{"id":1895,"date":"2013-01-03T10:01:33","date_gmt":"2013-01-03T14:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/ghg-development\/?p=1895"},"modified":"2013-01-03T10:01:34","modified_gmt":"2013-01-03T14:01:34","slug":"getting-at-the-heart-of-chinas-public-health-crisis-elizabeth-c-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/ghg\/2013\/01\/03\/getting-at-the-heart-of-chinas-public-health-crisis-elizabeth-c-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting at the Heart of China\u2019s Public Health Crisis – Elizabeth C. Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Getting at the Heart of China\u2019s Public Health Crisis<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Elizabeth C. Economy, Guest Blogger
\nC.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies, Council on Foreign Relations<\/p>\n

This is a cross-post with CFR’s Asia Unbound blog\u00a0which can be found here.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A nurse gives an infected patient medicine as she lies in her bed at the HIV\/AIDS ward of Beijing YouAn Hospital on December 1, 2011. (David Gray\/Reuters)<\/p><\/div>\n

Trying to wrap one\u2019s arms around China today is a significant challenge. It is a global power with a growing economy, rising military, and expanding diplomatic reach. Yet there continues to be a gnawing sense in and outside China that all is not quite right. Whether it is the 180,000 protests annually, the growing flight of capital and people to the West, or the potentially ruinous impact of corruption on the Communist Party\u2019s legitimacy, uncertainty about China and its future is much greater than the country\u2019s impressive global standing might suggest.<\/p>\n

In the face of such uncertainty, what we need most is to understand better\u2014issue by issue\u2014what is happening on the ground in the country; and a terrific new book\u00a0Governing Health in Contemporary China<\/em>\u00a0by my CFR colleague and renowned public health expert Huang Yanzhong provides precisely that kind of insight. It details Beijing\u2019s efforts to tackle one critical and politically explosive issue\u2014health care\u2014and helps us understand where and why the country has succeeded and failed, and what more needs to be done.<\/p>\n

The statistics are startling. China\u00a0has one-third of the world\u2019s smokers<\/a>\u00a0and suffers around one million tobacco-related deaths annually; the cardiovascular disease death rate\u00a0is higher in China<\/a>\u00a0than in the United States; and\u00a0close to one hundred million Chinese<\/a>\u00a0are believed to suffer from diabetes. Public anger over poor care, rising costs, and corruption in the health care systemtriggered over 17,000 violent attacks<\/a>\u00a0against hospital doctors and health care workers in 2010. Moreover, horrific stories of tainted food and drugs have further undermined the Chinese people\u2019s faith in their government\u2019s capacity to provide an effective health care regime. As Huang notes, over the past ten years, the Chinese people have come to refer to health care as one of the Three New Mountains\u2014health care, education, and social security\u2014modeled after the old Three Mountains (imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic-capitalism) that the Communist Party deployed to bring down the government of Chiang Kai-Shek.<\/p>\n

Huang takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the twists and turns of the various efforts by Chinese leaders from Mao Zedong through Hu Jintao to tackle the country\u2019s health care crisis. He explores the political battles surrounding three of the most pressing health care challenges the country faces: provision of good and affordable health care for all Chinese citizens, managing health care crises such as HIV\/AIDs and the outbreaks of SARS and Avian flu; and developing an effective regulatory and enforcement system for food and drug safety. In each case, Huang finds evidence that Chinese leaders have learned from experience and from the outside world how to improve their practices. As a result, he can point to a number of advances in areas such as health insurance coverage or the strengthening of grassroots health care providers.<\/p>\n

Yet as Huang amply demonstrates, these remain changes at the margin. He quotes a senior official from the Ministry of Health as noting that the most recent set of reforms launched in 2009 have not \u201csolved the fundamental, systematic and structural problems [in China\u2019s health sector].\u201d Even president-elect Xi Jinping\u2019s pledge to bring higher levels of health care to the Chinese people, coupled with increased investment in the health care sector (according to a recent McKinsey & Co. study, Beijing\u00a0plans to triple its health care investment<\/a>\u00a0to $1 trillion by 2020), will not be enough to make the kind of difference in the country\u2019s public health system that China\u2019s leaders desire and its people demand.<\/p>\n

Real change needs a far more radical set of political and institutional reforms that address how health care policy is made, financed, delivered, and evaluated. For Huang, that means health care policy \u201cby fiat\u201d cannot continue. What is needed, instead, he proposes, is reform in Beijing\u2019s relations with local governments, greater democratic participation, a robust civil society, the rule of law, and a true market economy. Without such reform, Beijing will never get at the heart of its public health care crisis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Getting at the Heart of China\u2019s Public Health Crisis By Elizabeth C. Economy, Guest Blogger C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies, Council on Foreign Relations This is a cross-post with CFR’s Asia Unbound blog\u00a0which can be found here. Trying to wrap one\u2019s arms around China today is a significant challenge. It is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":585,"featured_media":1897,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[27,207,38,155,122,176],"class_list":["post-1895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-global-health-governance-blog","tag-china","tag-economy","tag-food-safety","tag-health","tag-hivaids-2","tag-public-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/ghg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/ghg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/ghg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/ghg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/585"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/ghg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1895"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/ghg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1901,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/ghg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1895\/revisions\/1901"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/ghg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/ghg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/ghg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/ghg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}