Introduction: The Politics and Morality of Health Care Transformation in China

Abstract

The Chinese healthcare reform has attracted increasing academic attention in recent years, but the literature about the health care transformation in China is often statistical in nature or policy analysis within the disciplines of public health, social policy and health economy. There is relatively limited long-term, fieldwork-based research to provide a rich, nuanced understanding of people's experience of the healthcare reform or facilitate the exploration of the complexity, messiness and contradictions associated with the changing health sector. This book fills this lacuna by undertaking an ethnographic analysis of people's moral experiences during the healthcare reform over the past decades. This book situates health care change among the overall changes in Chinese society, analysing the links between experience, subjectivity and governance.