The most daunting problem is a shortage of doctors at the grassroots level. According to Qinghai healthcare standards, there should be two general practitioners per 10,000 residents. By this standard, a single doctor working in rural areas would have to cover an area of 1,200 square kilometers.

The government pays doctors' salaries through a multilevel structure that transfers and allocates national tax revenues. In addition to healthcare, fiscal transfer payments cover poverty-reduction programs, equal and affordable educational opportunities, environmental protection and targeted infrastructure development for China's less-developed geographic regions, social classes and ethnic groups.

The Chinese government says it can effect continuous and robust poverty relief, which requires strategic consistency, because the Communist Party of China maintains long-term political power. It's an argument.

Sharing is a way of thinking. It begins by taking seriously society's responsibility for its poorest and most vulnerable members, and it operates at all levels. That's why healthcare in Qinghai is a microcosm of shared development in China.

Shared development is the last of the Five Major Development Concepts not because it is least important but because it requires the prior success of the previous four concepts - innovative development, coordinated development, green development and open development. A society needs robust resources to help its poor.

Only when poverty is eliminated and socioeconomic imbalances are reduced will the Five Major Development Concepts have fulfilled their mission. The target date is 2020, when the advent of a "moderately prosperous society" would mean that the first part of the Chinese Dream has been realized.

The author is a public intellectual, political/economics commentator, and international corporate strategist, and the host of Closer to China with R.L. Kuhn on CCTV News (Sundays at 9:30 am and 9:30 pm).The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

(China Daily European Weekly 12/02/2016 page13)