Unleash the Pandora's Box: Political Turmoil and Malaria Outbreak During China's Cultural Revolution

Abstract

This paper examines whether the health system disruption during the Cultural Revolution was the major factor that triggered the malaria outbreak in the early 1970s. The trend of public health expenditure shows that the health system was disrupted from 1968 to 1970. The regression results demonstrate that provinces which experienced a more severe shock to the health system had larger increases in malaria incidence in the early 1970s. The malaria outbreak is found to have negative effects on public health, implying that the health consequence of disease control disruption was not eliminated by the improvement of medical care in rural China.