citation

"Online Event: Toxic Politics: A Conversation with Yanzhong Huang." CSIS Commission on Strengthening America's Health Security, Center for Strategic and International Studies, December 15, 2020. Accessed December 21, 2023. https://healthsecurity.csis.org/events/online-event-toxic-politics-a-conversation-with-yanzhong-huang/

Photo Credit: Getty Images

On Tuesday, December 15, J. Stephen Morrison hosted a conversation on _Yanzhong Huang’s _new book,** Toxic Politics: China’s Environmental Health Crisis and its Challenge to the Chinese State. _Yanzhong Huang _**is Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations and serves as Expert Advisor on the CSIS Commission on Strengthening America’s Health Security.

In China, environmental degradation is a cause of declining life expectancy, a drain on economic talent and growth, and a source of popular disaffection with the state-party. It is a matter of national health security. President Xi Jinping has in recent years launched targeted campaigns to address the growing environmental health crisis. But China’s tensions persist between the state-party’s need to sustain rapid economic growth and the political costs of environmental cleanup. In Toxic Politics, Huang presents new evidence on how the health and non-health consequences of environmental degradation threaten the resilience of the Chinese state and its global ambitions.

In this CSIS public event, J. Stephen Morrison, Senior Vice President and Director of the CSIS Global Health Policy Center, and Jude Blanchette, CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies, joined with Yanzhong Huang in discussing whether pollution and its impact on public health may prove to be “the Achilles heel of modern China.” Part of this conversation compared the national response to environmental degradation versus the response to Covid-19, and what this suggests about patterns of national governance in China.

This event is made possible by the generous support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.