Perhaps the historic event of our time, the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare every country's particular health care vulnerabilities and regulatory deficiencies, more starkly than in any other circumstances. In this episode, Neysun Mahboubi discusses with Yanzhong Huang, a preeminent expert on China and global health, the historical background to and deeper meaning of China's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recorded on February 26, 2021, the conversation underscores the deficiencies in governance structures and incentives that contributed to missteps whose effects continue to reverberate to this day.

Yanzhong Huang is Professor and Director of Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University's School of Diplomacy and International Relations, as well as Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the founding editor of Global Health Governance: The Scholarly Journal for the New Health Security Paradigm. Professor Huang has written extensively on China and global health, and is the author of The COVID-19 Pandemic and China's Global Health Leadership (CFR, 2022), Toxic Politics: China's Environmental Health Crisis and Its Challenge to the Chinese State (Cambridge, 2020), and Governing Health in Contemporary China (Routledge, 2013). He has testified before U.S. congressional committees multiple times and is regularly consulted by major media outlets, the private sector, and governmental and nongovernmental organizations on global health issues and China. He also has taught at Barnard College and Columbia University, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Sound engineering: Neysun Mahboubi and Devan Schwartz

Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com