Profile: The Making of an Unlikely Champion of Reform

When the Chinese Medical Association recently named Li Jiange one of the winners of the country's top prize in medical achievement its thinking was out of the box, but not out of line.

Li was the first winner of the Chinese Medical Science and Technology Award who does not work in the field of medicine since the top honor was first handed out in 2001. The association said Li, now head of the investment bank Chinese International Capital Corp. (CICC), was honored for his "key, distinctive contributions to the construction of the New Rural Cooperative Medical System (NRCMS)," which provides health insurance to hundreds of millions of rural Chinese.