The Economist.
Someone whose life is saved by a new medicine is unlikely to care whether
it was invented at home or on the other side of the world.
Yet America's policymakers have begun treating China's biotechnology industry as the next front in the tech war.
A bill before Congress would amend the Coins Act,
which restricts American investment in sensitive technologies abroad, to include licensing Chinese biotech.
Some want the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA,
America's drug regulator, to disregard clinical trial data from China.
America's worries have been brought about by a remarkable shift in where innovation happens.
Chinese firms ran nearly a third of the world's clinical trials last year, up from just six percent a decade earlier.
China is now the world's second largest source of new drugs, behind only America itself.
In 2025, nearly half of licensing deals worth $50 million or more were struck with Chinese firms,
up from none in 2020. In some categories, such as antibody drug conjugates,
a promising class of cancer treatments, Chinese firms accounted for almost all the licensing.
To view Chinese medical innovation as anything other than good news would be a mistake.
In AI and semiconductors, America worries about its intellectual property leaking to China.
In biotechnology, the flow of information runs in the opposite direction,
and though anxiety about China's dominance in the physical supply chain for drugs is understandable,
the country accounts for over 70% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients for essential drugs.
Manufacturing resilience and scientific collaboration are different issues.