Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. Thanks for downloading the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Claire Bowes.

Today we're looking back at the foundation of the World Health Organization following the end of the Second World War.

The organization whose role is to direct and coordinate international health work

was intended to be free of politics, but right from the start that was to prove impossible.

I've been speaking to Chiaming Zee, whose father was a member of the Chinese delegation

which proposed the idea to the United Nations.

In 1945 a conference in San Francisco changed the world forever.

At San Francisco, 200 men and women of 50 nations,

labored to build an organization that will outlaw war for all time.

And so the United Nations was born.

The meeting was led by the four big nations that had won the Second World War, the USSR, the US, the UK and China. One member of the Chinese delegation was Zaming Zee. A medical doctor

educated in England, he was there largely by accident as a speechwriter for the

Chinese foreign minister, as he later recalled in his memoir.

I snatched at the opportunity to be present at this historic conference,

especially as China was one of the sponsoring powers.

Thus I was in the lucky position of having a ringside seat at the conference at which the new post-war world was to be shaped.

And he had his own ideas about how to shape the post-war world,

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