23Received 05.09.2024. Revised 28.10.2024. Accepted 05.11.2024.
Acknowledgements. The research was carried out with the support of the Russian Science Foundation grant no. 24-28-01127 (https://rscf.ru/en/project/24-28-01127/).
Abstract. The Health Silk Road (HSR) is a component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that aims to enhance international cooperation in the healthcare sector at both global and regional levels. According to Beijing, the HSR as a long-term project can allow the Global South countries to go beyond the world order created by the West and increase their role in global health management. The purpose of this article is to characterize the conceptual foundations of the HSR, its assessments in Chinese and foreign scientific discourse, as well as to analyze its implementation in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The primary sources are government documents, papers of international organizations and forums, think tank reports, statistical data, speeches by officials, media publications, etc. In the course of the study, the following results are obtained: the evolution of HSR concept in the official political discourse of China is traced; key elements of the project are highlighted; Chinese and foreign scientific works on the topic are analyzed; the reaction of the USA to the intensification of Sino–Latin America health cooperation is characterized; the HSR’s implementation in the LAC region is examined. It is concluded that the HSR has played an important role in China’s COVID‑19 diplomacy and its significance might increase, especially in the context of humanity’s predicted entry into an “era of pandemics”. The final part of the article outlines promising directions for further HSR’s development including its merger with another important pillar of the BRI – the Digital Silk Road.
Keywords: China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Health Silk Road, public health diplomacy, vaccine diplomacy, humanitarian aid, China–U.S. geopolitical confrontation, Latin America and the Caribbean, COVID‑19 pandemic
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