Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Wikimedia Commons
You can save lives while earning some money!
—CSL Plasma
In the fifteen or so years that I lived in China, I was fascinated by the dystopian tales of that country’s plasma economy. Even the name seemed too strange for it to have been a reality. It was real, of course. The idea and the result of constructing a moneymaking scheme around the extraction and sale of the blood of poor people, or even of people just living on the economic fringes, seemed right out of a science fiction novel, one that at many turns was hardly believable. Back then, I thought it was a plan so brazenly weird that only China in that era would attempt to pull it off. It seemed to me a gross manifestation of unchecked greed to leech a lifegiving substance from people who need money so it could be sold by some faceless entity to make profits for a higher authority.