Gao Yaojie uncovered a scandal that shocked and shamed China

The impoverished farmers of Henan province, in the Yellow river valley of northern China, had no name for the illness that began to strike them down in the 1990s. They called it “the strange disease”. It made them weary and nauseous, spread a rash on their bodies and made sores grow in their mouths. And it made people vanish. Muscles and strength wasted away, so that men could no longer work the flat brown fields. Families dwindled and disappeared. Owners of new-built houses never moved in, leaving them empty. Some people, realising they were sick, simply ran away. Instead of crops, the fields sprouted mud-mound graves.