This interview is with Yijie Xu, the author “Blood Selling in Modern China: Technologies and Ideas, 1876–1937,” which appears in the May 2025 issue of Twentieth-Century China. Yijie Xu is a PhD student in History at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Read the article here
Before we start into the article and your research, could you tell us a bit about your academic background?
I got a BA in history at Zhejiang University in mainland China, where I developed a research interest in the lives of the underprivileged groups, such as women and laborers, in Chinese history. I read for an MSc in contemporary Chinese studies at the University of Oxford and benefited from an interdisciplinary perspective on the study of China’s past. Currently I am reading for a PhD at the Department of History of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Your article discusses the ethical debates over blood transfusions and the market for blood in China. How did you come to focus on this interesting topic?
I came across this topic in a conversation with my grandma. She was born in 1948. Her mother was a renowned fortune-teller who died early, her father was a farmer, and she herself married a landlord’s son. Grandma told me she sold blood twice in the 1970s because they were so poor. She mentioned selling blood to a municipal hospital, which issued a certificate to every registered blood donor to record their blood type and donation date. “It was to prevent one person from selling blood too often and getting all the money,” she said. I was astounded not only by the existence of blood selling in socialist China and the role the government played in the practice but also by the idea of the sheer commodification of blood, in her words. That was when I decided to look at the history of blood selling in China for my master’s dissertation. My supervisor, Henrietta Harrison, suggested I look at it from its beginnings, and I found in past newspapers that when people talked about blood selling in late Qing and Republican China it was inseparable from blood transfusion technology. In other words, when ordinary people in modern China heard about blood transfusion, they used to think of blood selling. So, I decided to start by studying how different groups of people in China conceptualized blood transfusion technology.
How does your history of blood selling speak to the overall history of late Qing and early Republican China?
The history of blood selling uncovers some untold stories of people’s lives in late Qing and early Republican China, such as Chinese people’s earliest contact with blood transfusion, Western biomedical technology, and an alternative means of livelihood for the lower classes. This history also encourages reflection on—and hopefully adds perspective to—the understanding of China’s medical modernization, what the changes in modern China’s social-economic order meant to certain groups of people, and the evaluation of those changes.
Your article is a fascinating study of blood transfusions and the market for blood sales. How did you conduct this research?
This article still has many problems, but thank you for saying that. It is based primarily on digitized newspapers and journals in modern China, broadsheets and tabloids alike. I tried to cross-reference reports of typical cases in various press accounts to reconstruct a story, like the blood-selling scandal related to the Peking Union Medical College. As the materials are fragmented, I strived to contextualize my cases as best as I could by soliciting original materials and historiographies and using some reasoning, exemplified by my analysis of the identity of Dihua, the first man seen to write about blood transfusion in the Chinese commercial press. I was aware that discourses reflected the living reality of many, so I looked into the term maixue, its origin, connotations, and usage in the commercial press to see in what ways it fits into certain aspects of changes in modern China. I adopted a chronological order in weaving my findings of blood selling together from 1876 to 1937, to better present the changes and their connotations.
Prior studies in US and European history have discussed blood transfusions as well as the technologies and paid blood donations. How does your article complement or complicate these works?
I benefited from their concerns and theoretical frameworks, such as technological morality and gift/commodity dichotomy. Transfusion’s globalization was debated differently in China, to the understanding of which I incorporated China’s social characteristics and transition into my analysis of technological morality, proposing a third-world perspective. My article also complicates existing works by demonstrating the necessity to analyze the identities and life experiences of those who engaged in the debates about new or foreign technologies, which were intertwined with specific political and socioeconomic events.
How does your study speak to the ethical debates over medical technologies and the payment for blood and other human tissue donations today?
Like most other historians interested in science and technology studies, I would like to encourage ethical reflection from within the medical profession about the social composition of medical technologies, for instance, the pricing of blood and the organization of blood donors. Hopefully, alternative value systems can be worked out to give blood donors and other human tissue donors more dignity today.
In your article, you discuss the way in which the sale of blood formed a metaphor for survival in capitalist cities. What work influenced your argument here?
I was inspired by Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927 by S. A. Smith and Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century by Hanchao Lu.
Can you give us a bit of background on this project? Is it part of a wider research project?
This article is preliminary research for my PhD dissertation, “Blood Selling in Modern China, 1876–1949,” in which I hope to unravel the issue on multiple levels—the materiality of the technology, governmental engagement (if there was any), doctors, people who sold blood, and blood collection services—and see how the technology’s morality—multilayered itself, indeed—changed chronologically and how such changes could possibly fit into or challenge existing narratives of modern Chinese history and the morality of medical technology. I also hope to incorporate a comparison of the technology’s stories worldwide to better achieve this goal. Let’s hope I can find sufficient materials to carry on, for so far I have found them extremely fragmented and difficult to access through archives.
In what ways would you like your research to change the field of Chinese history as a whole?
Honestly, I have formed no idea about the answer to this question up to now. I just hope that Chinese historians might find it meaningful to apply anthropological approaches to a wider range of historical subjects, as well as to remain prudent if they must use critical and dichotomous theoretical frameworks. Instead, it could bring us more insights to focus on agents in specific historical contexts, their experiences, their relationships with things, and how these experiences encourage us to reflect on existing periodization, reevaluate the impact of particular historical events, and shape later social structure.
What historiography shaped this project? For further reading, what historiography would you recommend?
My writing and ultimate concern were influenced by Henrietta Harrison’s approach to meditating on historical subjects by looking into individual or group experiences within broader historical contexts and vice versa. Francesca Bray’s redefinition of science and technology in her article about Chinese culture, Bridie Andrews’s discussion of the making of modern Chinese medicine and blood in its history, and the focus on the heterogeneity of the medical profession in Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity by Sean Hsiang-Lin Lei also enlightened my research. For readers interested in the blood banks in Southwest China during the Second World War, I recommend reading Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History by Wayne Soon.
Do you have any closing comments for our readers?
I hope readers enjoy reading the stories I have presented here, and suggestions are appreciated.
