China has the world’s largest population. In 2006, it was officially estimated at 1,314.5 million. The province of Henan, in south-central China, had the largest population, with 93.9 million, equal to 7.3% of the total. Eastern China was the most populated region of the country, inhabited by 376.6 million people in 2006. The area includes Shanghai, China’s largest city, with a population of 18.2 million.

Since opening its economy to the West in the late 1970s, China has experienced rapid growth. For 2009, China’s GDP is estimated at US$4,607 billion. While this makes China one of the world’s largest economies, the sheer size of the population means that per capita wealth is very low, at around US$3,450 in 2009.

Healthcare provision is extremely uneven. It is best in the towns and cities; many rural areas have very little provision, following the near total decay of the Communist rural healthcare system. Even in richer areas, public funding is very low, and most care is paid for by the patient. Hospitals and clinics earn a large percentage of their income from patient payments.

The Chinese government planned to aggressively expand the health insurance programme to cover all rural residents by the end of 2008. Urban health insurance is already well established, covering nearly all working citizens, and the government plans to cover all urban dwellers, including the unemployed and children who were not covered previously, by 2010.

The Chinese medical device market is largely supplied by imports or products made locally by multinational joint ventures, especially at the higher end of the technology scale. Local companies are usually small and undercapitalised by Western standards.

The regulatory system has been notoriously difficult to negotiate successfully and appeared opaque and awkward to many foreign investors. In an attempt to remedy this, revisions to the registration process have been implemented.