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China has been contributing to new approaches to global governance. The Health Silk Road (HSR), a significant component of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), was proposed by China in 2016. This paper claims that HSR is a new institution introduced alongside the existing WHO-led multilateral health system, and its relationship with the existing system can be described as layering. Having explored the new development of HSR during COVID-19, this paper further argues that while HSR has its unique strength in making contributions to global health governance and economic recovery, it faces a prominent issue of securitisation in the context of China-U.S. strategic competition, suspicion of the quality of medical products and sectoral fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese government has been prioritising the strengthening of its primary care system over the past two decades. This study reviews China's national policies in this domain from 2003 to 2018, incorporating academic literature and interviews with health officials and primary care providers. The aim is to assess these policies in alignment with the government's reform agenda and the ideal primary care system advocated in the public health literature. Initially focusing on network and infrastructure development, the Chinese government has progressively shifted its focus towards enhancing human resources and improving the service attributes of primary care facilities. Supported by detailed guidelines and increased funding, substantial progress has been made. Despite these advancements, significant gaps persist when comparing the current state of China's primary care system to the envisioned ideal. To gain a comprehensive understanding of these gaps, it is crucial to consider the Chinese government's agenda and the country's unique development trajectory, which has been influenced by its history of planned economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines three aspects of successful aging including subjective health, cognitive ability, and social participation and their relations with environmental conditions and environmental awareness. We used the seemingly uncorrelated regression and multilevel models to estimate the joint relationship by combining the Chinese General Social Survey (2013 and 2021) (N = 5404 and 1580 accordingly) and the Chinese Statistical Yearbook and used propensity score analysis to identify potential endogenous issues. The first finding is that older people who were men, married, lived in urban areas, or received social security had an edge in aging successfully. Secondly, the adverse effects of environmental pollution on older adults' cognitive ability and social participation can be reduced by the protective effects of environmental awareness. Additionally, air pollution had more apparent effects, and water pollution was more modest in social involvement. This study offers empirical results to enhance the well-being of the older population by lifting their environmental perception and improving environmental quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck and China reported the first case to the World Health Organization in December 2019, there was no evidence-based treatment to combat it. With the catastrophic situation that followed, materialised by a considerable number of deaths, researchers, doctors, traditional healers, and governments of all nations committed themselves to find therapeutic solutions, including preventive and curative. There are effective treatments offered both by modern medicine and traditional medicine for COVID-19 today. However, other therapeutic proposals have not been approved due to the lack of effectiveness and scientific rigour during their development process. Proponents of modern medicine prefer biomedical therapies while in some countries, traditional treatments are used regularly because of their availability, affordability and satisfaction they bring to the population. In this paper, we propose a transactional medicine approach where the interaction between traditional and modern medicine produces a change. With this approach, the promoters of traditional medicine and those of modern medicine will be able to acquire knowledge through the experience produced by their encounters. Transactional medicine aims to be a model for decolonising medicine and recognising the value of both traditional and modern medicine in the fight against COVID-19 and other global emerging pathogens.