Alice Han

With more than half of Chinese adults now overweight and health care costs soaring, Beijing is treating obesity like a systemic crisis that requires discipline, targets and institutional control, not just personal willpower.

At the same time, China is racing ahead on another front, flooding the market with GLP-1 weight loss drugs, not just for humans, but now also for pets, turning obesity into both a governance challenge and a massive commercial opportunity.

From fenced-in boot camps to injectable drugs for cats, China's approach raises a bigger question.

When weight becomes a national problem, how far should the state and the market go to fix it?

James, I sent you a video on this.

Did you watch it, The Fat Prisons?

I mean, in a way, it doesn't surprise me.

It seems like a very Chinese response to an issue, which is to go all out and to the extreme and to enforce it through this rigid structure.

And it honestly wasn't a surprise because over the last two years, I've been seeing a lot of on social media, these reels of people working out in China and

But the reason I wanted to share this with you is because I have been hearing and actually I've been seeing, and I don't know if you've seen this, James, in the last, I would say two years, I've noticed a lot more overweight people in China.

And growing up when I would go every year, you know, growing up in Australia, you saw more overweight people.

It's also a very overweight country.

But every time I went back to China, everyone would be very skinny.

Right.

And in the last two years, I've noticed a marked change.

And, you know, we can get into the medicine of it, but obviously part of this is economic, part of this is also societal and cultural.

They're living more sedentary lives, but they're having better access to food.

But in China, there is a strong prevalence of diabetes, as well as increasingly obesity.

The figures from the National Health Commission are startling.

So it's predicted that by 2030, 65% of Chinese adults could be overweight or obese.