Americans Should Celebrate China's Biotech Revolution
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Essays<br>Americans Should Celebrate China's Biotech Revolution<br>If Xi Jinping finds a cure for cancer, you will probably get access to it too
Richard Hanania<br>Jun 15, 2026
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Note: To do book promotional stuff, I’ll be in DC Monday and Tuesday this week, and NYC for about a week starting Wednesday. I may do one or two meetups. To remain informed, check the X feed and Substack notes, where I’ll post updates on what I’m doing.<br>Ruxandra Teslo and Amol Punjabi recently wrote about how a Chinese startup developed a new drug that significantly extends the lifespans of people with multiple myeloma.<br>This is part of a larger story in which China has suddenly become a global leader in biotech over the last decade. Here’s a figure from an Economist report on the topic last year.
A figure in the December 2025 report of the congressional National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) helpfully shows how drug development works and the rise of China in this area.
Teslo and Punjabi point out that the government has done this by enacting the kind of reforms that smarter critics of the FDA have been advocating for years.<br>China’s ongoing biotechnology transformation is the product of deliberate industrial policy. The Made in China 2025 initiative explicitly identified biotechnology and advanced medical technologies as strategic national priorities, and a series of targeted policies followed. Among them was the Thousand Talents Plan, designed to draw overseas Chinese scientists back from Western institutions. BeiGene, Innovent, and Junshi, which are now three of China’s leading oncology biotechs, were all founded or are now led by researchers who had trained in the United States before returning home.<br>Yet perhaps the most consequential advantage China has built lies in its clinical trial ecosystem. Chinese hospitals make extensive use of investigator-initiated trials. These are early-stage studies that allow oncologists to quickly assess whether a drug shows genuine promise. In China, such a trial can be up and running within roughly six months of a patient consultation with an academic oncologist. In the United States, the same process can take eighteen months or more, bogged down by regulatory preparation that includes a lengthy Investigational New Drug application. This is a document that can run to thousands of pages and is laden with a host of requirements which are unnecessary at such an early stage of development.<br>The most valuable thing early-stage trials enable is iteration. They allow tight feedback between the clinic and the lab. There are countless ways to engineer a better CAR-T cell, and many cannot be evaluated in the laboratory alone. No cell culture or animal model fully replicates the complexity of a human tumor, and AI is unlikely to close that gap anytime soon. We simply lack the training data to capture what tumors are actually like in vivo: their geometry, vascularization and biomechanical properties.<br>China’s ability to run these trials quickly and at scale gave it a structural advantage in that learning process, whereas the US is currently undermining itself through burdensome manufacturing requirements and regulatory bureaucracy that make early experimentation slower and more costly than it needs to be.
This isn’t that complicated. Talent acquisition plus the removal of burdensome regulations that don’t pass a cost-benefit test. One of the most significant reforms was enacted in 2018, and it ensured that clinical trials can begin upon an application being accepted as long as China’s National Medical Products Administration does not raise objections within a certain timeframe. The US formally allows something similar, but it involves more stringent paperwork, manufacturing, and institutional review board requirements.<br>I think that the narrative surrounding China’s rise in biotech is interesting because it’s a clear example of what I think is the overly zero-sum perspective we take when it comes to that country. A headline in Time Magazine from mid-2025 reads “The US Can’t Afford to Lose the Biotech Race with China.” Now, the idea that the US is losing to China in something can have a positive effect by encouraging needed reforms at home. But it can also lead to policies that harm ourselves because we think they’ll hurt China more, which is what we see in Trump’s approach to trade.<br>The Time article calls for limiting Chinese investment in American biotech companies. Now, usually when you see articles like this in a legacy publication on an obscure public policy issue, you can bet that it’s part of some lobbying campaign. And there is real momentum in Washington to try to hinder Chinese biotech, from both China hawks and probably business interests that see an opportunity to profit in some way.<br>John Moolenaar, a Republican congressman from Michigan, has pushed to restrict...