As a solid holiday and health resort strongly invested in the industry of well-being, Zhuhai is among China's top 20 cities in terms of healthcare, according to the Blue Book of Health & Wellness (2020) released May 24 in Beijing.

The city scores are high in 44 indexes related to healthcare resources, environment, facilities, and development. These were assessed on field trips by the School of Tourism Management of Sun Yat-sen University, Social Sciences Academic Press (China), and National Middle-Aged & Elderly Network.

Their teams visited some 200 prefecture-level cities to collect the latest data on local healthcare for refined analysis and weighted scoring.

New nursing home of the Zhuhai Social Welfare Center in New Xiangzhou [Photo courtesy Zhuhai Social Welfare Center]

Health characteristics of Zhuhai include leisure tourism in the city with the largest sea area, most islands, and the longest shoreline in the Pearl River Delta. A healthcare industry with regional characteristics is backed by policy and new projects.

Biomedicine and healthcare will become one of the city's five strategic pillar industrial clusters along with "smart" household appliances, automobiles, advanced materials, and software and information services by 2025, according to an outline for Strategic Pillar & Emerging Industrial Clusters issued by the Guangdong government in May 2020.

The Bluebook states that China's healthcare industry faces enormous opportunities in the post-epidemic era. National polices have positioned healthcare as a regional pillar industry, while the COVID-19 pandemic accentuated the role of healthcare and stimulated consumption.

He Mang, editor-in-chief of the Blue Book, calls upon resource-abundant areas to seize opportunities, increase support, deepen involvement of capital markets, and diversify the healthcare business.

Now in its fourth edition, the Blue Book has drawn wide attention for its systematic definition and theoretical interpretation of "healthcare" as well as its presentation of the status quo and trends in the domestic healthcare industry.