From Legal Indeterminacy to Risk-Governed Continuity: Operationalizing Risk Governance for China's Family Doctor Contract Services.

China's family doctor contract services (FDCS) are an important instrument for strengthening Primary Health Care, chronic disease management and continuity of care, but their legal and institutional foundations remain uneven. This Perspective treats legal indeterminacy not simply as a drafting defect but as a governable source of risk. It uses a structured narrative and legal-policy synthesis of Chinese FDCS policy and implementation materials and peer-reviewed studies principally from 2016-2025, relevant current Chinese laws and administrative rules, and limited functional reference points from the United Kingdom and Australia. The analysis distinguishes legal indeterminacy from regulatory fragmentation and implementation failure and develops an event-level qualitative risk-governance framework across five domains: contracting status and liability, rights, obligations and service packages, financing and evaluation, supervision and dispute resolution, and digital and data governance. Specific risk events are prioritized by qualitative likelihood and severity, with exposure and persistence recorded as potential escalation factors, and are then matched to proportionate regulatory responses. A worked example of remote diabetes follow-up illustrates the approach. The framework moves beyond catalogues of legal gaps by providing a transparent method for deciding where legal clarification and regulatory attention are most urgent, while remaining a conceptual tool that requires empirical validation.