From Barefoot Doctors to Village Doctors FU Jun*
Preface
China is a developing country, but its average life expectancy is significantly higher than that of most other developing countries, and far closer to that of developed countries. Take 2015 for example. China’s average life expectancy was 76.1 years; by comparison, it was 78.6 years in the United States. Elsewhere in the world and for illustrative purposes, it was 69.2 in Nepal; 64.8 in Ethiopia; 54.5 in Nigeria; 66.4 in Pakistan; 66.3 in Turkmenistan; and 64.5 in Syria.1
Why has China’s life expectancy far surpassed that of other developing nations?
Conventional wisdom has it that a country’s average life expectancy has much to do with its level of economic development. From a global perspective, life expectancy and economic development are indeed strongly correlated. This general observation also seems to be supported by statistics in China. To wit, China’s per capita GDP was USD$156 in 1978; it subsequently rose to approximately USD$9,000 in 2018. Accordingly, China’s life expectancy also rose during the same period of time (see fig. 1).
However, upon a closer look, there must be other forces at work that demand our attention.
In 1978 China’s per capita GDP was still far lower than that of sub-Saharan African countries, but its average life expectancy was already way above theirs, as well as India’s. Even more puzzling, prior to 1978, i.e., between 1965 and 1978, China’s economic growth crawled to a snail-pace due largely to the ultra-leftist politics of the Cultural Revolution, yet its average life expectancy increased dramatically – by a whopping 33% from 49.5 years in 1965 to 65.8 years in 1978.
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