Counting results: performance-based financing and HIV testing among MSM in China

In this paper, I examine the use of performance-based financing to scale-up HIV testing in men who have sex with men, or MSM, by global health initiatives in China. This mechanism, which ties financing directly to the achievement of targets and indicators, assures that measurable results are produced from health interventions and accounts for financial spending. On the one hand, its adoption into HIV programming in China articulates with broader shifts in global health that place currency on particular forms of evidence. At the same time, performance-based financing reshapes how HIV interventions are carried out and what counts in these programmes. The suturing of financing to outputs directs what gets counted and how, and as a consequence leads to the production of measurable results as an end in and of themselves. Based on 22 months of ethnographic research carried out in China, I explore the effects of this mechanism and, in doing so, ask what gets left out in the pursuit of evidence. In particular, I demonstrate how the demand for outputs undermines HIV prevention in MSM, thus risking the very lives these interventions are intended to save.