Yanzhong Huang Keynote Speaker

Expert on global health governance and diplomacy in China and East Asia
Author of Toxic Politics: China's Environmental Health Crisis and its Challenge to the Chinese State (2020) and Governing Health in Contemporary China (2013)
Founding editor of the Global Health Governance journal

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Yanzhong Huang's Biography

Dr. Yanzhong Huang is a leading expert in the fields of global health governance, public health in China and U.S.-China relations.

Huang serves as a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and directs the Global Health Governance roundtable series. He is also a professor and director of global health studies at Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations, where he developed the first academic concentration among U.S. professional international affairs schools that explicitly addresses the security and foreign policy aspects of health issues. He is the founding editor of Global Health Governance: The Scholarly Journal for the New Health Security Paradigm.

Yanzhong has written extensively on China and global health. His book, Governing Health in Contemporary China, looks at the health care reform, government ability to address disease outbreaks, and food and drug safety in China.

His latest book, China’s Toxic Politics: China’s Environmental Health Crisis and Its Challenge to State Power, received broad critical acclaim. Margaret (“Peggy”) Hamburg, an internationally recognized leader in public health and medicine, says the book is “full of valuable insights into how the Chinese government responds to crises that will matter to us all” and “a must-read for the times we live in.” Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition, says: “Anyone who wants to predict China’s growth prospects needs to read this.”

He is also the author of The COVID-19 Pandemic and China’s Global Health Leadership (2022). Dr. Yanzhong Huang’s scholarly work has appeared in Survival, Foreign Affairs, Public Health, Health Security, and the China Leadership Monitor, as well as opinion pieces in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and American Journal of Public Health, among others. In 2006, he co-authored the first scholarly article that systematically examined China’s soft power.

Huang was listed by Inside Jersey magazine as one of New Jersey’s “20 exceptional intellects who are changing the world” in 2012. Having testified many times before congressional committees, Dr. Yanzhong Huang is frequently consulted by major media outlets, the private sector, and governmental and non-governmental organisations on global health issues and China.

Yanzhong is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and co-chair of the CSIS Working Group on U.S.-China Cooperation on Health Security.

He previously was a research associate at the National Asia Research Program, a public intellectuals fellow at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, an associate fellow at the Asia Society, a visiting senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore, and a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has taught at Barnard College, Columbia University, and Tsinghua University’s Schwarzman Scholars Program.

He received his Ph.D. degree in political science from the University of Chicago and in 2006, Huang obtained a certificate from MIT’s Professional Programme on Combating Bioterrorism and Pandemics.

Dr. Yanzhong Huang also studied at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, China.