Abstract

China’s foreign aid in terms of Human Resources for Health (HRH) is an important part of the country’s foreign assistance and reflects the basic philosophy and innovative mechanism of China’s foreign aid, as well as being a typical mode of South-South cooperation. This paper systematically reviews the three types of China’s HRH aid: Foreign-aid medical teams; Chinese government scholarships for supporting students from developing countries to study in China; and holding seminars on health for officials, conducting technical training and providing internship opportunities in China. Through the review and summary, we establish the reasons behind China’s HRH success in the past half century. China has used its comparative advantages, paid attention to selecting appropriate technologies, fully affirmed traditional Chinese medicine, focused on establishing relevant primary health care systems and attached great importance to internationalism as a means of enhancing cohesion and preventing recipients’ medical brain drain. At present, a three-pronged Chinese foreign-aid framework for HRH has been formed, covering medical officials (focusing on health systems and policy), medical students (focusing on the future, nurturing the elites) and medical teams (responding to emergencies and meeting current demand). The model of China’s foreign assistance in this sphere is a method for enhancing the effectiveness of international development assistance, improving the assistance framework, and enriching and innovating in terms of the assistance framework in other fields.

Key words: Aid, health, human resources, China.