Fulfilling a Promise: Universal Care

Even before the extent of the epidemic became more reliably known, China’s leaders had signalled their renewed determination to tackle HIV in all of its dimensions, social and economic as well as medical. Because dedicated health officials and researchers had been running pilot programmes and building up evidence for well over a decade, there was a lot of information available about which approaches might work best. But most of these approaches went against the grain for many of the local politicians and senior bureaucrats who would have to implement them across the nation.