China Health Pulse: 2025 Wrapped
Doctor's Notes #5: Reflecting on an extraordinary year for the CHP newsletter.
Dear CHP readers,
Less than nine months ago, I created China Health Pulse as a newsletter dedicated to understanding China’s impact on patients, policy and the future of global health. Since then, it has grown to reach +3,000 subscribers and followers across almost 80 countries. A particular highlight has been the recent expansion and launch of the CHP Podcast, where I invite expert guests to share their perspectives through in-depth conversation.
What began as a dedicated platform for analysis and reflection has become an incredibly thoughtful community, and I’ve spent many hours in conversation with readers and listeners through emails, messages, events and meetings, and these exchanges have also informed wider media engagement and expanded my advisory work through LINTRIS Health consultancy. Taken together, it has been a year marked by learning and shared curiosity, and I’m deeply grateful to all of you for engaging with such enthusiasm.
You may have noticed that I posted less here toward the end of the year. This is because much of my recent writing energy has been channelled toward my forthcoming book: on the global impact of China’s health innovation - which I’m looking forward to sharing more about in due course! The book had begun as a broad intention to explain China’s health system, but has since naturally sharpened in focus towards biotech and digital health, reflecting where I see China’s real-world impact emerging most clearly, and where the implications for the rest of the world are already being felt.
Such reflections have been reinforced by my conversations overseas in recent weeks, including catching up with think-tanks, industry heads and academics on the US’s East Coast in November, and at an international development conference last week in Southeast Asia. Across very different health systems and political contexts, I was repeatedly struck by how similar the underlying questions were on global health, around access, innovation, affordability and trust, and how often China now features in those conversations across both developed and developing countries, explicitly as well as implicitly.
These experiences have strengthened my motivation to keep publishing and sharing my perspectives. I am not a journalist or academic, but first and foremost a doctor, and then a consultant and writer, with perspectives influenced by a personal and professional background that bridges East and West, and across government, multilateral institutions and industry. Whether in my writing or consulting, my focus remains on myth-busting through grounded insights, and to always keep patients, shared global challenges and real-world outcomes at the centre.
In 2026, I look forward to continuing to grow China Health Pulse with fresh perspectives and deeper analysis in my writing, to continue thoughtful conversations with health leaders on the CHP Podcast.
Below, I’ve pulled together a short roundup of highlights from the year, followed by a few links I’d like to recommend, as is usual in the Doctor’s Notes series. Thank you, as always, for reading and engaging - lots more to come!
Happy holidays ~
Top Five Posts of the Year
Posts on China Health Pulse broadly fall into three pillars. Vital Signs pieces provide essential explainers that set the context for understanding China’s health system, covering topics such as AI health, biotech and global health. Real Diagnosis posts take a deeper analytical dive into current trends and key developments, including major policy moments, political signals, and market shifts - from the 2025 Two Sessions and tariff dynamics, to health ministry explainers and industry analysis such as Alibaba’s AliHealth. Doctor’s Notes are regular round-ups where I collate recommended reads and listens from other sources.
I’ve rounded up five CHP posts from this year that I think best capture the range of my writing - and which, judging by readership and sharing, seem to be the ones many of you most often return to:
1. This was my very first post, written to reset the starting assumptions many Western readers bring to China’s health system. It addressed the most common myths I encounter in practice and explained how the system actually functions on the ground. Since then, it has become the piece I most often send to those looking for a grounded, first-principles understanding.
2. This popular post tackled the hot topic of China’s biotech, dissecting the gaps between how the sector is often discussed publicly across general media outlets versus how it really operates on the ground for industry insiders.
3. A practical explainer mapping the ministries, agencies and incentives that impact health decisions in China. It is what I wish I had when I first started working across this system, and one that I reference regularly in conversations with policymakers and journalists. It's also the start of a continuing series of deep dives on China’s health ministries (Ministry of Health, China’s drug regulators - with more to come).
Health and the Two Sessions (Pt 1 of 2): What China’s Top Political Event Really Revealed This Year
4. This two-part analysis (pt 2 here) unpacks how health fits into China’s wider political priorities. China’s governance structure and planning processes are complex and distinct from many other countries, but learning how to read them is essential to understanding how to operate successfully within the landscape. These pieces reflect the kind of analysis I provide for LINTRIS Health clients - paying close attention to what is being signalled between the lines, and not just what is formally announced.
5. With the retreat of Western aid, China’s expanding role in global health is becoming a scrutinised issue. This piece explores how and why many developing countries are engaging with China on health - looking at agency, incentives and power in order to try to bring in a more nuanced perspective that might be missing from usual global health debates - including, again, the key role of China’s technological rise.
China Health Pulse content has travelled beyond the newsletter through op-eds and features, as well as interviews and commentaries in external media and think-tank publications - including around China’s AI health (The Wire China Q&A, TechInAsia), biotech (Pharmaceutical Technology), and global health role (Nikkei Asia Op-Ed, National Committee on UK-China Relations, London School of Economics IDEAS, Asia Scotland Institute).
The CHP Podcast
I started the CHP Podcast to branch into audio (and video) as a medium and spend more time with topics that benefit from being talked through rather than written down. Just as importantly, I wanted to bring more voices into the conversation by inviting health leaders who I deeply respect, who have spent decades working in and with China across policy, industry, academia and global health, to share perspectives from their respective fields of expertise in candid discussions.
Each newsletter video post is accompanied by a full transcript, and you can also subscribe directly to the audio podcast on Spotify & Apple. It has been a joy to record the episodes so far, and I look forward to many more insightful conversations as the podcast continues into 2026.
Recommendation Round-up
📰 The changing shape of Chinese aid to Africa - The Economist, 27 Nov 2025
I provided comments for this recent article in The Economist that examines the changing shape of China’s health engagement in Africa, set against Western aid retrenchment and a more fragmented global health system. I noted that China’s approach is being welcomed by many developing countries for being speedy, well-resourced, tech-forward and, crucially, sovereignty-first, even as it remains selective, uneven and driven by political and economic objectives as much as development outcomes.
Related:
📰 China’s Search for an AI Magic Cure – Rachel Cheung, The Wire China, 14 Dec 2025
I was also quoted in The Wire China’s cover story earlier this week, which reflects on AI’s role in China’s health system, looking at how the maturing digital infrastructure, vast data pools and high patient and policymaker acceptance are accelerating adoption, from AI triage and diagnostic support to virtual doctor agents, while also highlighting unresolved risks around regulation, data quality, safety and incentives. I state that China has become a live experimental lab for health AI, with a level of real-world deployment and policy enthusiasm that few other countries can match. The result is a system moving unusually fast: technologically ambitious, operationally pragmatic and still grappling with how to scale innovation without undermining trust or care quality.
Related:
📰 China to eliminate out-of-pocket childbirth expenses from 2026 – Reuters, 15 Dec 2025
The National Healthcare Security Administration has announced that, starting in 2026, China will aim to achieve “no out-of-pocket expenses” for childbirth, and fully reimburse all policy-covered medical costs associated with delivery and prenatal care through national insurance. This move is part of a broader effort to ease the financial burden on families and address the long-term demographic challenge posed by persistently low birth rates and an ageing population. I predict we will see even more concrete direction at next March’s Two Sessions, when the 15th Five-Year Plan is published - which I will of course be covering, here at CHP.
Related:
📰 Will the next blockbuster drug come from China? – Eleanor Olcott, Financial Times, 2 Dec 2025
This piece adds to the growing media chorus on the rise of Chinese biotech, looking at how China’s drug industry has moved decisively beyond generics into globally relevant innovation, and pointing to faster development cycles, improving clinical quality, and a surge in cross-border licensing as multinationals increasingly source assets from Chinese biotechs. I would go one step further to say that blockbuster drugs and world-class assets are already coming from China - in 2025 we saw over 40% of global biopharma out-licensing activity involves China-origin assets - the pace, scale and quality of innovation coming out of China is now simply undeniable. The real question is now about how global markets, regulators and investors must adjust to that reality.
▶️ In China’s Crowded Hospitals, She Found a New Career - New York Times, 20 Oct 2025
This short video follows a “patient companion” in Beijing, a part advocate and part gig worker who helps patients and families navigate China’s crowded tertiary hospitals. These workers take on many responsibilities that nurses would typically provide in other health systems, and their role reflects long-standing gaps in nursing capacity within China’s hospital-centred model. Patient companions are quite well known to those of us who have worked or cared for patients in China’s healthcare system, but they are rather unfamiliar to outside audiences. English-language, on-the-ground reporting on China’s health system remains rare, and this clip offers a valuable glimpse into how care is accessed in practice, and the informal services that have emerged to address the gaps persisting in the system.
📘 Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future – Dan Wang, 2025
Breakneck examines China’s development through the lens of the “engineering state,” contrasting it with Western legal- and process-driven systems. While the book is not primarily about health, it weaves in social and public-health inflection points, including the One Child Policy and Zero COVID to contextualise how China approaches crisis management, social control and system-level trade-offs and illustrate the human consequences of large-scale, technocratic decision-making. It offers useful background for understanding the strengths and limits of China’s health governance model.
This was 2025 Wrapped at CHP. Previous posts for Doctor’s Notes, where I share a curated prescription of reads and listens on health and China : September, July, April and March.