just about HIV/AIDs, rather it tells a story about how China as a nation constitutes its identity through the construction of an inferior foreign other.
Although I have been very positive about this book, I am cautious about two issues. First, books such as this can run the risk of producing another racialized discourse: the morally pure and superior West vs. the uncivilized East (specifically China). To avoid this risk, I think the discussion on how America and Europe also produced racialized disease discourses should be placed up front in the introduction rather than in chapter two. Second, qualitative researchers are often pressed to answer the question about the extent to which their findings represent a general phenomenon. Although figures are only one dimension to measure the importance of an issue, the question of representativeness should not be lightly dismissed. Presenting figures about the percentage of racialized representations of HIV/AIDs materials in proportion to the overall materials collected would be helpful. Providing an analysis of the diversity of discursive strategies used in the construction of different HIV/AIDs discourses in China and situating the racialized discourse within these strategies will also give readers a more comprehensive picture.
