As for China, we have, of course, no WHO data at all. But there is information available, including some statistical data for syphilis. The testimony of several observers seems to me tantalizing.

Thanks especially to Buret, and in spite of Astruc (or if we accept Astruc's information and merely reject his interpretation of it), it appears that all the commoner forms of VD existed in China from very ancient times. There is every reason to believe that syphilis and gonorrhea flourished there before the Revolution, probably especially in the coastal cities, where prostitution was rife, but also in the interior as may be judged, for instance, from casual references in William Hinton's story of a Chinese village, Fanshen. But we are told by two independent Western observers, Edgar Snow and Felix Greene, that by 1957 1960 or so VD had been virtually conquered in China. Both Snow and Greene tell us of an American doctor born in Buffalo of Syrian descent, Dr. George Hatem, who has lived permanently in China since the 1930s, and who has apparently been largely responsible for the campaign there to eradicate YD. Snow says that Dr. Hatem, whose Chinese name is Ma Hai the, and who had been chief of the Institute of Venereology and Skin Diseases in Peking, occupied this post "during a successful national war against syphilis and gonorrhea" but, with that campaign presumably finished, thereafter became a deputy director and concentrated on skin diseases and malaria. The war against VD, Snow says, began soon after the Revolution in 1949. The details of the campaign must wait until later. But Snow tells us:

“Within two years most of urban China was cleansed of the chief carriers. Work was extended to the rural towns and then to the whole country.”

More recently an English surgeon, Dr. Joshua S. Horn, has written of his fifteen years' experience as a doctor in China (1969), with a chapter on "the conquest of syphilis." Dr. Horn is avowedly partisan to the Chinese cause. Perhaps his medical training compensates in part for a lack of the neutrality or impartiality to which the two journalists, Edgar Snow and Felix Greene, aspire. It is, of course, unavoidable that anything written about China today is sure to provoke a charge of bias on one side or the other. Dr. Horn gives evidence that he knows what he is talking about and that he saw most of what he describes with his own eyes. His chapter, nevertheless, has the defect of concentrating on syphilis at the expense of gonorrhea, which he mentions principally in order to point up how great a problem it is in other countries. I counted it an additional defect that Dr. Horn unhesitatingly accepts a corollary of the Columbian story, evidently because it fits his preconceptions in a curious reversal of what I have suggested may have been the basis of the European fallacy. (see OTHER COUNTRIES VD STATISTICS PART III)