Classification and Functions of Foods for Special Medical Purposes (FSMP)

Indeed, the 'Healthy China 2030' Planning Outline is a programmatic document for the current medical and health care industry and health sector. It is also a very important guide for promoting the continuous improvement of public health over the next 15 years.

Healthy China was clearly proposed as a requirement for advancing the construction of a healthy China at the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee last year. This is also when the construction of a healthy China was placed on the national agenda. Subsequently, under the leadership of the State Council's healthcare reform leading group, a drafting team and expert group were formed, centered around departments such as the National Health and Family Planning Commission, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, and the General Administration of Sport, involving more than 20 departments.

The drafting work mobilized national expert resources and widely solicited opinions from within and outside the industry, particularly from the entire society. It was approved at a meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee on August 26 and officially released by the State Council this past October 25.

Regarding the core content of the 20,000-word outline, some key insights, and related background information, I can provide readers with an interpretation to help more people in the industry understand the main ideas and key points of Healthy China construction, which will help everyone better integrate into the overall Healthy China construction plan over the next 15 years.

Goals of Healthy China

The main goal of Healthy China is to improve the health of the people. It aims to popularize healthy lifestyles, optimize health services, improve health insurance, build healthy environments, and develop the health industry. At the same time, we have six major supporting measures and safeguards, including institutional and systemic reform, legal construction, human resources and science and technology, information technology development, and international exchanges and cooperation.

Everyone knows that industries and services are among the most active in international cooperation and have frequent international exchanges. In terms of implementation, we have also proposed many measures, mainly including: building healthy cities and villages, establishing and improving monitoring and evaluation mechanisms, setting up a health impact evaluation system, improving the coordination mechanism for promoting Healthy China, incorporating key health indicators into the performance evaluation of Party committees and governments at all levels, and formulating and implementing five-year plans. These are all very important measures; without them, it would be difficult to achieve the planning tasks.

The current main goal is to improve the people's health, driven by reform, proposing five aspects of health, including healthy living, health services, health insurance, healthy environment, and health industry, providing comprehensive and full-cycle protection for the health of the people.

In this regard, there are four very important principles. The first is giving priority to health, which means placing health in a priority position. The national priority development strategy reflects the priority of public resources, such as national policies, investment, and talent assurance, which will all be prioritized for development. Therefore, the industry that is prioritized for development will often be the one that receives future support and assistance.

In terms of reform and innovation, reform and innovation are the driving forces. Scientific development, currently, is clearly centered around scientific and healthy development, with the fundamental purpose of improving the overall health of the population through scientific and healthy development, fair and equitable development, etc.

The goals of Healthy China are divided into three steps. The first step is to achieve the goal by 2020: to place the main health indicators at the forefront of middle- and high-income countries. We are currently already performing better than the average level of middle- and high-income countries. After careful calculations, we are confident that we will achieve a level of health that is at the forefront of middle- and high-income countries by 2020.

By 2030 is the second step; we hope that the level of health will be among high-income countries. By 2030, we aim to have the main health indicators enter the ranks of developed countries, although the difficulty and challenges are still quite significant. This aligns with our current positioning. However, we must also clearly recognize that we must strive to achieve the goal of moving towards high-income countries by 2030.

By 2050, the main indicator is to build a health level that corresponds with a modern socialist country, which is a series of arrangements proposed in the strategic goal setting. From the perspective of the main indicators, we have a very significant improvement in the four internationally recognized main health indicators, especially between 2020 and 2030, when there should be a very significant improvement.

After this goal was proposed, experts in the industry have suggested many implementation strategies for this goal. Health involves all aspects, so our indicator design also includes people's health literacy, the number of people who regularly participate in physical exercise, including health resources, government spending on people's livelihood, environmental protection, air and water quality, and other major health-influencing factors. Of course, there is also the development of the health industry.

In 2015, China's total health expenditure exceeded 4 trillion yuan, close to 6% of GDP, from this aspect, we can see the future development space of China's health industry.

Improving the health of the people starts with enhancing the overall health literacy.

In 2015, only 10% of the population truly possessed health literacy. Only 10% of people knew how to live a healthy lifestyle comprehensively, which directly determined the difficulties and situations we faced over the next 5 to 10 years. We hope to intensify our efforts in this area, cultivating from an early age, allowing everyone to shape and develop good healthy behaviors, which is the only way to fundamentally reduce and prevent illness. For example, shaping autonomous and self-disciplined behaviors, achieving balanced diets, quitting smoking and limiting alcohol consumption, moderate exercise, and psychological balance.

In addition to improving the overall health literacy, optimizing health services, the first dimension is public health, focusing on prevention. At this year's National Health and Wellness Conference, senior officials emphasized that the primary task is prevention. The second dimension is providing quality services. We regard improving the system and innovating service models as important components of providing quality services. What people are currently very concerned about, including hierarchical medical treatment, are all parts of transforming service models. We also need to continuously improve the level of service, making the level and quality of service an important starting point for measuring and evaluating services.

We must fully leverage our advantages and achieve a balance between traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine. One of our future tasks is health services for the elderly, achieving healthy aging.

The guarantee system is an important safety net for ensuring people's services. We must strive to build a good health guarantee network.

Logical Framework

What is the logical framework for building a healthy China? It is the joint efforts of the government, society, and individuals, strengthening the development of health services, healthy lifestyles, health security, health industries, and healthy environments, which will better promote the construction of a healthy China.

Why do we need to popularize healthy lifestyles? First, among the factors affecting people's life expectancy, behavior and lifestyle account for 60%, biological factors for 15%, environmental factors for 17%, and health services for 8%, so a healthy lifestyle is indeed very important.

Currently, there is a lack of emphasis on healthy lifestyles. The number of smokers exceeds 300 million, the regular drinking rate among those aged 15 and above is 9.5%, the daily salt intake for cooking among residents reaches 10.5 grams, far exceeding the WHO's recommended amount, the rate of non-active physical exercise among those aged 15 and above is as high as 72%, the overweight rate among adults aged 18 and above is 30%, and the obesity rate is nearly 12%, etc.

At present, the per capita public sports area in China is insufficient, which leads to the lack of places for people to exercise. Also, looking at the trend of premature deaths from chronic diseases under different interventions reminds us to control smoking and ensure physical activity to gradually reduce the rate of premature deaths from chronic diseases. Our current main mortality rate is caused by chronic diseases, accounting for 70%. In fact, we still face great threats from infectious diseases. Currently, there is a shortage of total resources, and high-quality resources are scarce, which is an important problem we face. Looking at the hospitalization rate, the indicators are very high, meaning that the growth in service volume is very fast, but service resources have not grown in tandem, which has caused great pressure.

Aging has become a very important social issue. China has become one of the countries with the fastest aging population in the world. The structure of the population age in China is almost the same as that in the United States. The intensification of aging, in a sense, heralds a significant increase in costs.

The destruction of the ecological environment and pollution are closely related to the health of the people. WHO data show that one out of every eight deaths is due to air pollution, mainly affecting the heart and brain blood vessels, and air pollution has a significant impact on children's intellectual development.

Looking at the pharmaceutical industry, by the end of 2015, there were 5,065 pharmaceutical manufacturing companies in China, making it the largest producer of raw materials and formulations globally. However, 97% of the products were generic drugs, with serious homogenization and low-level repetition problems. There were 13,508 pharmaceutical wholesale companies and 458,000 retail companies nationwide. Currently, the proportion of health services and the health industry in GDP is not very high in China, ranking relatively low globally. Commercial insurance accounts for only one-third of the global average, although commercial insurance has been growing at a rate of 50% annually in recent years, indicating a very rapid development speed.

From the perspective of the industry, it is necessary to develop new forms of health services and actively promote the integration of health with elderly care, tourism, the internet, food, and fitness. While promoting the development of the pharmaceutical industry, we also need to promote pharmaceutical innovation, improve the collaborative innovation system of government, industry, academia, research, and application, promote pharmaceutical innovation and transformation, strengthen the development of patented drugs, enhance the level of industrial development, develop professional pharmaceutical parks, support the establishment of industrial alliances or consortia, and build an innovation-driven model.

We hope that by 2030, we can form a group of new drug companies and pharmaceutical companies with intellectual property rights, which is a very high expectation. Overall, the 'Healthy China 2030' Planning Outline can further unite the entire society's consensus on the construction of a healthy China, boost confidence in building a healthy China, maintain scientific and reasonable expectations, and create a favorable atmosphere for the reform and development of the health and medical field, comprehensively enhancing the health of the entire population. At the same time, it is also beneficial for fulfilling international commitments under the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

The pharmaceutical industry can be positioned from two angles. First, the core goal of Healthy China is to enhance the overall health of the population. Improving the overall health of the population will reduce the demand for pharmaceutical products. Of course, pharmaceutical companies always hope to sell more medicines, but from the perspective of the whole society, we do not want more and more patients. We need to look at the opportunities brought by the construction of a healthy China to the pharmaceutical industry from the overall perspective of building a healthy China. This is a very important consideration: with the development of the entire economy and society, especially the improvement of people's income levels, people have put forward new requirements for product upgrades. Therefore, the pharmaceutical industry needs to position itself well now, do a good job with its products, refine and detail them, do well in technological innovation, improve its level, target market demand, do well in supply-side structural reform, and provide more products that the people need. From the development trajectory of improving health levels and the pharmaceutical industry in developed countries, we can see that Healthy China is both a challenge and a rare opportunity. The improvement of the overall health level of the population may relatively reduce the consumption of pharmaceutical products, but from an international perspective, countries like the United States and Japan, whose pharmaceutical markets have stable growth, indicate that if we do well in product upgrades and enrich product supply, meeting society's demand for high-quality products, there is still great potential. Therefore, the construction of a healthy China will first bring pressure, but more importantly, opportunities, but you need to be well prepared, improve product quality, and innovate to seize the opportunity.