U.S.-China Cancer Collaboration Could Open Door For New “Ping-Pong Diplomacy”
Forbes
The following is an excerpt detailing ASPI President Kevin Rudd's remarks at the Forbes China Healthcare Summit in 2021, originally published in Forbes.
A joint effort by the U.S. and China to fight cancer could represent a latter-day equivalent of the exchange of table tennis players between the two countries that led to a historic thaw in bilateral relations in the 1970s, former Australia Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said at a global online healthcare summit organized by Forbes China on Saturday.
“Given all that’s going wrong in the U.S.-China relationship, we should turn cancer collaboration between China and the United States into the ping-ping diplomacy of the 21st century,” said Rudd, who is currently the CEO of the New York-headquartered Asia Society. “If those guys could play ping-ping to bring the U.S.-China relationship in from the cold back in the early 1970s, then I think we can do something similar now if we put our mind to it.”
The 2021 Forbes China Healthcare Summit was held to discuss the theme of “Advance the Global Fight Against Cancer and Achieve a Moonshot in the Post-Pandemic Era.” The event was held in strategic partnership with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Forbes China is the Chinese-language edition of Forbes.
Though the COVID-19 pandemic this year has led to more than four million deaths globally in the past year and a half, cancer will likely kill far more people around the world this year– close to 10 million. Cancer patients are more vulnerable to contracting COVID-19 than others, and have more than double the COVID-19 death rate compared to COVID-19 patients without cancer.
Rudd was hopeful about collaboration between the two countries because the fight again cancer “cuts right across political and ideological divides into people’s lives.”
“The great thing about the United States is that normally when politicians that are Republicans and Democrats don’t talk to each other anymore, they did talk to each other about this,” he said. “That is really important. The idea of actually being able to have a bipartisan project in the United States on cancer treatment and cancer drug research and a bilateral initiative between China and the United States — because it transcends politics at home and abroad – I think is an exceptionally exciting thing.”