Thank you so much for the invitation. I hope my sound is coming through okay for everyone.
I come to you today to speak as the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Minnesota Duluth. I'm also a political scientist who is particularly interested in questions of global health governance and international responses to infectious disease outbreaks.
When we're thinking about global health governance, we're thinking about the system for responding to cross-border health issues that arise, and that is an issue in which Canada has long been a leader. The People's Republic of China has a very important potential role to play, but it's a role that has been called into question in recent years.
In many ways, we are in a paradoxical moment when it comes to global health governance. On the one hand, particularly over these past few years, we have seen more than ever the importance of having a co-operative arrangement that brings together countries across the globe in order to address issues and concerns that necessarily cross borders. No country is going to be able to deal with an issue like COVID-19 on its own.
However, at the same time, we are also seeing a moment in which there is more resistance than ever to engage in these sorts of processes. Many of these sorts of challenges have come up in the context of the relationship between the global health governance system and the Government of the People's Republic of China.
In many ways, the People's Republic of China is a vital element of any effective system of global health governance, for a number of different reasons.
One is that it is obviously an incredibly significant geopolitical player. Any sort of international system that isn't including China is going to have major gaps in it.
Second, the sheer number of people and the movement of those people mean that there are particular challenges that come up when we're talking about the control of infectious diseases and their spread, be they new diseases or diseases that we've previously seen.
Third, the degree of human-animal interactions that can exist within Chinese society, particularly as we see more people moving into areas where there has not been sustained human residence, causes great challenges. We know that zoonotic diseases—diseases that spread from animals to humans—are one of the most important causes of new disease outbreaks.
Finally, China also has a history of what we could call “health diplomacy”: engaging in health activities as a way of trying to build bilateral and multilateral relations with other countries.
The system we've seen over these past few years has really called into question the ability of the system to function in a cohesive manner. As I mentioned before, COVID-19 is perhaps emblematic of that. When we're looking at global health governance, we have a system that's largely based on notions of trust and shared norms of how things are going to operate, and this is where we have run into problems, particularly in these last few years when it comes to COVID-19.
We can talk in more detail about this in the questions, but the resistance comes from a number of different areas, including fears about surveillance that could come into play, the relationship between Taiwan and other elements of global governance, and just the general wariness that we've seen within the Government of the People's Republic of China to engage with global governance systems in general, not just in health.
The system was largely built in the aftermath of World War II, and it is not necessarily the most reflective of the sorts of challenges and needs of the contemporary international system's demands. In many ways, this is a moment of reform and opportunity for global health governance, but as I mentioned before, if there is not the inclusion of the People's Republic of China in this sort of process, we're going to have significant gaps, and those gaps are going to put us in danger.
Canada is a country that has long been a leader in global health governance and this sort of multilateral diplomacy and is in a very important and unique position to be able to help foster this new sort of system that can include the People's Republic of China, the United States and all the countries around the world.