About China Center for Disease Control and Prevention

China Center for Disease Control and Prevention

The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC; Zhongguo Jibing Yufang Kongzhi Zhongxin) is China's national public-health institution, headquartered in Beijing. Established in January 2002, it stands at the apex of the country's disease prevention and control system, directing technical work that runs down through provincial, prefecture-level and county-level centres for disease control. It is at once a research body, a surveillance and information centre, a training institution and a source of technical guidance on everything from epidemic infectious diseases to nutrition, occupational health and chronic disease. Its official website, chinacdc.cn, with an English service at en.chinacdc.cn, is the channel through which it publishes surveillance findings, health information and institutional news.

China CDC was modelled in part on the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and its creation marked the point at which China replaced a largely academic preventive-medicine structure and a network of epidemic prevention stations with a unified, operationally oriented disease-control system. The institution works under the National Health Commission and, since China's 2021 public-health reorganisation, within the framework of the National Disease Control and Prevention Administration.

Origins: from the Academy of Preventive Medicine to a national CDC

Before 2002, national preventive medicine in China was centred on the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, an academic body, while day-to-day disease control rested with epidemic prevention stations at county, city and provincial level. A pilot for a different model appeared in Shanghai, where the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention was established in 1998 — the first such centre in China, explicitly based on the example of the US CDC, and later described in the public-health literature as the precursor to the national institution.

In January 2002 the national-level Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was established in Beijing from the former Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine. Its founding director-general was Li Liming, who later recalled the institution's founding mission in the pages of its journal: “Centered on disease control, based on scientific research, and rooted on training talent.” The new centre was given direction of the existing three-tier disease prevention system — county, prefecture/city and province — with the aim of achieving a complete disease control and prevention system running from the local level to the centre.

Mandate and scope of work

The establishment of China CDC did more than rename an existing structure. It refined the disease-control system to cover both communicable and non-communicable diseases, and it expanded programmes beyond the academy's original research base in environmental health, nutrition and food hygiene, occupational health and radiological health. New areas of work included child and adolescent health, mental health, the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS, tuberculosis prevention and endemic disease prevention.

In practical terms, the mandate combines several distinct functions. China CDC conducts epidemiological surveillance and research on the distribution and development of diseases, providing the evidence base and technical support for policies, regulations, standards and programmes. It formulates and implements working schemes for prevention and control, monitors their quality and evaluates their effect. It supports the National Immunization Program, which it set up as part of its early institutional architecture, and it carries out health education and health promotion. Because the institution is a technical guidance body rather than an administrative law-enforcement agency, its influence runs through standards, surveillance data, expert assessment and direction of the CDC network below it.

The national disease-control system

China CDC directs a system that mirrors its own structure at lower levels of government. Following the 2002 reorganisation, centres for disease control were created in province-level regions across the country, and the model extends down through prefecture and county CDCs, so that surveillance reporting, laboratory confirmation and outbreak response can move from local to central level within one institutional family. Commentators writing in the American Journal of Public Health at the time noted that the creation of these centres reflected much more than organisational restructuring: it was a policy response to shifting disease patterns and to a changing understanding of what disease control required.

The system's weaknesses were tested almost immediately by the SARS outbreak of 2003, and later reforms repeatedly returned to the question of how quickly information travels upward through the tiers. The creation in May 2021 of a new national disease-control administration, announced as an overhaul of the public-health bureaucracy, was intended in part to strengthen epidemic monitoring and early warning and to give disease-control research clearer guidance from above.

Structure and specialist institutes

China CDC carries out much of its work through national specialist institutes, several of which were long-established bodies folded into the new centre in 2002. The National Institute of Parasitic Diseases, based in Shanghai, is the only specialised institution for parasitology at national level in China. Its earliest precursor, the Huadong Branch of the National Institute of Health, was established in Nanjing in 1950; it became the Institute of Parasitic Diseases of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in 1956, moved to Shanghai in 1957, passed to the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine in 1983, and took its present name on 23 January 2002 when it joined China CDC. It is organised around disease-oriented departments covering schistosomiasis, malaria, filariasis, kala-azar and hydatidosis, and soil-transmitted and foodborne parasitic diseases, and it also serves as a WHO collaborating centre for tropical diseases.

The National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention is the centre's virology arm: it organises national influenza reference work, including proficiency testing and technical training for provincial influenza reference centres, and it entered the first arrangement under which an international team — Columbia University's Center for Infection and Immunity — operated a joint pathogen-discovery laboratory inside China CDC. The National Institute for Nutrition and Health leads national nutrition surveillance work, including the China Nutrition and Health Surveillance programme conducted under the Healthy China Action Plan and the National Nutrition Plan. Other national-level units named in China CDC's own reporting include the National Center for Women and Children's Health. Alongside the institutes, the centre set up dedicated functional bodies at its founding, among them the National Immunization Program and a public health surveillance and information centre.

Surveillance, information and emergency response

Surveillance is the institution's core information function. China CDC collects and analyses disease data flowing up from the CDC network, turning local reporting into national pictures of epidemic and endemic disease, chronic-disease risk and environmental and occupational health. Its published output during major events illustrates the role: in January 2020, its journal reported for the first time the epidemiological characteristics of the novel coronavirus then emerging in Wuhan, including the whole genome sequences of virus strains, and published the first epidemiological investigation results of the outbreak.

The institution's advisory position in such emergencies is technical rather than executive. During the COVID-19 pandemic its director-general was among the senior health officials who travelled to Wuhan in January 2020, and its researchers took part in the joint study with World Health Organization experts on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, sharing early case data and materials with the international team. That pattern — generating and publishing the scientific record on which policy is then made by government — defines how China CDC operates in a crisis.

Training: the Chinese Field Epidemiology Training Program

Training was written into the founding mission, and its principal vehicle is the Chinese Field Epidemiology Training Program (CFETP), initiated in 2001, just before the national centre itself was established. The programme trains field epidemiologists through a two-year course built around practical outbreak investigation; by 2019 a total of 313 trainees had completed it. China CDC has since described CFETP as operating through a three-tier training network with training models it characterises as having distinct Chinese characteristics, and field epidemiology training is a standing topic in its cooperation with counterpart agencies abroad, including the Communicable Diseases Agency of Singapore, whose delegation held talks with CFETP in 2025.

Publications: China CDC Weekly and official channels

China CDC's flagship publication is China CDC Weekly, launched in 2019 as a scientific journal of public-health information modelled in concept on the US Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The idea of an MMWR-like journal had been an aspiration since the institution's early years: its founders envisaged a release platform for information on public-health practice in China, a dissemination platform for related agencies and international partners, and a learning platform for the centre's own personnel. George F. Gao, then director-general, served as the journal's editor-in-chief and wrote its founding foreword under the title “China's Outreach to the World: Public Health Goes Global.”

Beyond the Weekly, the institution disseminates disease surveillance and health information through chinacdc.cn and its English-language site, which carries institutional news, international cooperation reporting and health-topic material spanning infectious diseases, noncommunicable and chronic diseases, tobacco control and nutrition and health. Specialist institutes publish through their own channels as well; the National Institute of Parasitic Diseases, for example, maintains an English website setting out its tasks in surveillance, programme formulation, health education and public information services.

Leadership

Li Liming was the founding director-general, associated with the institution's founding mission statement and the early aspiration for its journal. George F. Gao (Gao Fu), an Oxford-trained virologist known internationally for his work on emerging infections and for his role in the response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, took the role of director in 2017 and led China CDC through the COVID-19 pandemic period, holding the agency's annual meeting with the director of the US CDC in January 2022.

In July 2022 Shen Hongbing, an epidemiologist and oncologist and former president of Nanjing Medical University, succeeded Gao as chief of China CDC, while also serving as a deputy director of the new national disease prevention and control bureau. By July 2025 China CDC's own reporting named Professor Wang Jianwei as its director general, chairing the institution's technical roundtable with Singapore's communicable diseases agency in Beijing. Leadership of the centre thus combines scientific standing with a position inside the national health administration, reflecting the institution's dual character as research academy and system headquarters.

The 2021 reorganisation and the institution's present place

On 13 May 2021 China announced an overhaul of its public-health bureaucracy centred on a new National Administration of Disease Prevention and Control, reporting within the national health structure and tasked with safeguarding and promoting public health, establishing an epidemic monitoring and early-warning system and guiding disease-control research. The new administration absorbed the existing China CDC into its framework. The reform followed debate during the pandemic about whether the separation between technical disease-control institutions and administrative authority had slowed the flow of information in the early days of the Wuhan and Hebei outbreaks.

Within that structure China CDC remains what it was created to be in 2002: the national technical centre of the disease-control system. Its institutes hold the reference laboratories and specialist programmes, its surveillance machinery assembles the national picture, its training programme supplies field epidemiologists, and its Weekly publishes the scientific record in English for an international readership.

International cooperation and role

International work is built into the institution's routine. It holds an annual meeting with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at which the two sides have discussed COVID-19 control, public-health capacity building, global public health and field epidemiology training. Its institutes host foreign delegations — the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute's 2025 visit to the National Institute of Parasitic Diseases is one recent example — and its parasitic-diseases institute has spent seven decades building cooperation that transfers China's experience in controlling parasitic diseases abroad. Joint laboratories, WHO collaborating-centre functions and co-authored research with foreign universities extend that reach.

For readers of this directory, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention is recorded as China's national disease-control and public-health information institution: a Beijing-based agency, founded in January 2002, that directs a three-tier national system, publishes the China CDC Weekly, and serves as the technical centre of disease prevention for communicable and non-communicable diseases alike. Its official website is chinacdc.cn.