In 2002, the United Nations Theme Group on HIV/AIDS in China released a report entitled ‘HIV/AIDS: China’s Titanic Peril’ which underscored a potential crisis around the epidemic, reiterating concerns that up to 10 million people could be infected with HIV by 2010. By the end of 2011, however, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/ AIDS (UNAIDS, 2013), estimated that 780,000 people were living with HIV, with 48,000 new infections reported in the same year. Although the numbers were less dramatic than imagined, the report foregrounded an emerging trend in the epidemic landscape: an increasing number of infections from sexual transmission. At the end of 2011, this mode accounted for 63.9% of all existing infections and 81.6% of all new infections (UNAIDS, 2013). Sexual contact had become the leading route of transmission for HIV in China, and a new crisis had appeared, reshaping in crucial ways the response to the epidemic.