China's Engagement with Global Health Diplomacy: Was SARS a Watershed?

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was the first global epidemic of the 21st century. It not only caused mass panic but also generated a discourse on health insecurity around the world. Table 1 shows a chronological account of the disease outbreaks. Owing to China's belated response, particularly its obstruction in early 2003 of the entry of World Health Organization (WHO) assessment teams into the country for investigation of the virus, the subsequent mapping of the disease during the outbreak period kept global attention on China. In retrospect, there appear to be valuable lessons China can draw from its experience with SARS and several implications of SARS on China's engagement in global health diplomacy. This case study examines China's policy changes in the area of public health since the SARS outbreak. Using literature reviews, personal experience , and informal interviews with Chi-nese health officials, we provide insight into the extent of China's increased engagement in public health, at both the domestic and the international levels. We spoke with three high-ranking health officials in China's Ministry of Health in August 2009 who admitted that the SARS outbreak had alerted Chinese citizens as well as the government to the danger that public health, particularly infectious diseases, could become a dire threat if not properly controlled. This perceived threat extended beyond their country to the world. In the face of criticism from abroad about China's handling of the SARS epidemic, the new Hu Jintao±Wen Jiabao leadership, taking office in early 2003, swiftly adopted a more open and proactive attitude to the WHO member countries and southeast Asian nations containing the disease. Indeed, SARS appears to have prompted a national discourse on the interrelationship between infectious diseases and non-traditional security inside China. This is evidenced by the vast amount of literature on the subject of non-traditional security issues generated by Chinese scholars since the SARS outbreak. Using``^ ߉h(fei chuantong anquan, non-traditional security)'' to search for articles contained in a database known as``China Academic Journals Full-text Database: Economics, Politics and Law (Zhongguo qikan quanwen shujuku: jingji, zhengzhi yu falu È zhuandang,-ýh‡pn“: ÏN ?»Õ‹c),'' there are barely any``non traditional security'' articles published before the SARS outbreak. However , subsequent to the outbreak it became a flourishing subject in China's scholarly world. Among the articles that includè`non-traditional security'' in their titles since the start of economic reforms in 1979, more than 95% of them were published after 2003 …