editor and authors should be commended for their contribution to understanding sex- ual and reproductive health in China. More research and critical discussion are needed to move forward sexual and reproductive health in China. JOSEPH D. TUCKER HIV/AIDS, Health and the Media in China JOHANNA HOOD London and New York: Routledge, 2011 xi + 244 pp. £90.00 ISBN 978-0-415-47198-5 doi:10.1017/S0305741012000240 Discourses are power in two senses. They are power because by shaping how people define and view social reality, they constitute such reality. They are power because the making of discourses underlies existing power inequalities between social classes, racial categories and so on. By exploring how and why the media produce HIV knowledge in China through the appropriation of the images of “black Africans,” Johanna Hood’s book tells a story of these two meanings of power. The author argues that, on the one hand, connecting HIV/AIDs with images and stories of African suffering in the Chinese media creates the impression that HIV/AIDs in China is a foreign disease that cannot be contracted by the local people. On the other hand, the representations of black people in the HIV/AIDs discourse in China reflect deep-seated racial prejudices against Africa and its people. In these rep- resentations, the place of Africa is often linked to ideas of the primitive and anti- modern, whereas images of its people are deployed to tell stories of poverty, danger, diseases and disasters. The interrogation of these two meanings of power thus locates the book and its implications beyond the Chinese border to a more general question of how regional inequalities between Africa and other parts of the world have been played out globally and inscribed in our (both East and West’s) understandings of dis- eases and health. In addition to the two introductory chapters, the book has four substantive chap- ters. Chapter three traces the multiple negative meanings of “black” and “blackness” in daily languages, disease and disaster narratives in urban China. Using documents and texts collected through multiple channels, chapter four provides a fascinating account of the ways through which the black bodies are mobilized for the production of a HIV/AIDs discourse that serves to define the disease as non-Chinese in China. Chapter five extends the analysis to examine the intricate framing of places, cultures, people and diseases in China within the concept of “yuanshi” (primitive) and shows how this framing has played into the fear of losing control in the China’s quest for modernization. Chapter six reverses the analysis by contrasting the portrayal in the Chinese media of black powerlessness against diseases with the media’s depiction of China’s scientific vigour in combating diseases. Overall, the book provides an intriguing account that questions the very validity and legitimacy of disease narratives and health knowledge in urban China. Scholarly studies on HIV/AIDs in China have been dominated by the Health Belief Model that takes health knowledge as its starting point of analysis and have seldom questioned the socio-political contexts and power inequalities within which this knowledge is produced and whom it will serve. Johanna Hood’s book is therefore a very timely contribution to HIV/AIDs studies in China. It problematizes the 246 The China Quarterly, 209, March 2012, pp. 222–255