Proactive health refers to a health paradigm, lifestyle, and cultural approach in which individuals take primary responsibility for their own well-being by enhancing health awareness, leveraging health technologies, and actively promoting their well-being. Together with medical services, disease prevention, and the Traditional Chinese Medicine concept of "preventive treatment," proactive health constitutes an integrated health protection system. Nearly forty years after the concept was first introduced, proactive health in China remains at the stage of research and demonstration, with limited public participation and underdeveloped systems for related technologies, industries, services, and policies. Currently, the promotion of proactive health in China faces five major challenges: weak public awareness, insufficient technological capacity, inadequate health protection for key populations, limited support for coping with population aging and chronic diseases, and an incomplete policy framework. This study suggests that advancing proactive health in China serves three major purposes: safeguarding public health, promoting economic development, and contributing to national revitalization. The essence of proactive health lies in individuals actively promoting their own health through a "whole-population, whole-life-cycle, and whole-factor (lifestyle)" approach. Its goal is to "prevent disease, delay disease onset, and reduce disease severity." The guiding principles are "individual responsibility, government leadership, social participation, innovation-driven development, and international cooperation." The six pillars of proactive health are diet, physical activity, lifestyle, health management, psychological and moral well-being, and living environment. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, key tasks for advancing proactive health include strategic innovation, technological innovation, institutional and mechanism reform, and service model innovation; fostering the integration of public initiatives and industrial development; and strengthening international cooperation. These efforts aim to accelerate the transition of proactive health from research and demonstration to broad social practice, enhance population health, ease healthcare system burdens, and explore a Chinese model of health that integrates traditional Chinese and western medicine as well as proactive health and medical security.