China may be eager to claim a top spot in the international scientific community, but before it can move forward, it must first face up to its past.

Just last week, it seems that government authorities prevented a prominent AIDS activist, Gao Yaojie, from traveling from her apartment in Zhengzhou to Beijing for a visa to attend an awards ceremony in the United States. She is slated to be honored this March by the Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nonprofit group with Hillary Clinton on its board.

Yaojie is well-known for uncovering the unsafe blood donation practices in Henan province in the 1990s that ultimately infected more than tens of thousands of individuals with HIV. In state-run facilities, blood from multiple donors was mixed together before being infused back into the donors' bloodstream—a practice that continued for years as Henan officials attempted to cover it up .

For her tireless effort to expose the scandal, Yaojie, a 79-year-old physician, endured government harassment and surveillance. According to some reports, the current effort to keep her quiet stems from a wish to avoid embarrassing Li Keqiang, the former governor and party chief of Henan, who is rumored to be in line for the presidency.

No official seems to have been punished for his role in the plasma trade, according to reporting by the Economist. Victims of the scandal have been promised drugs and reparations by the government, but it’s also unclear how that effort is progressing.

China recently lifted some of its restrictions on foreign reporters, in advance of the Olympic Games. Hopefully some will be able to use the opportunity to dig deeper into the legacy of this government-sanctioned and silenced disaster.