In their Policy Forum “HIV testing in China”, Z. Wu et al. describe the new Chinese national program of active, provider-initiated HIV/AIDS testing among prisoners and other high-risk groups. For some groups, such as prisoners and government workers, individuals consent to health examinations that include an HIV test, rather than directly consenting to the test itself. As the authors admit, this strategy places community protection over individual rights. Although for some, routine HIV testing represents a standard public health response to a deadly epidemic, for others, this represents a dramatic reduction of individual control over when and how one is tested for HIV.