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China is one of the largest countries in the world with nearly 20% of the world’s population. There have been significant improvements in economy, education and technology over the last three decades. Due to substantial investments from all levels of government, the public health system in China has been improved since the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak. However, infectious diseases still remain a major population health issue and this may be exacerbated by rapid urbanization and unprecedented impacts of climate change. This commentary aims to explore China’s current capacity to manage infectious diseases which impair population health. It discusses the existing disease surveillance system and underscores the critical importance of strengthening the system. It also explores how the growing migrant population, dramatic changes in the natural landscape following rapid urbanization, and changing climatic conditions can contribute to the emergence and re-emergence of infectious disease. Continuing research on infectious diseases, urbanization and climate change may inform the country’s capacity to deal with emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases in the future.

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The words of political elites have the potential to play a significant role in the constitution and proliferation of racist discourse, especially when this discourse has the nuanced linguistic characteristics of ‘new racism’. This article examines the political rhetoric deployed in the articulation and defence of contentious government policy on Sudanese humanitarian refugee quotas in media interviews. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, we analyse a corpus of seven political interviews and identify a number of pervasive discursive features. These include descriptions, categories and multidimensional causal narratives that characterize the Sudanese as young, violent (i.e. gang members) and uneducated; the construction of ‘culture as cause’ narrative; and the differential orientation to the term race. Through our analysis, we show how causal inference and category description function multifariously in political discourse, contending with situated issues of policy justification, accusations of racism and the allocation of blame which exclusively rests with African refugees. The role of causal formulations in racist discourse is discussed.

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