Complex Structures: Meaning Formation amid China’s New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme

Authors

  • Mohan J. Dutta National University of Singapore
  • Kang Sun National University of Singapore

Keywords:

culture-centered approach, structure, China, health policy, rural, new rural cooperative medical scheme (NCMS), meaning

Abstract

The culture-centered approach (CCA) foregrounds meanings from the margins as entry points for interrogating structures of health care. Through a culturally centered ethnographic examination of the ways in which family members left behind in a village in China make sense of their (in)access to health services, we seek to develop an understanding of China’s new rural cooperative medical scheme (NCMS). Although structures have been theorized in earlier CCA projects, this article specifically focuses on the interpretations of health services under a newly introduced health policy framework. To our knowledge, this is the first culture-centered study of negotiations of health services in rural China amid the ongoing health reforms as China opens up to a global market economy and undergoes market reforms in the public sectors (e.g., health, education). Voices of community members point toward the inequities constituted in the structures of NCMS, corruption introduced by the transformation to a monetary economy from a cooperative-based economy of health care, and agentic expressions that imagine alternative structures of organizing health and care.

Author Biographies

Mohan J. Dutta, National University of Singapore

Mohan J Dutta is Provost's Chair Professor of Communication at National University of Singapore, where he teaches and conducts research in international health communication, critical cultural theory, poverty in healthcare, health activism in globalization politics, indigenous cosmologies of health, subaltern studies and dialogue, and public policy and social change. Currently, he serves as Senior Editor of the journal Health Communication and sits on the editorial board of seven journals. He is the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education in the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University, a Service Learning Fellow, and a fellow of the Entrepreneurial Leadership Academy at Purdue University where he has been developing a project on communication leadership in social change.

Kang Sun, National University of Singapore

Dr. Kang Sun is a post-doctoral Fellow at the National University of Singapore. His research includes the area of health seeking, health services, and communication geography.

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Published

2017-04-14

Issue

Vol. 11 (2017)

Section

Articles

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