China Economy Forum

[Han Patriot]

Chinese, Indonesian firms sign contract on satellite purchase package
(Xinhua) 21:03, May 17, 2017
JAKARTA, May 17 (Xinhua) -- Senior officials of Chinese firm China Great Wall IndustryCorporation (CGWIC) and Indonesian firm Palapa Satelit Nusa Sejahtera (PSNS) Wednesday signed a purchase contract for the latter's satellite system, namely PALAPA-N1, scheduled to orbit in first half of 2020.

PALAPA-N1 communication satellite project is the first communication satellite ofIndonesia that is produced by China.

PSNS is a joint venture enterprise of prominent telecommunication firm operating inIndonesia, Indosat Ooredoo, and Pasifik Satelit Nusantara (PSN).

Under the contract, CGWIC is responsible for in orbit delivery of the PALAPA N1. CGWICshall provide a package solution with the products and services to its Indonesian client, including the satellite, the rocket launching service, ground system, insurance andfinancing support.

The PALAPA-N1 satellite, which is designed to replace the PALAPA D, will be launched toits orbit slot at 113°E in the geostationary arc by Long March 3B launch vehicle from theXichang Satellite Launch Center in China.

PALAPA-N1 will provide the latest technology of High Throughput Satellite for broadcastand broadband telecommunications.

Speaking on the sideline of the signing ceremony, Indosat Ooredoo CEO Alexander Ruslisaid the new satellite would greatly help broadband penetration among the society inIndonesia.

"It would also help accelerating the creation of digital society in Indonesia, support thegovernment's plan to make Indonesia the largest digital state in Southeast Asia," he added.

The contract signing was witnessed by Indonesian Informatics and CommunicationsMinister Rudiantara, Chinese Embassy Charge d'Affaires Sun Weide and Vice President ofChina Aerospace Science & Technology Corporation (CASC), the parent firm of CGWIC, Yang Baohua.

CGWIC President Yin Liming said the satellite would significantly improve the broadcastand broadband in Indonesia.

"It would also be an embodiment of friendship between Chinese and Indonesian people," he said in a statement.

CGWIC won the contract after undergoing a strict auction process considering technical, manufacturing period and cost efficiency. It brushed competitors from Europe and theUnited States to get the contract.

The PALAPA-N1 satellite is developed by China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), asubsidiary of CASC.

The PALAPA-N1's satellite system is designed to have lifetime of more than 16 years, to beequipped with a total of 42 transponders.

http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0517/c90000-9216997.html

 

[TaiShang]

China leads global emerging markets boom in 2017: summit
Xinhua | Updated: 2017-05-22


DUBAI - Experts at the ongoing Middle East Investment Summit 2017 in Dubai said Monday that China is leading the global emerging markets boom in 2017, which is expected to see combined GDP rise of 4.6 percent.

Renowned Singapore-based fund manager Mark Mobius, Executive Chairman at Temepleton said here on Monday he expects the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of 70 emerging markets globally to rise by 4.6 percent in 2017 compared to 1.8 percent in the developed world, with China taking a lead based on a rising middle class and the growing Internet usage.

Delivering a key note at the two-day Middle East Investment Summit 2017 organised by UK research firm Terrapinn which started today, Mobius said "China's population has a 22 percent world share in internet usage, its young tech-savvy population and the fast expanding tech-firms like e-commerce giant Alibaba Group are only two factors why we are bullish for China."

Online sales in China were outshining sales in the developing world, said Mobius. Major western consumer goods giants like Dutch-British firm Unilever "are technically emerging markets firms as Unilever generates 60 percent of its revenues in the emerging world, with China again taking a lead."

"Alibaba's recorded sales revenue on the China's shopping festival Singles Day, which takes place always on the 11th of November in China, reached $17.8 billion in 2016."

He urged investors "not to look at the value of Chinese imports, but at the quantity." While China's iron ore and oil imports for example declined, "both the quantity of imported iron ore and oil both rose constantly in the last two years. It is the quantity what counts, not the value as newspapers often suggest in their reports," he said.

On market timing, Mobius said "you should invest into emerging market shares when you have money. The GDP value gap between emerging and developed countries is still huge and as an investor you can only benefit from the low and middle income economies catching-up-race which will last for next decades."

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-05/22/content_29447194.htm

 

[Deidara]

I am here to pay my respects to @TaiShang and @AndrewJin for working so hard on PDF.

 

[onebyone]

As global investment firm Goldman Sachs recently said about China’s economic growth, “What the world has seen so far is only a preview of the opportunities to come.”

 

[onebyone]

What could happen to China’s economy
To give you an idea of the “opportunities to come,” look at the chart below. The black line shows the extraordinary growth in GDP per capita in the United States from 1960 to 2015, when America was the engine for the global economy. During that time, GDP per capita in the U.S. grew 1,757 percent.

The red line represents China’s GDP per capita from 2000 to 2015 (using the x-axis at the top of the graph). Notice how closely it tracks America’s historical growth from 1960 to 1976.

Stansberry Churchouse Research

As you can see, China’s GDP per capita is about where the U.S. was in 1976. But, U.S. GDP per capita growth took off from there. Now, 40 years later, U.S. GDP per capita is over US$55,000. But China’s is only about US$8,000.

If China follows a similar pattern to the U.S., its economy still has a lot of growth ahead of it. Of course, it won’t happen in a straight line and there will be some dramatic ups and downs. But it does give you an idea of what could happen.

The development of the “American Dream” created one of the richest countries the world has ever seen. And China is heading in the same direction.

It’s no longer possible – without a time machine – to invest in the “American Dream”. But the emerging “Chinese Dream” is alive and well and ripe with opportunities for investors.

Read the original article on Stansberry Churchouse Research. This is a guest post by Stansberry Churchouse Research, an independent investment research company based in Singapore and Hong Kong that delivers investment insight on Asia and around the world. Click here to sign up to receive the Asia Wealth Investment Daily in your inbox every day, for free. Copyright 2017. Follow Stansberry Churchouse Research on Twitter.

How China is like the post-war U.S.
Like the U.S. in 1950, China is already an industrial and economic power. It has been the world’s manufacturing centre for over a decade. And China is home to the world’s second-largest economy.

It also has the world’s largest middle class. It’s expected to be over half a billion people by 2020. This booming middle class is also earning more money and has more disposable income – just like the baby boomer generation that started taking shape in mid-20th century America.

And the Chinese government, like the U.S. government in the 1950s, is encouraging Chinese consumers to buy more stuff, for the good of China’s economy. So, even though China’s economic growth has been miraculous for the past 20 years, it isn’t over yet.

As global investment firm Goldman Sachs recently said about China’s economic growth, “What the world has seen so far is only a preview of the opportunities to come.”

In 1950, the United States was on the cusp of a boom that would produce the largest middle class in history. It was also the beginning of a surge in the U.S. economy that would make it one of the richest countries ever.

This was when the concept of the “American Dream” took shape – the idea that every family could own a house with a white picket fence, at least one car in the garage, a fridge, stove, TV and an annual vacation with the kids.

Today – as I’ll explain in a moment – China is on the verge of something similar.

Investing in the U.S. stock market in 1950 was a once-a-century opportunity. US$1,000 in the S&P 500 Index would have been worth more than US$86,000 by 2007 – and that’s not including reinvested dividends.

What put the U.S. over the top
The U.S. was already an industrial and economic power in 1950, and it was in the midst of a post-war consumption frenzy. The baby boomer generation was just getting started – and this turned into a demographic trend that shaped the U.S. economy for the rest of the 20th century.

Then the government started encouraging Americans to spend more “for the good of America.” That’s when the U.S. economy went to the next level and became a global behemoth – and its stock market followed.

The U.S. government wanted to engineer domestic consumption – that is, to get people to spend more money buying things. In 1954, President Eisenhower reduced personal taxes to help households “increase purchasing power.” It helped that during his presidency, from 1953-1961, personal incomes in the U.S. increased 45 percent.

This extra income meant Americans had more money to spend on appliances, fancy clothes, entertainment and other non-essentials. Spend they did… and they still haven’t stopped.

This post-war boom led to the creation of the largest middle class the world had even seen. But the U.S. middle class is no longer the largest in the world. That title now goes to China.


http://uk.businessinsider.com/china-is-on-the-cusp-of-its-own-american-dream-2017-5

 

[JSCh]

Beijing praises German stance on China's status in the WTO
By Wang Qingyun | China Daily | Updated: 2017-05-26 08:06

China praised Germany's position over Article 15 in the protocol on China's accession to the World Trade Organization, saying it hopes to see Germany continue to play a positive role on the issue.

Sigmar Gabriel, Germany's vice-chancellor and foreign minister, called for the implementation of the article during talks with Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing on Wednesday.

Gabriel said Article 15 should be implemented and that revision of the European Union's laws should not target or discriminate against any country and should comply with the WTO's rules.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in a news conference in Beijing on Thursday that Gabriel's statements reflect "a responsible attitude of the German government".

Lu called on the EU to implement the article "comprehensively and thoroughly as soon as possible", and said China hopes to see Germany continue to play a positive role in helping accomplish this.

According to Article 15, WTO member nations should have ceased on Dec 11, 2016, from using the surrogate country approach in anti-dumping investigations on China. This date was 15 years after China became an official member of the organization.

Under the surrogate country approach, WTO members use costs of production in a third country to calculate the value of products from countries on its "non-market economy" list, which includes China.

Lu said that if it honors the agreement soon, the EU will show the world its "commitment to promises and observance of rules".

"In a time when protectionism is rearing its head in the world, the attitude major economies take over multilateral trade rules will eventually impose a fundamental influence on their own interests," the spokesman said.

China should have gained market economy status automatically at the end of 2016 according to Article 15, Gabriel said at a news converence with Wang in Beijing.

Gabriel said Germany will work in the EU so that the EU trade remedy measures will focus not only on whether a target country has market economy status, but on whether the country has dumping practices or actions that violate WTO rules.

He said, "We shouldn't discriminate against any country, including China", adding that Germany's position is clear, which is that new EU anti-dumping rules should comply with WTO rules.

Premier Li Keqiang will pay an official visit to Germany starting on Tuesday.

 

[TaiShang]

China industrial companies post strong growth in first four months
Xinhua | Updated: 2017-05-27

BEIJING - China's major industrial firms posted double-digit growth in profits in the first four months of this year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Saturday.

The companies reported a 24.4-percent profit increase in the four-month period from one year earlier, the NBS said in a statement.

In April alone, profits of major industrial firms rose 14 percent year on year, it said.

 

[Jlaw]

I had high hopes that foreign banks would involve themselves more heavily in the Chinese financial system, particularly after the WTO accession, and that hasn't really happened to a very large extent.

Hope is another globalist scumbag who want his elitist masters to take over another country through owning a country's treasury. Thank goodness banks are owned by the people in China. @Götterdämmerung

 

[Götterdämmerung]

Hope is another globalist scumbag who want his elitist masters to take over another country through owning a country's treasury. Thank goodness banks are owned by the people in China. @Götterdämmerung

You have to give him credit that he was candid enough to say what he thinks and for whom he works.

 

[PAKISTANFOREVER]

US expert: China's economic transformation breathtaking
By Xue Yujie, Qiu Lijie (People's Daily Online) 09:30, July 10, 2016


San Francisco, June 8, — There are enormously effective improving economic performance in China. No one is free of problems if you are trying to manage the economy. I don't feel China is doing badly," Nicholas Hope, director of the Stanford Center for International Development (SCID) recently told People's Daily Online, looking back at China's economic development in the past decades.

Worked as the Chief of the World Bank External Debt Division, Hope recalled China's economic policy reform when he first visited China in 1993. He told People's Daily Online, "It worked very well. The macro reform that attempted to set up the most socialist market economy, that also worked very well."

In his opinion, he divided China's reform era into two parts. From 1978 to 1993, goods and services were still provided partially by the government. But the free market was sprouting. By 1993, the reform of the household responsibility system happened in rural areas. And there were boom and bust cycle beginning in 1994 and continuing now, which was sort of reemphasized by the 3rd Plenum of the 18th Party Congress . "So that second era is in some way even more challenging than the first, the first was difficult because we had a command economy that suddenly wanted to become a market economy," he said.

In November 1993, China announced the establishment of the socialist market economic system in the Third Plenum of the 14th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and put forward the Fifty Decisions that involved a series of reforms aimed at overhauling its economy over the next decade. "It was extremely ambitious, and it involved just about everything you could think of it," Hope told People's Daily Online.

In 1994, Hope came back to Washington, D.C. as the Country Director for China at the World Bank. In 2000, Hope joined Stanford University and was involved with Chinese economy on a day-to-day basis.

"I had high hopes that foreign banks would involve themselves more heavily in the Chinese financial system, particularly after the WTO accession, and that hasn't really happened to a very large extent. The financial system still does not allocate resources in a market-determined fashion," Hope said. To illustrate this, he took China's "zombie firms" for example. Although some firms were bankrupt but kept alive by local decision makers. "Partly because I guess they don't want unemployed workers and others to be unhappy. "A lot of the loans that are made to these firms are simply used to pay wages and sometimes pensions, and they are not used for productive investment.

In addition to human capital, Hope emphasized the importance of greater efficiency in investment to economic growth, "China over the years has done wonderful job in investing in infrastructure." Infrastructure development remains a top priority for China's government mainly in roads and rails, electricity, and telecommunications. Hope added that China should improve its investment efficiency in other industries.

According to a report released by the government in January 2016, China's GDP growth rate moderated to 6.8 percent for the fourth quarter and 6.9 percent for 2015. The annual pace was the weakest in the quarter century. When asked about China's economic slowdown, Hope told People's Daily Online, "A few years ago at a conference with Tsinghua University, we had a very distinguished panel making presentations on the likely growth under China's 12th Five-Year Plan. At the 12th Five-Year Plan people were suggesting that the growth would be 7 to 8 percent. That didn't surprise me. Nothing grows at 10 percent forever, and China is the same."

He said "Slower growth in China was inevitable, now the concern I think the government has in the current situation is to grow slow faster than desirable, given the sort of constraints that the Chinese government has to deal with, given job creation, given migration from rural areas into urban areas, given the expectations of the Chinese citizens for continuing improvements and wellbeing. "

In March, the Government Work Report emphasized strengthening supply-side reform through cutting low-end supply while increasing high-end supply and public products and services. Chinese president Xi Jinping also called for "resolutely push forward supply-side structural reform" in a speech on May 16. "My response is that the supply-side reform proposals all make senses," Hope said. Meanwhile, he suggested that Chinese government should be more cautious when taking actions.

Hope raised a case in the steel industry as example. "When you talk about reducing excess capacity of steel production, you couldn't reproduce the extent of 300 million tones a year then you cut the other production to 150 million times the next year. That is not going to solve the problems, but it creates problems, " Hope said. Such bold and aggressive actions would create a large amount of displaced workers that need to be retrained and moved, and require a large fiscal capacity to take care of the unemployed workers.

"It was a unique event in world history, in which so many people improved their wellbeing by so much, over such a short period. It's a most extraordinary triumph for humanity. The transformation of the Chinese economy has been breathtaking. China as the second economy, almost equal to the US in the trading economy in terms of goods and merchandise trade, has played a major role in the evolution of the global economy."

@Beidou2020

To be honest the Chinese economy been breathtaking, a miracle and unprecedented for the last 35 years. NO nation on earth can match their phenomenonal rise.

 

[F-22Raptor]

BEIJING — China’s medical system could not stop the cancer eating at Guo Shushi’s stomach. It roared back even after Mr. Guo, a 63-year-old real estate developer, endured surgery, chemotherapy and radiation at two hospitals.

Then his son-in-law discovered online that — for a price — companies were willing to help critically ill Chinese people seek treatment abroad. Soon Mr. Guo was at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, receiving a new immunotherapy drug, Keytruda, which is not available in China. In April, nearly four months later, his tumor has shrunk and his weight has gone up.

“When I arrived, I could feel how large the gap was,” said Mr. Guo of the difference in care.

The cost: about $220,000 — all paid out of pocket.

China’s nearly 1.4 billion people depend on a strained and struggling health care system that belies the country’s rise as an increasingly wealthy global power. But more and more, the rich are finding a way out.

Western hospitals and a new group of well-connected companies are reaching for well-heeled Chinese patients who need lifesaving treatments unavailable at home. The trend is a twist on the perception of medical tourism as a way to save money, often on noncritical procedures like dental work and face-lifts. For these customers, getting out of China is a matter of life or death.

Medical care is just one manifestation of China’s wide wealth disparity. A new generation of affluent Chinese can seek help at private hospitals or go abroad, even as the rest endure long waits and find their treatment falling short.

Chinese people took an estimated 500,000 outbound medical trips last year, a fivefold increase from a year earlier, according to Ctrip.com International, a Chinese travel booking company, which offers medical travel on its website. While the bulk of that is focused on plastic surgeryand routine examinations, medical travel agencies say the number of critically ill Chinese patients leaving the country for medical treatment is growing.

“China is among the countries where we have seen the greatest growth in recent years,” Dr. Stephanie L. Hines, the chairwoman of executive health and international medicine at the Mayo Clinic, said in an email.

At Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, employees help patients with travel and lodging. Mass General, Mayo Clinic and Boston Children’s Hospital provide interpreters.

Mr. Guo is one of more than 1,000 patients that one company based in Beijing, Hope Noah Health Company, says it helped last year — a number it says was double that of the year before. Upon arriving in the United States or Japan, the two countries to which Hope Noah sends people, patients are greeted at the airports by Hope Noah employees and whisked off to a rented apartment. When they head to the hospital, a Hope Noah translator is by their side.

As recently as the 1970s, China’s health care system provided cradle-to-grave medical support. But despite a huge health care reform plan, its public hospitals are overburdened, with too few beds and doctors to deliver the kind of care that many in the West take for granted. A 2015 study by The Lancet based on United Nations criteria found that China ranked 92 out of 188 countries, after Cuba and Mexico.

The government has increased spending and encouraged private investors to address the problem. A total of about 4.3 million cancer cases were diagnosed in China in 2015, or almost 12,000 cases a day, compared with 2.4 million in 2010, according to the state-run news media. The five-year survival rate of Chinese cancer patients is around 30 percent, compared with about 70 percent in the United States, according to China’s National Cancer Prevention and Research Center.

Patients often have to travel to Hong Kong and Macau — regions of China governed by their own laws — to buy foreign drugs, which on the mainland face an approval process that takes three to five years. The drug that Mr. Guo is using, Keytruda, was approved for use only last year in a medical tourism pilot zone in the southern Chinese island of Hainan.

In top public hospitals in the top-tier Chinese cities, lines begin forming just after midnight. Appointments for the best doctors are snapped up before dawn. For those who can afford it, tickets can be bought from scalpers hawking appointment numbers. In March, the authorities in Beijing said that they would bar public hospitals from imposing consultation fees on patients, in a bid to reduce public discontent.

By contrast, Mr. Guo said his experience at Dana-Farber was “more humane.” Mr. Guo’s doctor let him speak. There was easy access to food and beverages. The waiting area had a couch.

“In China, the most that we can get is a metal chair,” he said, speaking by videoconference from his apartment in Boston. “Even having a cup of hot water is inconvenient.”

But the benefits can be fleeting. “The biggest challenge that we’ve had is ensuring continuity of care when the patient returns back home to China,” said Misty Hathaway, who leads Mass General’s Center for Specialized Services.

Oscar Zhou, who founded Ryavo Health Management of Shanghai, another medical travel agency, said he had started to shift his business into one that helped clients look for drugs in Hong Kong and Macau as well as doctors who could treat the problem domestically.

“It has caused a lot of problems. Many patients go overseas, and indeed, for several months, it’s good,” Mr. Zhou said, adding that he thought the outlook for businesses from a pure medical travel standpoint was limited. “But when they return, if their treatment can’t keep up, then it’s useless.”

Others are more bullish. Cai Qiang — the founder of Beijing Saint Lucia Hospital Management Consulting Company, in which the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital has invested an undisclosed amount — says his number of clients has increased to about 1,000 last year, from just two in 2011.

Mr. Cai, who is widely considered the pioneer of medical travel in China, is trying to narrow the cultural gap between his Chinese clients and American hospitals.

He recalled how an American hospital called him in for an “emergency meeting” after a Chinese patient walked unannounced into a doctor’s office with a question. The doctor was in the middle of treating someone else.

“In China, we have no concept of privacy,” Mr. Cai said, adding that his company had since set up a “patient education” department on the “dos” and “don’ts” in hospitals abroad. “It wasn’t the patient’s fault. It was ours.”

Mr. Cai said he started the company after being moved by the friendliness of Australia’s doctors and nurses when his daughter was born.

“Every year, there are so many Chinese people who buy imported cars, clothes, cosmetics,” Mr. Cai said. “They go abroad to travel and send their children to study abroad. Why can’t a Chinese person consider going overseas to see a doctor if they are seriously ill?”

Last November, Zhao Xiaoqing, 31, a bridge designer in the Chinese city of Nanjing, took her 5-year-old daughter, Kefei, to the Essen University Hospital in Germany to get proton therapy treatment for her child’s brain tumor. The treatment is available in Shanghai only for children 14 and above. She spent about $140,000, more than half of that borrowed from relatives.

Kefei’s tumor shrank. Ms. Zhao, who went to Germany with Ryavo Healthcare, is a satisfied customer, saying she was willing to spend double what she had paid.

“After going abroad, you can see that the middlemen are not exaggerating,” she said. “In fact, what they’ve told us pales in comparison to what we’ve experienced.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/business/china-medical-tourism-hospital.html?_r=0

 

[ShanMujtaba]

Dost SD DUah

 

[Holmes]

BEIJING — China’s medical system could not stop the cancer eating at Guo Shushi’s stomach. It roared back even after Mr. Guo, a 63-year-old real estate developer, endured surgery, chemotherapy and radiation at two hospitals.

Then his son-in-law discovered online that — for a price — companies were willing to help critically ill Chinese people seek treatment abroad. Soon Mr. Guo was at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, receiving a new immunotherapy drug, Keytruda, which is not available in China. In April, nearly four months later, his tumor has shrunk and his weight has gone up.

“When I arrived, I could feel how large the gap was,” said Mr. Guo of the difference in care.

The cost: about $220,000 — all paid out of pocket.

China’s nearly 1.4 billion people depend on a strained and struggling health care system that belies the country’s rise as an increasingly wealthy global power. But more and more, the rich are finding a way out.

Continue reading the main story

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story
Western hospitals and a new group of well-connected companies are reaching for well-heeled Chinese patients who need lifesaving treatments unavailable at home. The trend is a twist on the perception of medical tourism as a way to save money, often on noncritical procedures like dental work and face-lifts. For these customers, getting out of China is a matter of life or death.

Medical care is just one manifestation of China’s wide wealth disparity. A new generation of affluent Chinese can seek help at private hospitals or go abroad, even as the rest endure long waits and find their treatment falling short.

Chinese people took an estimated 500,000 outbound medical trips last year, a fivefold increase from a year earlier, according to Ctrip.com International, a Chinese travel booking company, which offers medical travel on its website. While the bulk of that is focused on plastic surgery and routine examinations, medical travel agencies say the number of critically ill Chinese patients leaving the country for medical treatment is growing.

“China is among the countries where we have seen the greatest growth in recent years,” Dr. Stephanie L. Hines, the chairwoman of executive health and international medicine at the Mayo Clinic, said in an email.

At Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, employees help patients with travel and lodging. Mass General, Mayo Clinic and Boston Children’s Hospital provide interpreters.

Photo

Guo Shushi, a Chinese citizen who sought medical treatment in the United States for cancer, at an apartment in Boston, where he has been staying during his treatment. Credit Tony Luong for The New York Times
Mr. Guo is one of more than 1,000 patients that one company based in Beijing, Hope Noah Health Company, says it helped last year — a number it says was double that of the year before. Upon arriving in the United States or Japan, the two countries to which Hope Noah sends people, patients are greeted at the airports by Hope Noah employees and whisked off to a rented apartment. When they head to the hospital, a Hope Noah translator is by their side.

As recently as the 1970s, China’s health care system provided cradle-to-grave medical support. But despite a huge health care reform plan, its public hospitals are overburdened, with too few beds and doctors to deliver the kind of care that many in the West take for granted. A 2015 study by The Lancet based on United Nations criteria found that China ranked 92 out of 188 countries, after Cuba and Mexico.

The government has increased spending and encouraged private investors to address the problem. A total of about 4.3 million cancer cases were diagnosed in China in 2015, or almost 12,000 cases a day, compared with 2.4 million in 2010, according to the state-run news media. The five-year survival rate of Chinese cancer patients is around 30 percent, compared with about 70 percent in the United States, according to China’s National Cancer Prevention and Research Center.

Patients often have to travel to Hong Kong and Macau — regions of China governed by their own laws — to buy foreign drugs, which on the mainland face an approval process that takes three to five years. The drug that Mr. Guo is using, Keytruda, was approved for use only last year in a medical tourism pilot zone in the southern Chinese island of Hainan.

In top public hospitals in the top-tier Chinese cities, lines begin forming just after midnight. Appointments for the best doctors are snapped up before dawn. For those who can afford it, tickets can be bought from scalpers hawking appointment numbers. In March, the authorities in Beijing said that they would bar public hospitals from imposing consultation fees on patients, in a bid to reduce public discontent.

By contrast, Mr. Guo said his experience at Dana-Farber was “more humane.” Mr. Guo’s doctor let him speak. There was easy access to food and beverages. The waiting area had a couch.

“In China, the most that we can get is a metal chair,” he said, speaking by videoconference from his apartment in Boston. “Even having a cup of hot water is inconvenient.”

But the benefits can be fleeting. “The biggest challenge that we’ve had is ensuring continuity of care when the patient returns back home to China,” said Misty Hathaway, who leads Mass General’s Center for Specialized Services.

Oscar Zhou, who founded Ryavo Health Management of Shanghai, another medical travel agency, said he had started to shift his business into one that helped clients look for drugs in Hong Kong and Macau as well as doctors who could treat the problem domestically.

Photo

Zhao Xiaoqing, 31, a bridge designer, at her office in Nanjing. She took her 5-year-old daughter to Germany for proton therapy treatment. Credit Patrick Wack for The New York Times
“It has caused a lot of problems. Many patients go overseas, and indeed, for several months, it’s good,” Mr. Zhou said, adding that he thought the outlook for businesses from a pure medical travel standpoint was limited. “But when they return, if their treatment can’t keep up, then it’s useless.”

Others are more bullish. Cai Qiang — the founder of Beijing Saint Lucia Hospital Management Consulting Company, in which the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital has invested an undisclosed amount — says his number of clients has increased to about 1,000 last year, from just two in 2011.

Mr. Cai, who is widely considered the pioneer of medical travel in China, is trying to narrow the cultural gap between his Chinese clients and American hospitals.

He recalled how an American hospital called him in for an “emergency meeting” after a Chinese patient walked unannounced into a doctor’s office with a question. The doctor was in the middle of treating someone else.

“In China, we have no concept of privacy,” Mr. Cai said, adding that his company had since set up a “patient education” department on the “dos” and “don’ts” in hospitals abroad. “It wasn’t the patient’s fault. It was ours.”

Mr. Cai said he started the company after being moved by the friendliness of Australia’s doctors and nurses when his daughter was born.

“Every year, there are so many Chinese people who buy imported cars, clothes, cosmetics,” Mr. Cai said. “They go abroad to travel and send their children to study abroad. Why can’t a Chinese person consider going overseas to see a doctor if they are seriously ill?”

Last November, Zhao Xiaoqing, 31, a bridge designer in the Chinese city of Nanjing, took her 5-year-old daughter, Kefei, to the Essen University Hospital in Germany to get proton therapy treatment for her child’s brain tumor. The treatment is available in Shanghai only for children 14 and above. She spent about $140,000, more than half of that borrowed from relatives.

Kefei’s tumor shrank. Ms. Zhao, who went to Germany with Ryavo Healthcare, is a satisfied customer, saying she was willing to spend double what she had paid.

“After going abroad, you can see that the middlemen are not exaggerating,” she said. “In fact, what they’ve told us pales in comparison to what we’ve experienced.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/29/business/china-medical-tourism-hospital.html?_r=0

 

[Beast]

These show Chinese are rich.

 

[Han Patriot]

Do you spot a market potential here? Most Western hospital chains are just vulturing around to enter the healthcare market in China, we are talking trillions here. China needs to allow more foreign hospitals to enter the market and compete.