ABSTRACT
National health policies were formulated and health tasks specified at the beginning of the People's Republic of China (PRC), which laid the ground work for mass campaigns to prevent diseases. This chapter examines people's health and socioeconomic transformations, health campaigns and literacy movement, political commitment to Chinese medicine, mutual learning of Western and Chinese medicines, building of rural healthcare system and barefoot doctors, and medical education and health institutions during the modernization of China through socialist reconstruction. The Korean War had an unexpected impact on the re-formulation of Chinese national health policy. The central government emphasized that educational propaganda work should be further strengthened among the people to make them understand the importance of prevention. The Great Patriotic Health Movement energized nationwide anti-epidemic campaigns with the call to defend the motherland and to fight American imperialism. People's health was promoted as vitally important to economic production and national development.
