China’s rebranding campaign during the Covid-19 pandemic: How successful is it?

Dr. Yanzhong Huang is a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he directs the Global Health Governance roundtable series. He is also a professor and the director of global health studies at Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations, where he developed the first academic concentration among U.S. professional schools of international affairs that explicitly addresses the security and foreign policy aspects of health issues. He is the founding editor of Global Health Governance: The Scholarly Journal for the New Health Security Paradigm.

Dr. Huang has written extensively on China and global health. He is the author of Governing Health in Contemporary China (2013) and Toxic Politics: China’s Environmental Health Crisis and Its Challenge to the Chinese State (2020). He has also published numerous reports, journal articles, and book chapters, including articles in Survival, Foreign Affairs, Public Health, Bioterrorism and Biosecurity, and China Leadership Monitor, as well as opinion pieces in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and the South China Morning Post, among others. In 2006, he co-authored the first scholarly article that systematically examined China’s soft power.

Dr. Huang has testified before U.S. congressional committees many times and regularly is consulted by major media outlets, the private sector, and governmental and nongovernmental organizations on global health issues and China. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and a board member of the Institute of Global Health (Georgia). In 2012, InsideJersey listed him as one of the “20 Brainiest People in New Jersey.” He previously was a research associate at the National Asia Research Program, a public intellectuals fellow at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, an associate fellow at the Asia Society, a visiting senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore, and a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has taught at Barnard College and Columbia University. He obtained his BA and MA from Fudan University and his PhD from the University of Chicago.

Dr. Zoë McLaren is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and an Affiliate of the Health Econometrics and Data Group at York University. Dr. McLaren is a health economist whose research informs health and economic policy to combat infectious disease epidemics including HIV, tuberculosis and COVID19 in the United States and abroad. She develops rigorous applied statistical approaches to answer important policy questions using real-world data. Her work builds the evidence base in three key research areas: (1) the impact of health and economic policies to fight HIV, tuberculosis (TB) and COVID-19 globally, (2) the relationship between access to health resources and economic outcomes, and (3) the causes of persistent poverty. Dr. McLaren was formerly an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University Elliot School of International Affairs. She received her Ph.D. in Public Policy and Economics from the University of Michigan and her B.A. from Dartmouth College.

Joan Kaufman is the NY–based Senior Director for Academic Programs for the Schwarzman Scholars Program. She is Lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Visiting Professor at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University where she teaches on global health policy.  Dr. Kaufman is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations.   An expert on both China and global health policy, she was the Director of Columbia University’s Global Center for East Asia (Beijing) from 2012-2016 and Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. From 2002-2010 she was based at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government where she founded and directed the AIDS Public Policy Project.   She was Distinguished Scientist, Senior Lecturer and Associate Director of the Master Program in Health Policy and Management at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management from 2003-2012.    She was selected as a Radcliffe fellow in residence at Harvard from 2001-2002. She has lived and worked in China for 15 years since 1980 for the United Nations (1980-1984) the Ford Foundation (1996-2001), as the China Team Leader for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (2002-2012), and Columbia University (2012-2016).   She holds a Doctorate in Public Health from the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, as well as a MA and BA cum laude in Chinese Studies. She serves on the Advisory Boards for Sup China, Uplift International, and several Chinese NGOs, has consulted for many foundations and international organizations and has published widely on global health policy, HIV/AIDS, women’s rights, reproductive health, population, emerging infectious diseases, and civil society with a focus on China.