A court in Yiwu, Zhejiang, has agreed to hear China’s first ever lawsuit against an employer for refusing to hire a prospective employee on the grounds of their white blood cell count. The lawsuit, filed by a Ningbo University graduate, accuses the Yiwu municipal education and labour departments of denying him a job as a high school mathematics teacher because his medical examination indicated an abnormally high white blood cell count.

The Ministry of Health and China’s premier media organizations have all condemned the testing of prospective employees for the Hepatitis B virus (HBV), after HBV activists disclosed that 61 percent of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) still conducted such tests in contravention of government regulations. Moreover, the survey of 180 SOEs by the Beijing Yirenping Centre showed that more than a third of those enterprises would refuse or be reluctant to hire people with HBV.

China’s ministries of health, education and human resources on 10 February ordered local governments to implement new policies designed to eliminate discrimination against people with HBV, the virus that causes hepatitis B. They were given 30 days to ban the use of HBV blood tests in job recruitment and school entry examinations.

Despite government moves to eradicate employment discrimination against people with HBV, the virus that causes Hepatitis B, employers still routinely refuse to hire HBV-positive job candidates, and there is still a widespread fear and misunderstanding of the disease in Chinese society, according to a new research report by the HBV activist and support group, Yirenping

A 25 year-old university graduate with Hepatitis B has, for the first time in China, successfully sued a hospital for violating his right to privacy after it gave the results of his blood test to a prospective employer.

BEIJING - CHINA will stop mandatory hepatitis B tests for employees joining new companies and students enrolling in schools, state media said on Sunday, after a court ruled the tests were illegal discrimination. Deng Haihua, deputy director of the health ministry's general office, said the government would soon issue instructions to stop the practice, which is currently a requirement, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

On 23 May 2008, a Beijing district court awarded Gao Yiming nearly 20,000 yuan in compensation after he was refused employment at a Beijing technology company on the grounds that he was carrying the Hepatitis B virus (HBV). This was the first time a HBV discrimination case had been successfully litigated in China. Earlier cases had been successfully concluded through court ordered mediation or through private agreements between the plaintiff and defendant.

Table of Contents

Part one: Those left behind

CLB presents a detailed examination of the current struggle for workers’ rights in China at an international conference to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which opened in Paris on 4 December. Photo by Saad Akhtar.