China’s efforts to embed artificial intelligence across industries, which it calls its “AI plan,” has generated plenty of fanfare, and much of it is justified. For China, AI is a national development project, not simply a technological innovation, with the ambition to lift everything from traditional industries to emerging sectors.

But the next challenges are not technical. China has already tapped much of the low-hanging fruit, such as long-term industrial planning, advanced supply chains, and a vast engineering talent pool. Some of the most important AI challenges go back to less glamorous problems requiring system-level and institutional policy change. Nowhere is this clearer than in “AI health,” made urgent by demographic pressures and an increasing disease burden.

China’s efforts to embed artificial intelligence across industries, which it calls its “AI plan,” has generated plenty of fanfare, and much of it is justified. For China, AI is a national development project, not simply a technological innovation, with the ambition to lift everything from traditional industries to emerging sectors.

But the next challenges are not technical. China has already tapped much of the low-hanging fruit, such as long-term industrial planning, advanced supply chains, and a vast engineering talent pool. Some of the most important AI challenges go back to less glamorous problems requiring system-level and institutional policy change. Nowhere is this clearer than in “AI health,” made urgent by demographic pressures and an increasing disease burden.

In China and beyond, discussion of China’s AI health push tends to picture futuristic diagnostic models and smart hospitals. But on the ground, practitioners inside the system focus on less glamorous things: data plumbing, the systems that make health data usable; incentives for institutions to cooperate; and the question of who pays.

This July, one of us (Guo) attended AI and health-policy forums in Beijing and Shanghai.  Practitioners at these forums returned to the same bottlenecks: usable hospital data, institutional data-sharing, and whether AI saves the health system money. Chinese experts see AI as a potential route to more accessible, efficient care, but the consensus is that there are too few high-quality datasets and too little data-sharing at scale.

Since the State Council launched its nationwide AI initiative in 2025, health has been identified as a priority area for AI applications, with some successes. Leading hospitals have built formidable health-data assets; health-focused large language models have advanced quickly; and health apps have reached sale. Yet the market struggles to convert this capacity into commercial success: Few AI health........

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