View: What the world should learn from China’s health innovation

The superpower now plays a huge role in global health and medicine. We must all take note. Dr Ruby Wang is a UK-based clinician, healthcare strategy, and policy analyst. She leads at LINTRIS Health consultancy and writes at ChinaHealthPulse.com. She is the author of the forthcoming book China Cure, to be released by Agenda Publishing on Oct. 31. Only two decades ago, my family looked West for a treatment for my grandmother that was unavailable in China. Once regarded as fragile and inward-looking, China’s health system is now emerging as an ambitious innovation engine. Today, the traffic in innovation is beginning to move in multiple directions. And what travels outwards will not stop with drugs. China has moved well beyond its earlier role as a manufacturing base, and into a major source of health capability in its own right: a source of new drugs, as well as devices and scientific capacity; a builder of digital systems; a state with unusual capacity to align industrial policy, infrastructure, and health reform; and an increasingly consequential actor in global health. Competition is part of this story. China’s faster development cycles and greater capacity to move from laboratory