Chinese health system: Better not to get sick

Franka Lu is a Chinese journalist and entrepreneur. She works in China and Germany. In this ZEIT-ONLINE series, she reports critically on life, culture and everyday life in China. To protect her professional and private environment, she writes under a pseudonym.

A few months ago, a friend's mother had to undergo a colonoscopy in China . To her horror, my friend, who lives in Europe and had traveled to China for the procedure, learned that her mother had woken up from the anesthesia during the procedure. The family naturally wondered what had gone wrong. What they heard on the news a few days later provided a possible answer.