China has an increasingly pyramidal health care system, with many small hospitals at the bottom, fewer midsize hospitals in the middle and a small number of very large hospitals at the top.
There are two main factors at work in creating this unwieldy system: patient preference, and the unwillilngness of young doctors to work at smaller hospitals.
Just a few months ago, China was widely derided here as the financial backbone propping up an autocratic president, Mamadou Tandja,
giving him the confidence to ignore international condemnation as he chopped away at Niger’s democratic institutions.
Nearly 150 years after American railroads brought in thousands of Chinese laborers to build rail lines across the West, China is poised once again to play a role in American rail construction.
But this time, it would be an entirely different role: supplying the technology, equipment and engineers to build high-speed rail lines.[br]
Ultimately, the Chinese plan to build a global network of high-speed trains would let passengers board in London and reach Beijing two days later …
As we have noted previously, China’s elite has made a huge investment in high-speed rail, with bullet trains zipping along thousands of miles of track at speeds of up to 220 miles an hour.
While I don’t like everything that Jim Fallows does, he is one of the rare people – not just Westerners – who really seems to have a grasp of the complexity that is today’s China. [br]
