Just by sheer number of cases, the African AIDS crisis has finally entered the world’s consciousness. China’s turn is coming soon, and it may well be of a magnitude that dwarfs the tragedy in Africa.

The situation is this. At present, the Chinese government is in almost total denial that there is an AIDS problem in China. The official government estimate is that there are only 10,000 people with the virus, out of a population of 1.4 billion. Nothing to worry about, right?

Wrong. A panel of Chinese physicians in Beijing recently released, at some personal risk, their own careful study of the situation. Their estimate, which they suspect is low, is that there are 600,000 HIV positives in China today. Further, these people don’t know they are positive. Thus the number will grow rapidly as they infect others.

Here’s the kicker. Of course AIDS is being spread in China in the usual ways (drug users, sexual contact), but China has added another: the blood supply. The collection of blood in China has become a very big, often private business. It’s easy to make a lot of money by going into the countryside and collecting blood from peasants and then selling it to hospitals in the cities. You can even make the same rounds of the same villages every month or two.

What’s the catch? Disposable needles are even now virtually unknown in China. Whether private or public, persons involved in the blood supply system universally re-use the needles. (The writer has a Chinese friend who grew up in an affluent family in one of the largest coastal cities; he reports that he never saw doctors use disposable needles even for routine injections.)

So you get 600,000 HIV+ people, which the government says don’t exist. Since they don’t exist, the government doesn’t need to do much. The AIDS education budget for China last year was $2 million. Even the few billboards and TV commercials which that money could buy have been pulled after a few days’ exposure. Denial, denial, denial.

Add to this the deep, Confucian version of puritanism which you find in China, which is very much part of official government policy. Remember: The Chinese government fears two things on the Internet: political information... and pornography. In government eyes, yes, the New York Times is dangerous. But no more dangerous than superboobs.com, or whatever.

Which brings us to the circumcision pageant that’s about to unfold in the early 3rd millennium. The Beijing doctors, in their report, estimate that, if nothing is done, within ten years China will have more HIV+ people than Africa does now.

This, in a country that has never practiced circumcision, that in fact views it as yet another example of weird Western barbarism. Yet, based on what’s happening in Africa now, it seems likely that a few years down the road, the world will be clamoring for China to start cutting. And when you start cutting nationwide in China, the numbers of discarded foreskins quickly get into nine figures.

China doesn’t have the AIDS drugs now. China officially claims it has no AIDS problem now, or in the foreseeable future. But when the problem finally becomes so great that it can no longer be denied, the government is going to be faced with one simple, revealing choice: to cut, or not to cut.

We know how the West, perversely, has decided, time and again. No problem: cut, cut, cut. How China decides will be one of the more fascinating stories of the new millennium.