China has made the development of traditional Chinese medicine a national strategy, according to a white paper issued by the State Council Information Office.
The document — “Traditional Chinese Medicine in China” — said TCM “has created unique views on life, on fitness, on diseases and on the prevention and treatment of diseases during its long history of absorption and innovation.”
It said the Communist Party and the government have granted greater importance to TCM’s development, and have made a series of major policy decisions and adopted a number of plans in this regard.
As ideas on fitness and medical models change and evolve, traditional Chinese medicine has come to underline a more and more profound value, the document said.
Boasting the establishment of a TCM medical care system covering both urban and rural areas in China, the white paper said there were 3,966 TCM hospitals, 42,528 TCM clinics and 452,000 practitioners and assistant practitioners of TCM across the country by last year.
In addition to making contributions to the prevention and treatment of common, endemic and difficult diseases, TCM has played an important role in the prevention and treatment of major epidemics, such as SARS, HIV/AIDS, and hand, foot and mouth disease, the document said.
TCM also played an important role in the reform of the medical care system, it added.
The medical care services provided by TCM institutions in the national total increased from 14.3 percent to 15.7 percent from 2009 to 2015, official statistics show.
In 2015, outpatient expenses per visit and inpatient expenses per capita at public TCM hospitals were 11.5 percent and 24 percent lower than those at general public hospitals.
China has initially established a modern Chinese medicine industry based on the production of medicinal materials and industrial production and tied together by commerce, said the white paper, while noting the rapid development of the TCM pharmaceutical industry.
To date, 60,000 TCM and ethnic minority medical drugs have been approved, and 2,088 approved pharmaceutical enterprises are manufacturing patent medicines.
In 2015, the total output value of the TCM pharmaceutical industry was 786.6 billion yuan (US$114.21 billion), accounting for 28.55 percent of the total generated by the country’s pharmaceutical industry, and becoming a new source of growth in China’s economy.
The white paper said China aspires to enable every citizen to have access to basic TCM services by 2020, and make TCM services cover all areas of medical care by 2030.
Last year, an executive meeting of the State Council approved the draft Law on Traditional Chinese Medicine and submitted it to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress for deliberation, intending to provide a sounder policy environment and legal basis for TCM’s development.