The Sick Man of Asia
China's Health Crisis
Article Summary and Author Biography
In their single-minded pursuit of economic growth, China's leaders have long overlooked public health -- which, by some measures, is now worse than under Mao. Despite recent reforms, China's citizens keep getting sicker, threatening the country's health-care system, the economy at large, and even the stability of the regime.
YANZHONG HUANG is Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations and Associate Professor at the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University.
Snapshot
中国领导人一味追求经济增长，长时期忽略了公共卫生。在某些领域，公共卫生状况甚至逊于毛时期。尽管中国政府已经采取了一系列改革措施，但疾病负担仍持续增长，威胁到了中国医疗卫生体系、整个国民经济乃至政权稳定。
Snapshot
Recent headlines have been shocking: 16,000 decaying pig carcasses in Shanghai’s Whampoa River, dire air quality reports in Beijing, and hundreds of thousands of people dying prematurely because of environmental degradation. China's pollution problem is holding back its economy -- and is endagering its people and the rest of the world in the process.
Although China has made remarkable economic progress over the past few decades, its citizens’ health has not improved as much. Since 1980, the country has achieved an average economic growth rate of ten percent and lifted 400–500 million people out of poverty. Yet Chinese official data suggest that average life expectancy in China rose by only about five years between 1981 and 2009, from roughly 68 years to 73 years. (It had increased by almost 33 years between 1949 and 1980.) In countries that had similar life expectancy levels in 1981 but had slower economic growth thereafter -- Colombia, Malaysia, Mexico, and South Korea, for example -- by 2009 life expectancy had increased by 7–14 years. According to the World Bank, even in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore, which had much higher life expectancy figures than China in 1981, those figures rose by 7–10 years during the same period...
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