China is home to one quarter of the world's population, and increasingly its 1.3 billion people have flocked into highly prosperous cities like Shanghai and Beijing. China's gross domestic product (GDP) has grown at 8 per cent for 25 years, making its economy among the world's largest. Yet, the 900 million rural population lives in abject poverty. In the 1980s, abandoning Mao's socialist and collectivist strategy of central governmental control with social equality, the Chinese privatised and decentralised health care, resulting in huge disparities between urban and rural populations.