Chinese biotech companies have dramatically expanded out-licensing deals with global drugmakers, granting rights to their drugs nearly tenfold over the past four years, from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $137.7 billion in 2025. More than three-quarters of American pharma companies now depend on Chinese suppliers for at least some component of their drug manufacturing.
This dependence creates worrying security risks.
Yet Western policymakers and thought leaders seem deaf to the dangers. They preach careful engagement, “pragmatic risk management,” or joint venture structures to create “operational firewalls.”
“Don’t restrict Chinese biotech,” The Economist recommends. “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.”
“Competition, not protections, is the answer,” added The Washington Post in a recent editorial.
This framing dodges the reality that China is not merely a commercial partner but a strategic competitor. What does pragmatic risk management look like in practice, and who conducts it? Biotech companies are not intelligence agencies. They cannot be expected to have the capability or tools to assess whether a Chinese partner’s research infrastructure is subject to Chinese army requisition orders, whether their partner’s data systems are accessible to Chinese state actors, or whether the talent program funding their collaborator’s salary is military-linked.
The dangers are real, ranging from accidental release to deliberate bioterrorism or bio-crimes. Biotech’s accelerating pace compounds the security risks. The same research that promises to transform healthcare, agriculture, and other sectors also increases the potential for misuse, whether through accident, negligence, or deliberate weaponization.
Chinese actors are responsible for many documented cases of misuse. In 2023, a search by a local Code Enforcement Officer uncovered an unlicensed laboratory in Reedley, California, which contained vials labelled HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, coronavirus, and Ebola, along with hundreds of laboratory mice. The owner? Chinese national Zhu Jia Bei, who maintains extensive connections to the Chinese Communist Party. This year, visitors to Zhu’s Las Vegas home reported becoming acutely ill. Investigators collected more than 1,000 samples of unknown biological materials. In another incident, two Chinese scientists were charged with attempting to smuggle into the US viable samples of a toxic fungus with potential bioweapon applications.
Beyond misuse, there’s the danger of intellectual property theft. Former GlaxoSmithKline scientists pleaded guilty in 2018 and 2022 to stealing cancer research trade secrets and sharing them with Renopharma, a Chinese biotech firm funded by $300,000 of Chinese government money. Oxford Nanopore, a British genomics company, is pursuing legal action against several affiliates of Chinese biotech company BGI for allegedly stealing trade secrets under the guise of what appeared to be a routine customer relationship.
These should not be treated as isolated cases. China’s efforts to advance its biotech industry are a national strategy. The 15th Five-Year Plan, published this year, promotes biomanufacturing (which uses biotechnology to produce commercial products at industrial scale, including vaccines, therapeutics and materials) as a new economic growth priority alongside quantum computing, brain-computer interfaces, and sixth-generation mobile communications. New quality productive forces refer to industries characterized by “high technology, high efficiency and high quality.”
The links to national security are explicit. The Five-Year Plan calls for strengthening military-civilian strategic planning, including promoting “the efficient integration of new quality productive forces and new quality combat forces, with bidirectional pull.” Military-civil fusion integrates civilian biotech assets into military development.
COVID-19 demonstrated the impact of the Chinese state commandeering civilian medical infrastructure. A new draft revision to the National Defense Mobilization Law, a mechanism enabling that resource requisition, published in April, positions medical and health “institutions” as mobilizable entities in future emergency or wartime scenarios. The practical implications: any Western biotech supply chain or research presence in China could be subject to those laws.
China’s existing export controls on certain biological technologies and materials compound this risk, meaning that research conducted in China may not always be removable. As with critical minerals, where China has already weaponized export controls to restrict gallium, germanium, and rare earths, Beijing has both the legal tools and the demonstrated willingness to prevent the exit of strategically valuable technologies and materials.
Advocates for engaging China on biotech propose a risk management strategy that is fundamentally impractical. Chinese biotech companies face legal obligations to the state that supersede any commercial contract. The decisions made today will determine whether the next crisis is manageable or not.
Dr. Samantha Hoffman is President, CEO and Co-Founder of Arclight Labs (formerly ANS Analytics LLC). She is the author of China’s Mobilization State (forthcoming). She is also an adviser to the UK-based Coalition on Secure Technology (CIM-Coalition), and Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation. Dr. Hoffman holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Nottingham (2017), an MSc in Modern Chinese Studies from the University of Oxford (2011), a BA in International Affairs from Florida State University (2010), and a BA in Chinese Language and Culture from Florida State University (2010).
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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