A decade has passed since China declared a state-level war against HIV/AIDS, through the release of preventative guidelines and a set of related policies.

On the whole, the initiative has been a success but the fight is far from over.

As the 27th World AIDS Day fell on Monday, Xinhua reporters revisited Qulou, a once-unknown village in central China's Henan Province.

The village, so small it is not identifiable on maps, attracted worldwide attention due to the prevalence of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA).

Poverty and a lack of education resulted in many people in the area selling their blood to the black market, this unhygienic practice resulted in 107 of Qulou's 1,600 villagers contracting the disease.

SHADOW OF DEATH, SHAME

Reaching its peak at the end of 1980s and the beginning of 1990s, black market blood trade kingpins, the "blood heads", ensured constant supply by pooling all the donated blood, siphoning off the plasma and then pumping the plasma into donors' bodies. This meant people could donate more often, an attractive offer to the poor and uneducated, but with it came the consequence of contracting the disease.

In 2011, the film "Love for Life" brought the 1990s blood-selling scandal to the fore of Chinese consciousness.

The movie's heroine, Qinqin, contracts the disease after selling her blood to buy shampoo only affordable by city dwellers at the time.

In reality, however, the reasons many farmers sold their blood was simple: for food or to pay for their children's education.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic devastated the already impoverished village. People were unable to work, medical care was expensive and even those who were not infected were labeled "unemployable" due to their association with the region.

One of the lines in the film: "Once there was a global fever called AIDS. It snuck into our village and everyone who caught it died, and fell like falling leaves," resonated with villager Han Ding.

Han, 42, was informed that he had contracted the virus through a screening in 1999. Many people died without even knowing they had contracted the disease, he recalled.

"I felt the sky collapse. My life had been snatched away from me," he said.

A doctor named Gui Xien as the first to expose the reality of this "dirty" secret. After that, Chinese leaders visited these villages.

PLWHA had to also live with stigma surrounding the virus and were often shamed as the "disgraced". They faced isolation and ostracization

Han recalled once giving a relative a bag of bananas as a gift, only for the man to throw them away as soon as he left.