A medical researcher who sacrificed her career and risked her life to reveal the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C in China's poorest regions has died while hiking in the US, aged 59.
Dr Shuping Wang is estimated to have saved tens of thousands of lives through pressuring the government to act after finding many blood and plasma donors - who were often poor farmers selling their blood for money - were being infected with HIV and Hepatitis C due to unsafe collection practices in the 1990s.
After alerting health officials to her findings, Dr Wang was fired from her job at a for-profit plasma collection centre in Henan, China.
Years later, after relocating to the Zhoukou Health Bureau, she began testing blood samples for the conditions using kits purchased with her own money.
After discovering a significant number of HIV infections in the city, she again reported her findings to officials but was rejected.
In response to her advocacy, she was allegedly beaten "with a wooden baton" and her clinic vandalised.
Dr Wang never returned to China. Source: Hampstead Theatre
Eventually, however, the government introduced Hepatitis C and HIV testing for donors.
"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," she said in an interview last month.
"I never stop thinking about those I left behind in China. My mother died after I left the country and I was never able to see her after I left."
According to her obituary, Dr Wang died on Saturday during a hike in Salt Lake City with her husband, Gary Christensen, and friends. She had been living in the US since 2001 and worked as a university researcher.
"Shuping’s friends and family knew her as a talented painter and exuberant practical joker who loved wearing rainbow socks and teaching her dog Bagel and cats Coco and Billy new tricks," her obituary read.
Despite relocating to the US, where she became a citizen, Dr Wang remained an outspoken advocate for victims of the rural HIV epidemic in China. In response, her family and friends in China were repeatedly visited by Chinese authorities, she said.
She had never returned to China, believing it to be too dangerous.
Last month, the whistleblower released a statement accusing the Chinese government of attempting to shut down a play inspired by her life, The King of Hell's Palace, by "pressuring and punishing" her relatives.
"The stated purpose was that they want to stop Hampstead Theatre’s production of The King of Hell’s Palace, which dramatises how the HIV epidemic spread in the Zhoukou region of Henan province twenty-four years ago," she said in the statement.
"Their reason is that this play will embarrass and damage the Chinese government and the reputations of specific officials."
Dr Wang said she refused to be silenced, despite fearing for the livelihood of her friends and family.
"With bullying and censorship, the government has covered up the HCV and HIV epidemics in China very successfully. Why, in 2019, do they worry so much about a play being produced in London, twenty-four years after the events it depicts," she added.
