Shuping Wang, who helped expose China’s rural AIDS crisis

Shuping Wang, a Chinese doctor who braved the loss of her job as well as ostracism, assault and the destruction of her first marriage to expose the spread of AIDS in rural China, died on Sept. 21 in Salt Lake City. She was 59.

She died while hiking in a canyon with her husband, Gary Christensen. A preliminary autopsy indicated that the cause was a heart attack, he said. She had lived in Salt Lake City in recent years after settling in the United States.

Her death came a little more than two weeks after a stage play based on her experience as a whistleblower opened in London.

Wang worked for nearly two decades in relative quiet as a medical researcher in her adopted homeland, most recently at the University of Utah. Colleagues, she said, sometimes did not know of her dramatic past.

In the 1990s, she stood up to Chinese officials who had tried to conceal an AIDS epidemic in rural China. There, the spread of HIV, the virus that causes the blood-borne disease, had been attributed to shoddy facilities that bought blood from poor farmers.

Wang was one of a group of Chinese doctors, researchers, activists and journalists who took great risks to spread information about the hidden epidemic in Henan province and other regions. She was the whistleblower who marshaled evidence of it.

“Wang Shuping was the earliest medical worker to enter the fray in the war against AIDS,” Gao Yaojie, a doctor from Henan, who become the public face of efforts to expose and treat the spread of AIDS there, wrote in a tribute to Wang. “For this, she suffered the most grievous attacks and pain of her life.”

Eventually — far too late, in Wang’s view — the Chinese authorities shuttered the commercial blood stations that had spread HIV and offered medical help to villagers who had become infected, usually after they or family members sold blood.

Wang’s pride in what she accomplished was tempered by what she and her family endured. After she took evidence of the HIV infections to officials and researchers in Beijing, her superiors in Henan assailed her.

A former medical official, she said, used a club to smash Wang’s testing lab and beat her. The local government shut the lab, leaving her without pay. Her marriage to an official who worked in the medical administration cracked under the pressure.

The play based on Wang’s story, “The King of Hell’s Palace,” by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, recently had its premiere at the Hampstead Theater in London.

“Speaking out cost me my job, my marriage and my happiness at the time, but it also helped save the lives of thousands and thousands of people,” Wang said in a question-and-answer exchange on the theater’s website. “I wanted to prevent disease, I didn’t care about power and position.”