East is meeting West. And North. And South. One in every five people in the world is Chinese, and that number doesn’t even count people of Chinese descent born outside of China. The world is getting smaller by the day.
China is a nation worth checking into for many reasons. With a population of 1.3 billion and an ever-increasing role in global politics, China cannot be ignored.
The history of China’s organized government dates back more than 4,000 years, and through those millennia, the nation held immense power. Now, after some difficult years, China’s power is returning once again.
We’re in luck. We have a first-class ticket to the action. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has been interested in China for awhile now. We began with a partnership with a university in Xi’an, Shaanxi, China, an amazing place I visited last month. In the upcoming school year, we’re offering a special look at China through the E.N. Thompson Forum lecture series.
And, of course, there are my columns this summer. Honestly, it doesn’t get any better than this.
In all seriousness, there are a multitude of issues China is dealing with today. The United States is working on some of the same issues, a surprising fact considering the wealth difference between the two nations. I am inclined to think that a country with as much wealth as the United States would, for example, provide health care to all of its citizens, especially with its promises of equality.
Of course, I also figured the United States would be able to balance its budget without borrowing money from a nation with as much poverty as China.
China seems to be doing a lot to work on the poverty their citizens experience these days, including the recent launch of a $124 billion, three-year overhaul of the health care system. The majority of China’s population lives in rural areas, most of them hidden from the world and all of its medical technology, some of them a full day’s journey from the nearest doctor.
According to the June issue of Foreign Policy, a peer-reviewed journal on globalization, more than 200 million Chinese citizens lack health insurance. A few factors contribute to this fact, including rising fees for care and poor use of the money currently available to fund health care. As of 2000, less than a quarter of the national health care budget is allocated to the two-thirds of China’s population living in rural areas.
China’s major health care problems can be traced back to the 1980s, when the nation began limiting its funding of the health care system. Just a decade later, the United States began to face rising prescription costs with no extra help from the government. The cost of medical care got out of control. Today, our nation is facing what many consider a health care crisis.
President Obama announced a plan for comprehensive health reform last week that includes control of rising health costs, choice of doctors and affordable health care for all Americans. Obama’s plan calls for a budget of $630 billion over ten years, according to the official federal government Web site on health reform.
In the U.S., we have fooled ourselves into believing that we live in some kind of paradise – that we have no poverty and no problem with the distribution of wealth in our society.In reality, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that 15.3 percent of the population was without health insurance in 2007. This number is surprisingly similar to the number of uninsured Chinese citizens – 15.4 percent by my calculations.
What this reveals is that the nation we are so financially indebted to is doing just about as well, or just about as poorly, as we are when it comes to providing medical care to its citizens. And as our president has revealed a plan to provide affordable health insurance to all Americans within ten years, the Chinese government is simultaneously beginning to carry out a plan to provide affordable health services to all of its citizens by 2020.
Perhaps the U.S. and China have more in common than we once thought. Almost identical percentages of our populations lack health insurance, and our plans to fix our problem won’t be carried out for another ten and eleven years, respectively.
Having this in common with China, perhaps we should take the time to check out what other traits we share. Spending a month in China this summer, I found more similarities than differences in our nations. In the end, we’re just nations made up of people trying to live their lives and raise their families.
We need to take advantage of the opportunities we have to learn about China, and the opportunities we have to learn from China. I can assure you that their citizens have all eyes on us doing the same.
Once we get past our national arrogance, we can take the good ideas and the bad ideas China has used in the past to help solve our own problems. Perhaps we can start by working with the Chinese to find which parts of their health care reform plan are and are not working, so that we can amend our plan accordingly.
China may be halfway across the world, but it’s also having impacts everywhere, including our own campus. We have the opportunity to lead the way for the nation to partner with this culture from the East.
Sarah Melecki is a senior political science major. Reach her at sarahmelecki@dailynebraskan.com.
