A Tale of Two Markets: Healthcare Reform, Dental Consumption, and the Rural-Urban Divide

Jinghong Zhang, University of Maryland at Baltimore County

This paper investigates the formation of two distinctive dental markets in rural and urban China from the beginning of the 1978 market reform to the present. It centers on how the 1978 economic reform and the subsequent healthcare reform in the 1980s have produced uneven access to dental care in the rural and urban areas. Starting in the 1980s, the transnational spread of cosmetic dentistry from the US to China and the rise of a beauty economy in China have further remolded the dental industry, rooting it in urban consumer culture, while rural areas became more marginalized in accessing basic dental care. Lacking access to professional dental services, the rural and suburb areas have been occupied by the itinerant dentists and apprentice dental practitioners. With the CCP state asserting only a limited role in dental care for medical purposes, cosmetic dentistry has become the driving force of the dental industry in urban China. The formation of the two dental markets, with a high rate of privatization and relatively limited state intervention, showcases how medical privatization in the reform period took different forms in urban and rural areas. While the market reform has created a space for various private forces to make choices and to target different social groups as well as to grow and profit in different ways, the retreat of the state from the dental care sector has exacerbated the rural-urban inequality in accessing dental care.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 184. The Chinese Reform as Social Science History (III): Braving the Market Waves