Opinion: America’s biotech race with China must be won at home

Writing in STAT News, former U.S. ambassador to China and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and former North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry — both senior advisers to the American Biosecurity Initiative — argue that Washington must prioritize investing in American biotech strength rather than focusing on containing China's rise. They note that President Trump recently welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to Washington for the first time in a decade, a summit dominated by tariffs, Iran, and rare earth minerals, but that biotechnology is another arena of competition that deserves Washington's attention. The U.S. remains the global biotech leader, they write, but China is rapidly narrowing the gap.

Beijing has released a new five-year plan to make biomedicine a national "pillar industry." Under the plan, China aims by 2030 to produce a quarter of the world's first-in-class drugs — a category in which the U.S. currently produces medicines at seven times China's rate. China also intends to grow its innovative-drug industry by 20% a year, speed regulatory approvals, and strengthen protections for cutting-edge drug development. Its momentum is already visible: China leads the world in the number of clinical trials initiated annually, Chinese-designed medicines accounted for almost 30% of all drugs in development globally as of 2025 (up from less than 7% a decade earlier), and Chinese labs manufacture about 20% of the active ingredients used in medicines the FDA considers essential.

The authors warn that if China becomes the global biotech leader, Beijing would gain significant leverage over America's health and security in future crises, and the U.S. would lose its ability to shape the future of medicine, damaging both the economy and military readiness. That threat has prompted many of their former colleagues in Washington to propose sweeping measures to slow China's biotech progress. Both authors say they understand the value of targeted trade restrictions: Locke worked to reform the U.S. export control system to protect sensitive technologies, and McHenry, during 20 years in Congress, helped craft export controls on surveillance technologies that could benefit China's military or intelligence agencies. Crucially, they say, those efforts stayed narrowly focused because restricting China can at times weaken the U.S. rather than strengthen it.

Some of the broad restrictions now under consideration would erode key U.S. advantages in biotech, the authors argue. They single out blanket tariffs on many drug ingredients, which may be intended to reshore manufacturing but — in the portion of the argument carried in the excerpt — would undermine American interests.