Public Health Legal Education for Chinese Youth Amidst the US Legalized Ideological Strategy

Against the backdrop of global public health crises, this paper examines the emerging trend of the United States institutionalizing its ideological strategies through legal means and the challenges this poses to legal education on public health for Chinese youth. It further proposes systematic countermeasures within China's public health legal education framework. The study highlights that public health crises have become a critical arena for ideological contestation among nations. The U.S. has increasingly endowed its ideological strategies with legal form by promoting targeted sanctions legislation against China, initiating judicial proceedings, and leading international “accountability investigations”. Such legalized ideological maneuvers, within the specific context of public health governance, exert multidimensional impacts on Chinese youth. It has exerted a profound influence on the values and national identity of the younger generation in China, as well as restricted and affected their understanding of domestic public health legal principles, obscure their grasp of the complexities within international health legal orders, and blurre their discernment of the functional boundaries between law and science in public health governance. In light of the deficiencies in China's existing public health legal education system—particularly in interpretive depth, global engagement, and conceptual clarity—this paper advocates for a comprehensive enhancement of youth legal literacy and value-based reasoning among youth in complex international discourse. This can be achieved by deepening the theoretical foundations of public health law in pedagogy, integrating global legal discourse into teaching practices, and establishing an interdisciplinary model for experiential learning in public health education.