China's Biotechnology Bloom
Life Sciences in the World's Fastest Growing Economy

by Nancy Chen

On October 14, 2003, China launched a taikonaut into space. Though coming forty years after the United States and Russia put their own astronauts in orbit, the Shenzou 5’s
ninety-minute flight was a moment of nationalist glory for China, whose space program is a mere eleven years old — and was, importantly, developed without Western help. The launch is a powerful symbol of China’s ongoing mission to modernize itself through science and technology, and of the rapidity at which they are doing so.

In just the last five years, social and economic changes in China, and the growth of its biological sciences, have been truly breathtaking; and the biotechnology industry’s growth is a critical narrative of Chinese development in the twenty-first century. In an age when the global flow of goods, services, and people are determined by a market economy, the state bureaucracy still faces the recurrent issue of how to maintain social order within ongoing market reform. Old tensions and concerns about social order and stability remain, while the challenges of providing for a younger, consumer-oriented population have become much more complex. Science, and biotechnology in particular, is embraced as a growth engine by the state, and seen as a largely undefined field in which a latecomer can still dominate. The biotech industry has emerged as part of the new Chinese economy, where public and private interests merge to shape modern life.

Why Science Matters

Critiques of Chinese science in the present context tend to highlight discontinuities and departures from the Maoist era, when science was expected to “serve the people” and lay practitioners were encouraged to be “red and expert.” These are significant changes. Since the post-Mao economic reforms of the 1980s, which shifted the economy’s foundations from centralized planning to free markets, laboratories — especially those in the biosciences — have been retooled as sites for commercial enterprise, their operations directed by scientists who are encouraged to become entrepreneurs in this new economic climate.

Nevertheless, there are important continuities with socialist policies and leaders. The ethos of science as critical to nation-building pervaded most of the last century. Under Mao, national progress was charted in terms of scientific progress guided by Marxist principles. Science continues to be a powerful tool to anchor and legitimize the State, and to expand its power. The alliance of government officials and scientists has also allowed the state to portray expert knowledge as the basis of its authority.

With market expansion and globalization, the “Shanghai minute” is faster than ever. Still, with careful focus on people, places, and practices, it is possible to trace how science and technology travel. (This can be quite literal, as many Chinese scientists received training abroad before returning to set up labs or work.) Laboratory funding and capital for
start-up companies come from joint ventures between state enterprises and foreign corporations, mostly from large Western pharmaceutical corporations.

In what follows, I address the agricultural and pharmaceutical sectors of biotechnology now emerging in China; how the biotechnology industry has been stimulated by the state; and how these form a platform for Chinese development in the era of neoliberal free trade, in which it became firmly entrenched after entering the World Trade Organization in 2001.

Agricultural Biotech

Of all sectors of China’s biotechnology industry, agriculture has received the most extensive international coverage. During 2000, China filed more patents than any other nation on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), mostly for crops including cotton, rice, wheat, soy, maize, peanuts, tobacco, and traditional medical herbs; the most economically significant GM crops are cotton, tobacco, and rice. In 2002, Chinese farmers planted 2.2 million hectares of GM cotton — an area twice the size of Belgium. One hundred and forty-one transgenic plants were developed in research institutes, with sixty-five already approved for commercial use (compared to fifty in the United States). Also in 2002, the Beijing Genomics Institute published the japonica rice genome sequence.

Another measure of volume is state investment. In 1999, the Chinese government invested $112 million in biotechnology — more than ten times the amount invested by Brazil or India, though still just five percent of U.S. federal investments. To compensate, China will quadruple its investments by 2005. Sales of GM crops are expected to reach $82 million by 2004, and it is projected that the majority of rice, wheat, corn, cotton, soy, and canola will be transgenic by 2010.

As elsewhere, the most common modified crop traits include resistance to diseases, bacteria, insects, and herbicides. Researchers in the agricultural sector are working to produce meatier sheep; develop deliverable human vaccines in the milk of goats, rabbits, and cows; sequence the pig genome; and clone goats and cows. At the same time, the government is aware of external markets that do not want GMOs, and has started to zone certain regions as non-GMO for export to these markets. This, however, does not address the problem of crop migration and gene flow. There are also concerns of GM piracy, since farmers do not wait for permission to plant certain crops.

China’s efforts in agricultural biotechnology need to be seen in the context of personal, cultural, and institutional memories of past famines, particularly of widespread starvation in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward. Survivalist accounts, where science and technology rescue China from a Malthusian fate, are common in Chinese media and culture. Such a perspective locates bio-technology as a savior rather than a potential problem; it also differs from the position of agricultural biotechnology’s international supporters, who market it altruistically as a means of feeding others.

Within the next three decades, it is estimated that China’s population will increase to 1.6 billion, and food production must increase by at least sixty percent to match this growth. The aggressive promotion of agricultural biotechnology is considered crucial for the nation’s well-being, an attitude which is also manifested in relation to genomic and pharmaceutical biotechnologies.

Genomic and Pharmaceutical Biotech

At a government science fair in 2001, such sensational items as human ears transplanted into mice — by now an icon of recombinant technologies — were prominently displayed. Visitors could also view projects involving the transplantation of silkworm genes into goats; the production of human organs by means of a stem cell bank; the cloning of corneas as a treatment for glaucoma; and studies of gene pools of some of the nation’s fifty-six minorities. Bioprospecting — searching for patentable materials or knowledge in plants, traditional knowledge, and isolated gene pools — is common in China, conducted by Big Pharma as well as by national research centers. [See “Harvard’s Experiments in China,” GeneWatch Volume 16 Number 5.]

The human genome project in China began in 1994, consisting of a small consortium of labs working on resource conservation, technology and informatics development, and disease genes. By 1998, twenty-two genomic centers were established in Beijing and Shanghai, and thirty more laboratories were engaged in genomic and cloning research.

Activity in genomics, however, is small in comparison to development in pharmaceutical biotechnology. There are currently two hundred pharmaceutical companies developing drugs produced through recombinant genetic technologies. Between 1989 and 2000, twenty recombinant drugs were approved, with patents for twenty more pending. The domestic market alone for recombinant pharmaceuticals is nearly $1 billion, and the current value of China’s pharmaceutical biotech industry is estimated at $4.5 billion.

Most of the focus is directed at vaccines, along with medications targeted at regional issues like hepatitis B and cholera. The first approved products included interferon-alpha, Hepatitis B vaccine, and monoclonal antibodies for cancer. Presently, about fifty local biopharmaceutical companies receive government support; by 2005, the government will have invested $5 billion in recombinant pharmaceuticals, a figure which will reach $14 billion by 2015.

The Chinese pharmaceutical market has rapidly shifted from bulk to prescription drugs to over the counter sales, which have experienced a twenty five-fold increase in growth since 1988. China accounts for 46% of global antibiotic production — it is the largest producer, and arguably the largest consumer, of antibiotics. This scenario has been viewed in market terms as an opportunity. However, in terms of public health, it is disastrous. Rampant antibiotics use accelerates the development of resistant pathogen strains, which on a broad scale could result in what Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, has described as an epidemiological nightmare.

Building the Industry

Though China’s biotechnology industry really only began in the late 1980s, by 2000 China was home to more than six hundred biotechnology companies. In a 2001 report to the UN Commission on Science & Technology for Development, Chinese delegate Jin Ju reported that sales of biotech products in China increased fifty-fold in the last decade. In 1997, sales reached $1.6 billion; by 2000, this figure rose to $2.5 billion, and the total value of products derived from biotechnology amounted to $10 billion. These figures have undoubtedly increased in the years since.

What makes this rapid growth all the more incredible is the lack of resources, both material and human, which were initially overcome. Scientists had to be trained and labs funded. In the government’s efforts to develop the industry, echoes of socialist revolutionary rhetoric could be heard: Zhu Chen, Director of China’s National Human Genome Project and vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, describes China’s “great leap forward” in
biosciences and technology. Similarly, one government initiative was the Hundred Scholars Project — its name reminiscent of the 1960s campaign to “let one hundred flowers bloom” — which was established in 1994 to reverse the post-Mao ‘brain drain’. Talented Chinese scientists living abroad were enticed to return with reward packages of $250,000, three years’ promised salary, free housing, and subsidized laboratories.

“These days, the ideal is to have a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the U.S. and to be thirty-five years old,” confided a medical doctor who had decided to return to Shanghai in his late forties. “The government has a policy to support younger scholars these days. I missed out.” Biotechnology in China will only accelerate as this crop of younger scientist matures.
The Chinese government has also approached patenting in a way that benefits the biotechnology industry. The first Chinese patent laws for pharmaceuticals were adopted in 1992, and another set of patent law enforcement measures were enacted in 2001, in order to fulfill WTO requirements.

However, while many of these laws are similar to European Union patent conventions, there are also significant departures. Prophylactic treatment methods for diseases, wounds,
contraception, artificial insemination, and embryo transfer are “expressly excluded” from patent protection. Plant and animal varieties are also excluded. For methods of breeding to be patentable, they can’t be “expressly biological.” Human intervention must play a key role.

Finally, China’s government has also made major biotechnology infrastructure investments. There are now seventy-four national centers of molecular biology which accommodate the return of talent recruited after study abroad. In Beijing, a medical research zone has been constructed, while a biopharmaceutical park in Xian is being constructed with $108 million from the government. Another public-private enterprise is "Bio-Island," a research and manufacturing facility on a South China island. Special economic zones for pharmaceutical firms have also been declared.

Other Implications

Until recently, the Chinese state vigorously pursued new biotechnologies without much questioning of whether the science would prove ineffective or, worse, detrimental. In the context of these hopes and enthusiasm, however, a discourse on bioethics has emerged. Officials and scientists have called for bans on reproductive cloning and genetic piracy; in 2002, Chinese representatives to UNESCO outlined guidelines on stem cell research, initially formulated by Shanghai’s Department of Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues, at the Chinese Human Genome Center in Shanghai, which restricted reproductive cloning. There has been a sea change in which the government has deliberately slowed down and even adopted guidelines. However, the enormous stake that the Chinese government has in biotechnology — not to mention its horrible human rights record and general disregard for worker safety — raise justifiable concerns over its ability or inclination to regulate the industry.

Bioethics concerns aside, China’s leap into biotechnology has not gone unnoticed in other parts of Asia. Particularly in Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan, science parks have been
constructed to stimulate local economies which hope to profit from markets China is creating. Education in biotechnology and bioinformatics is central to many new university initiatives; the next generation of their scientists will be incubated within the countries themselves, rather than forced abroad for training.

After the successful flight of the Shenzou 5, Xie Guangxuan, director of the government's China Rocket Design Department, proudly said, "China's space technology has been created by China itself. We may have started later than Russia and the United States, but it's amazing how fast we've been able to do this." The same ethos holds true for their biotechnology industry.

The tendency of the West to overlook or underestimate China is reflected in the limited attention given to Chinese biotechnology. This will not be possible much longer.

Nancy Chen is associate professor of anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz. A medical anthropologist, she also teaches courses on food, ethnographic film, cities, China, and Asian Americans.