Why China is targeting the corruption tumour at the heart of its ailing health system

Beijing has launched a crackdown on bribery and other forms of graft that have long plagued hospitals and driven up medical costs

The campaign is part of a broader push to tackle livelihood issues and boost the economy, an observer says

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Published: 6:00am, 22 Aug 2023Updated: 11:02am, 23 Aug 2023

Surgeon James Wu said he was “shocked but happy” when colleagues told him that the head of their hospital in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong had surrendered to corruption investigators.

Wu’s boss turned himself in in late July, becoming one of more than 160 hospital chiefs around the country to be detained by anticorruption investigators since the start of the year.

Authorities had given senior medical staff until August to declare their illicit activities as part of a national campaign targeting a long-standing source of public grievance: soaring health costs fuelled by corruption.

In this vicious cycle, hospital chiefs take kickbacks to order expensive medical equipment and pass on the cost to patients by encouraging staff to order unnecessary tests.

For Wu, the pressure was intense.

“We have been instructed to prescribe many tests for the patients so that the hospital could recoup the investment faster,” he said.

Excessive testing is just one form of corruption in the health system that is inflating medical bills and fuelling public resentment – a discontent that has at times erupted into violence against doctors.