Stratospheric economic growth since the late 1970s has brought great prosperity, along with ‘western-style’ health problems that are beginning to have a devastating impact
However, there remain obstacles such as the government’s dependency on cigarette tax, which providesA man walks on a street smoking a cigarette during a sandstorm in the financial district in Beijing.The health crisis can in many ways be traced back to China’s stratospheric economic growth since the late 1970s, when people started being able to consume a more western-style diet and acquire western-style habits.
In 1978, most Chinese people were on a subsistence-level diet. By 1988 they were consuming 60% more pork and 150% more vegetable oil, Wang says, which helped improve nutrition enormously. However, at the same time, alcohol consumption increased 3.5 times, and the number of packets of cigarettes being smoked doubled.
Wang says: “This was almost 30 years ago. But it is coming back as a problem for people in later life now. People were consuming liquor, sugar, and tobacco faster than food … There was no awareness of new malnutrition, people being overweight, and about how fast this has happened.” The high cost of caring for a sick and ageing population is also a serious obstacle to Beijing’s hopes to revive. One reason is that a greater share of the expense falls on individual households than might be expected in the Communist-controlled nation – around a third of health spending per head. The need to save for healthcare is a huge drain on the budgets of families – often with just one child to do the saving and caring.
These mounting problems are recognised by the Communist party leadership and are among the reasons the government has stuck so rigidly to its zero-Covid strategy while the rest of the world has returned to normal life. Beijing knows that the population – especially elderly people living in rural areas – do not have access to good healthcare, and with underlying health problems such as heart disease and breathing trouble already so common, would be at high risk from the spread of Covid.
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