Shao-hua Liu at the Institute of Ethnology has published her book “Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China” by Stanford University Press in October 2010. It is also honored to be listed along with books published by many internationally famous scholars in the China field in the Studies of Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. This book addresses the intersection of modernity, heroin use, and HIV/AIDS as they are embodied in a new rite-of-passage among young men in the Sichuan province of southwestern China. Through a nuanced analysis of the Nuosu population, this book seeks to answer why the Nuosu has a disproportionately large number of opiate users and HIV positive individuals relative to other populations in Sichuan. By focusing on the experiences of Nuosu migrants and drug users, it shows how multiple modernities, individual yearnings, and societal resilience have become entwined in the Nuosu's calamitous encounter with the Chinese state and, after long suppression, their efforts at cultural reconstruction.

Renowned medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman at Harvard University comments this book: "Liu's remarkable 'medical ethnography' is not just a telling account of the devastating effects of youth migration, drugs, and AIDS on the Nuosu minority. It is as impressive an anthropological study as I have read of how the failure of the Chinese state and international organizations to take into account the local moral experiences of real people both causes social suffering and prevents the successful implementation of intervention programs. A splendid achievement." The book includes eight chapters, with 248 pages and in both cloth and paperback copies.