Exclusive Interview with China Pacific Insurance's Ma Xin: An In-Depth Analysis of the Strategic Transition from "Big Health" to "Big Wellness"

Ask AI · How does China Pacific Insurance’s integrated approach reshape the health and wellness ecosystem?

Reporter Sun Shihui, 21st Century Business Herald

The population aged 60 and above in China has exceeded 310 million. Insurance companies, leveraging their natural advantages in risk protection, long-term funds, and service integration, have become key players in the silver economy. China Pacific Insurance officially upgraded its “Big Health” strategy to a “Big Wellness” strategy in 2025, establishing it as one of the core strategies for the next five years.

What strategic logic underlies this subtle change? Faced with nationwide development of long-term care insurance, expansion of enterprise annuities, and other policy benefits, how is China Pacific Insurance positioning itself? The 21st Century Business Herald conducted an in-depth interview with Ma Xin, Vice President of China Pacific Insurance.

Chart: Ma Xin, Vice President of China Pacific Insurance, provided by interviewee

From “Big Health” to “Big Wellness”

“Strategic upgrading is not about starting over from scratch,” Ma Xin said. Over the past five years, China Pacific Insurance has built a solid foundation in areas such as “Blue Medical Insurance,” the “Golden Sunset” pension collection plan, Pacific Home, and “Taiyi Butler.” Among these, “Blue Medical Insurance” has served over 3 million people; the “Golden Sunset” pension collection plan has exceeded 60 billion yuan in scale, making it the largest collection plan in the occupational and enterprise annuity markets. He pointed out that steadfast strategic focus has laid a solid foundation for the strategic upgrade.

When asked how China Pacific Insurance’s “Big Wellness” differs from peers, Ma Xin offered one keyword: integration. He explained that China Pacific’s “integration” manifests across three levels: organization, goals, and ecosystem. By September 2025, the group had established a wellness ecosystem organization, creating a three-tier structure and forming a normalized operational management mechanism. “Integration is not just a slogan; it’s about mechanisms, assessments, and resource allocation logic.”

In 2026, the long-term care insurance system will be officially implemented nationwide. This system, often called the “Sixth Insurance,” is viewed as a key foundation for addressing aging and the care challenges of disabled elderly.

Ma Xin believes that developing long-term care insurance is an important reflection of serving national strategies and practicing the “great responsibilities of the nation.” It demonstrates political commitment and social responsibility, while also aligning with the company’s development needs.

By the end of 2025, China Pacific Insurance had participated in government-led long-term care insurance services in 57 cities, covering 120 million insured individuals. Ma Xin said that these accumulated experiences also create favorable conditions for China Pacific to identify new growth points and achieve breakthroughs in a new market cycle.

However, industry experts generally believe that China’s long-term care insurance development is still in its early stages, with issues such as profit models for service operations, delayed government payments, and inconsistent service standards still present. Ma Xin pointed out that future participation of commercial insurance companies in long-term care insurance will mainly involve three aspects: participating in service operations, providing supplementary coverage, and integrating nursing services.

Meanwhile, on the health insurance product side, “Blue Medical Insurance” has become a flagship for China Pacific. As of now, it has served over 3 million users and has become a key link connecting resources for “medical, nursing, wellness, and care.”

Overall, China’s commercial health insurance is still in a critical stage of transitioning from “whether it exists” to “how good it is,” especially needing to balance medical inflation and risk reduction in a healthy interaction.

Ma Xin said, “Service is the growth flywheel of health insurance.” China Pacific’s Pacific Health Insurance, jointly launched with China Pacific Property & Casualty Insurance and Taiyi Butler, offers the “Medical Claims Pass” service, aiming to create a one-stop “medical treatment + claims” solution for enterprises. By the end of 2025, “Medical Claims Pass” has covered 380 corporate clients, serving 298k employees. Ma Xin emphasized, “The fundamental goal of service growth is to improve the efficiency of commercial insurance fundraising, enhance customer stickiness, and achieve risk reduction.”

When asked about how China’s aging population differs from Europe and America, Ma Xin pointed out that compared to Europe, America, and Japan, China is “aging before becoming wealthy,” facing rapid aging and structural challenges such as “one-pillar dominance” and a low pension replacement rate (about 40%).

In response to these features, Ma Xin said that China Pacific Insurance is fully involved in the three-pillar pension system: the first pillar focuses on investment capacity output, the second on expanding coverage, and the third on optimizing product and service quality.

Through resource sharing, corporate clients in the second pillar can be converted into individual clients in the third pillar; through asset-liability linkage, pension asset allocation can connect with China Pacific’s wellness infrastructure for long-term funding; through industry-service integration, pension benefits and wellness service payments form a closed loop.

Ma Xin summarized, “Pension finance is not just about selling a policy; it’s about managing customer relationships spanning decades.”

Seizing the “Break” and “Establish” in Transformation

Actively responding to aging, deploying wellness industries, and empowering core insurance businesses have become consensus in the industry’s transformation.

Ma Xin introduced that China Pacific Insurance has preliminarily established a full-chain service system of “prevention-diagnosis-treatment-recovery-wellness”: prevention includes physical exams, vaccines, and youth health promotion programs like “Green Growth”; diagnosis features 7×24 online medical services “Taiyi Butler,” offline referrals, and county-level intelligent medical alliances; treatment covers direct-pay medical networks, medical assistance, and drug and caregiver services; recovery includes “Yuan Shen Recovery” hospitals and rehabilitation networks; elder care includes “Pacific Home” institutional elder care and “Bai Sui Ju” home care.

Ma Xin said that the next step is not simply to expand but to focus on specialization, refinement, and excellence, promoting service transformation from “comprehensive” to “specialized.”

Notably, in recent years, Pacific Home has been shifting from “heavy assets” to a “light-heavy combination” model. The 13 cities and 15 projects under Pacific Home have a clear new strategic direction:坚持“轻重结合、以轻为主” (adhering to “light-heavy combination, mainly light”).

“Previously, land acquisition and community development aimed to quickly build brand and operational capacity. Now, with these capabilities in place, China Pacific will seize urban renewal opportunities, adopting more rental, renovation, and entrusted operation models—light asset modes—focusing on city-center elder care—allowing seniors to stay within familiar social and medical circles, reducing investment intensity and increasing customer acceptance,” Ma Xin explained.

In fact, home-based elder care remains the most common choice for the majority of elderly in China and also the most challenging area to develop deeply. To address this, China Pacific has launched the “Bai Sui Ju” brand for home elder care. Ma Xin believes that the birth of “Bai Sui Ju” precisely solves three major pain points: first, safety detection (assistive device protection, risk alerts, three-level response); second, medical assistance (online consultation, offline accompaniment, priority medical channels); third, caregiving services (in-hospital nursing, post-hospital rehabilitation, on-demand home visits).

He revealed that the next step is to accelerate the construction of front-end family clinics, using elder care managers as a link to achieve seamless cross-scenario services, and to build a full-scene elder care service network for both home and outdoor settings.

Beyond home elder care, in the medical chain, rehabilitation is often overlooked. The reporter learned that China Pacific is filling this gap through the “Yuan Shen Rehabilitation” brand. “Currently, we have projects in Xiamen, Jinan, and Guangzhou, with a total planned capacity of about 1,100 beds. The rehabilitation hospitals in Xiamen and Jinan are already operational,” Ma Xin added.

Regarding the core carrier of AI technology in China Pacific’s wellness ecosystem—Taiyi Butler—Ma Xin emphasized: “AI is not about replacing doctors but enabling doctors to focus their energy on the most valuable judgments and communication.” Currently, Taiyi Butler has built 11 intelligent modules around pre-diagnosis, diagnosis, and post-diagnosis scenarios, fully empowering diagnostic accuracy and doctor efficiency.

Ma Xin stated that in the next phase, China Pacific will deepen the integration of services and core businesses around three major scenarios: customer development, product innovation, and operational cost control, creating a virtuous cycle of “service embedded in scenarios and scenarios feeding back into core businesses.”

From “Big Health” to “Big Wellness,” China Pacific is attempting to build an ecosystem integrating insurance, investment, services, and technology. However, whether this path can succeed still faces a series of challenges, including profit models for long-term care insurance, cost control for home elder care, and AI application issues. In response, Ma Xin emphasized: “Strategic focus is our original intention; strategic upgrading is a new situation. We will deepen the ‘Big Wellness’ strategy and deliver a solid answer sheet for Pacific in the silver age.”