Social equity is a high priority for China's policymakers; nevertheless, rural areas, especially those in Western China, continue to lag far behind urban centers in providing equitable access to health services. This is due, in part, to the great difficulties rural areas face in recruiting, training, and retaining qualified medical professionals.

Collaboration is essential in confronting health challenges that increasingly extend beyond the border of a single country. This is especially true for China, whose border province Yunnan is part of the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS), an area that also includes Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Young faculty researchers at China’s medical universities are finding health policy and systems sciences (HPSS) can be an effective framework for investigating some of the nation’s most pressing and complicated health challenges. Ninety of these rising scholars presented their research and discussed shared interests with mentors and peers at the first Westlake Summer Youth Forum.

China faces a daunting array of new health challenges: non-communicable diseases, environmental hazards, and mental health. Managing these new health threats requires not only traditional individual-level medical care, but also robust population-based public health delivery in the form of disease prevention and health promotion.