From October 25 to 26, representatives from 192 countries gathered in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, and issued the Astana Declaration, which called for global primary health care to be strengthened. 

It is a follow-up to the meeting 40 years ago in Almaty, then the capital of Kazakhstan, which asked the world to take prompt and effective action in improving primary health care. 

In September of 2013 in Astana, Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which aims to proactively benefit humanity in an unprecedented manner. 

Last week, China's determination for global engagement was further strengthened by the first China International Import Expo (CIIE) in Shanghai. This event solidified the nation's determination to engage with the globe and showed its readiness to shoulder the global responsibility of mitigating the challenges of the 21st century. 

Having moved 700 million out of poverty in a relatively short time, China should be the country most ready to respond to the Astana Declaration.

At the national meeting on health, held in August 2016 in Beijing, Xi clearly put forth a strategy centered on improving the health of people in China. The policy of "focusing on primary health care, using reform and innovation as driving force, giving priority to prevention, giving equal attention to both traditional Chinese and Western medicine, integrating health into all policies and building and sharing it with the people" laid a top-down foundation for China to revitalize primary health care.

It goes without saying that primary health care is the cornerstone of any country's health system. However, in the past century, the Western healthcare service model of emphasizing treatment over prevention and the framework of the disease-centricity have seriously weakened primary health care. As a result, medical crises are now a global challenge and with China's rapid growth, in which medical reform became a national calling, how to strengthen the primary health care is an imminent and arduous national task.

It is worth underscoring that 40 years ago, China's barefoot doctor system was able to achieve low-cost health coverage and established the foundation of the national primary health care framework. In fact, the system even caught the attention of the World Health Organization (WHO), who recommended that the rest of the world should follow this system and that it could be branded as the first generation of primary health care. 

Over the past four decades, the family physician system in the US and the general practitioner (GP) system in the UK have improved the quality of primary health care. These systems are considered to be the second generation of primary health care. 

As practiced in the UK and the US, this system relies heavily on high-quality and high-cost family doctors or GPs. For most developing countries - including China - it is prohibitively expensive to train the numbers of high-quality family doctors or general practitioners needed in a short enough time. For developing nations, this makes the rolling out of the second generation of primary health care very difficult, if not impossible. 

The world is now at the cusp of the third generation of a primary health care system. With the development of modern science and technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, mobile medicine, trends in medical service models are moving towards a team-based, standardized, evidence-based and personalized system. In this scenario, the excessive reliance on individual doctors can be diminished significantly. 

The new system is team-based, with the best of licenses. Through the power of scientific and technological innovation, one can provide a higher quality primary health care service at a lower cost.

To this end, on a large scale, China can take the lead in achieving this goal and form a new healthcare system. While developed nations such as UK and US do have the advantages of technological and theoretical innovation, their existing medical system has matured to the point of becoming a significant resistance to innovation. 

Indeed, developed nations do not have governments that can promote profound reforms nor do they have a market to incubate this kind of disruptive innovation. 

At present, China's primary health care system is still relatively weak. However, it has a broad market for development, and the Chinese government is determined to promote this innovation in health care. As long as China can, it will take this advanced international technology and experience and carry out the deep integration suitable for the country, in order to bring about this third generation of primary health care. 

Furthermore, the BRI can be the vehicle to extend the influence to other countries. In this regard, China has an opportunity to reconstruct a new generation of primary health care system.

China is at an exciting crossroad in instituting a new national primary health care era. However, one must bear in mind that reforming into a new era of primary health care should not and cannot simply be based on attracting existing global industrial chains and bringing them into China. It must use the leapfrog advantages of China to create something new that works to China's needs.

It is believed that with China becoming successful in this way, changing primary health care reform can, through its win-win interactions with all BRI related countries and beyond, benefit humanity in the long run and around the globe.