History

The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has been engaged in education, research, and knowledge exchange with China for more than a century. Just two years after the School was founded in 1913, it welcomed its first international students—three Chinese doctors. A decade later, Dean David Linn Edsall took a six-month trip to China to conduct research. In 1979, after the Cultural Revolution, the Harvard Chan School became the first foreign school of public health to work with the Chinese government and Chinese schools of public health.

Over the past four decades, ties between Harvard Chan researchers and peers across China have grown increasingly close. Harvard faculty guided and assisted China in establishing the field of health policy and management, while also training the first generation of Chinese molecular biologists in public health. The School’s work with academic and government partners has resulted in numerous cooperative endeavors in research, education, academic exchange, and network building.

These joint efforts have yielded remarkable results, including:

• Piloting an innovative, low-cost health insurance system that has since expanded to cover more than 90 percent of China’s 833 million rural residents.
• Expanding health education by helping to launch a network connecting major Chinese universities to educate new generations of health economists and policymakers.
• Identifying culturally relevant strategies to slow the spread of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.
• Prompting the tightening of air-quality standards in factories across China through a 30-year study linking cotton dust to lung disease.
• Introducing high-tech, low-cost mobile health centers to rural China in the aftermath of the devastating 2008 earthquake.
• Advancing scientific understanding of the SARS virus in ways that helped contain a potential worldwide pandemic.