Summary
This paper was published in the Health Affairs Blog by scholars in the initiative's U.S.-China Research Group on Global Health and Migration as part of their collaborative research.
China's Emerging Role in Global Health
Author: Jennifer Huang Bouey Rebecca Katz Elanah Uretsky
As the United States shifts its funding priorities and precipitates an inevitable slowdown in its investments in global health, China is poised to fill in the void as it increases its international diplomatic efforts through its One Belt One Road Initiative, which will rival the scale of the Marshall Plan to develop infrastructure along with a China-centered trading network. But the Chinese philosophy on global health and its approaches in distributing aid, and development assistance for health (DAH) in particular, is vastly different from that of the United States. China’s entry into the DAH field represents the first time that a developing nation switched its role from being a recipient to being a major financial contributor to global health. It is our belief that this will create new models for south-south collaboration—that is, exchanges between developing nations—in global health and prompt a paradigm shift in global health assistance as we currently know it.