As June got underway, political efforts in Washington targeting China's biotechnology sector began to gather momentum once again.

 

A bipartisan bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives would require the federal government to review American investments in China's biotechnology industry. To accomplish this, lawmakers are seeking to amend the Comprehensive Outbound Investment National Security (COINS) Act, which was enacted last year.

 

Yet even as policymakers push to curb China's growing influence, much of the biopharmaceutical industry sees the trajectory differently. Rather than expecting collaboration to diminish, many believe scientific and commercial partnerships with China will become even stronger over the next five years.

 

One participant in that trend is RA Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in life sciences and drug development. Recently, the firm filed registration documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its third Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC), aiming to raise $50 million for mergers with or acquisitions of Chinese biotechnology companies.

 

Meanwhile, RA Capital has partnered with Qiming Venture Partners to organize the inaugural S2S China Symposium, scheduled for the second half of this year. The objective is straightforward: to identify promising early-stage scientific projects directly from Chinese universities and research institutes.

 

Why does such a divergence exist? More specifically, why does the global biopharmaceutical industry—including many leading American investors and companies—remain so optimistic about China's role in innovation?

 

According to the Biopharma Sentiment Index (BPSI), roughly three-quarters of respondents expect research and development collaboration between Western countries and China to increase over the next five years rather than decline.

 

One recent essay offers a particularly personal answer to that question.

 

In "RA Capital's Work in China: A Personal Viewpoint," Sarah Reed, General Counsel of RA Capital, reflects on nearly fifty years of experiences spanning two generations of her family. Through the stories of her father and herself, she provides a firsthand perspective on the debate that now divides parts of America's political establishment and business community.

 

01、An Old Photograph

 

Sarah Reed found an old photograph in the basement of her mother's house.

 

In it, her father is dressed like a classic American corporate executive, wearing a Burberry trench coat and standing in Tiananmen Square beneath the enormous portrait of Mao Zedong. The photograph was taken in the spring of 1977.

 

He was part of one of United Technologies Corporation's earliest exploratory delegations to China, arriving just as the country was beginning to reopen itself to the outside world after years of upheaval.

 

When that long period of turmoil ended, China's leadership made what would prove to be a transformative decision: it chose pragmatism.

 

As Deng Xiaoping famously observed, it does not matter whether a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.

 

Sarah Reed's father was among the first of those "cats" to find a way in.

 

Both sides recognized the mutual benefits of cooperation. China could benefit from United Technologies, and United Technologies could benefit from China. By the 1980s, the company had established manufacturing joint ventures across the country, among them Tianjin Otis Elevator, which would become one of the best-known elevator brands in China.

 

The logic behind this model was simple: exchange market access for technology and use openness to accelerate industrial upgrading. Otis brought advanced elevator manufacturing technology, while China offered a competitive manufacturing base and a rapidly expanding real estate market.

 

The industrial complementarity that defined that era follows much the same logic as today's partnership in biopharmaceuticals. The United States remains a global leader in frontier science and venture capital, while China has developed remarkable strengths in translational execution, clinical development at scale, and manufacturing capabilities. Together, those advantages can translate into medicines reaching patients faster and at lower development costs.

 

Nearly half a century later, Sarah Reed writes that Americans are still trying to understand what China's rise ultimately means for them.

 

"We are awed by its rise, yet fearful of what that rise may mean. We treat China as an opponent to defeat rather than a people to understand."

 

She reflects further that countries such as Japan and Germany—once wartime enemies—have become allies whose partnership Americans now take almost for granted.

 

The question she asks is both simple and difficult:

 

Can the United States eventually find a similar way of living and working with China?

 

02、The Road to Fudan

 

Several months after her father's trip to China, three Chinese officials who were visiting United Technologies in the United States came to the Reed family's home in Connecticut for dinner. Sarah Reed, then just thirteen years old, was allowed to join the conversation.

 

Not long before, she had finished reading a book called In Search of Peking Man. The book recounted the story of the famous Peking Man fossils—remains of one of humanity's prehistoric ancestors dating back roughly 400,000 years—which disappeared during World War II after reportedly being removed from China by the U.S. Marine Corps and were never recovered.

 

During the evening, Sarah saw an opportunity.

 

She stood up and, speaking from the heart, delivered what she remembers as a sincere apology on behalf of the United States for the disappearance of the Peking Man skull fossils.

 

The reaction surprised her.

 

The three visitors immediately became animated. One official, who had spent most of the evening quietly and politely listening, suddenly engaged her in conversation. He mentioned that he had a daughter about Sarah's age and asked whether she would like to spend part of a summer in China. Perhaps, he suggested, the two girls could become small ambassadors of friendship between China and the United States.

 

Sarah enthusiastically accepted the invitation.

 

Her father, however, quickly declined it on her behalf.

 

Ironically, that rejection only strengthened her determination. From that day forward, she later wrote, going to China became something of a personal mission.

 

Five years later, she enrolled at Harvard University and chose East Asian Studies as her undergraduate major, despite her father's objections. She also began studying Chinese.

 

By her junior year, she joked that she had become a self-proclaimed China expert despite never having set foot in the country.

 

In 1984, Harvard had more than 6,000 undergraduate students and considered itself an international university. Yet among them there was only a single undergraduate student from mainland China. Sarah's academic advisor introduced the two, and decades later they remain close friends.

 

That same advisor did something even more consequential.

 

He telephoned the president of Fudan University in Shanghai and advocated for Sarah to receive a full scholarship, including housing, meals, and a living stipend.

 

Fudan agreed.

 

In 1985, Sarah Reed finally arrived in China.

 

She would later describe that year as one of the most vivid and formative experiences of her life.

 

She traveled whenever and wherever she could. She rode hard-seat trains across the country, climbed aboard freight trucks when necessary, and occasionally found herself traveling by donkey cart. Her journeys took her from Tibet to Xinjiang, from Xishuangbanna in the southwest to Harbin in the depths of winter, where she visited the famous Ice Festival. Along the way, she stopped at countless historical and cultural landmarks.

 

China at the time was only seven years into its Reform and Opening-Up era.

 

Foreign companies were beginning to establish representative offices along the country's coastal regions. State-owned enterprises were looking abroad for equipment and technology to modernize their operations. Across the country, experimentation and transformation were underway simultaneously.

 

For Sarah Reed, however, the experience was more than an academic exercise or a study-abroad program.

 

It fundamentally reshaped the way she understood China—not as an abstraction or a geopolitical rival, but as a society of individuals pursuing opportunities, confronting challenges, and imagining a different future for themselves and their country.

 

That perspective would remain with her throughout her career and would eventually inform her views on scientific collaboration between China and the United States.

 

03、A Common Enemy

 

Nearly half a century has passed since Sarah Reed's father stood beneath the portrait of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square.

 

Today, Reed's work at RA Capital has brought her back to a country that has remained part of her life for decades. She now works in biotechnology investment—an industry built upon one simple but profound reality: Americans and Chinese, like everyone else on the planet, share the same human biology.

 

We develop the same cancers.

 

We suffer from the same neurodegenerative diseases.

 

We lose parents, spouses, children, and friends to the same illnesses.

 

"The researchers trying to stop these diseases," Reed writes, "are not thinking about geopolitical competition. They are thinking about the scientific problem in front of them."

 

When nations are in tension, it is often the threads of shared purpose that eventually become the scaffolding for something better. And what purpose could be more universal than the search for treatments and cures?

 

Reed is careful not to romanticize international cooperation. She acknowledges the legitimate concerns surrounding supply-chain resilience and strategic dependence. She is an American, and she wants her country to remain strong, innovative, and capable of sustaining its own biomedical ecosystem.

 

But decades of personal experience—from conversations around her family's dinner table in Connecticut to journeys across rural China—have also taught her another lesson.

 

The Chinese people are not America's enemy.

 

Disease is.

 

And curing more disease is easier together than apart.

 

That principle is not merely philosophical; it is increasingly reflected in the structure of the global biopharmaceutical industry itself.

 

In the earliest stages of drug discovery, American universities and biotechnology companies continue to generate the vast majority of first-in-class biological insights, novel therapeutic targets, and new mechanisms of action. The United States remains unmatched in the concentration of frontier scientific research and venture capital that supports it.

 

China, meanwhile, has rapidly expanded its capabilities beyond being a manufacturing base. In recent years, Chinese companies have demonstrated growing strength in lead optimization, antibody engineering, and the design of linkers and payloads for antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). Increasingly, innovation is emerging alongside execution.

 

The complementarity becomes even more apparent during clinical development.

 

China's advantages in patient recruitment, operational efficiency, and trial execution have enabled multinational pharmaceutical companies to accelerate global development programs. In many cases, access to Chinese clinical resources can shorten development timelines by approximately 12 to 18 months while significantly reducing costs.

 

Manufacturing represents another area of deep integration. Chinese contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) now account for roughly one-third of global antibody drug production capacity and are rapidly advancing in technologies supporting gene therapies and mRNA-based medicines.

 

Taken together, these capabilities form an industrial network that has become deeply interconnected across borders.

 

Attempting to separate such a network through administrative mandates would not simply redirect existing capabilities elsewhere. Every stage of the value chain—from discovery and development to manufacturing and commercialization—would need to rebuild alternative infrastructure, requiring years of investment and execution. Depending on the segment, those replacement cycles could take anywhere from three to ten years.

 

Patients, however, do not operate on geopolitical timelines.

 

Cancer does not wait for supply chains to be reconstructed.

 

Alzheimer's disease does not pause while new manufacturing capacity is built.

 

Nor will the next pandemic delay its arrival until governments have finished redesigning global innovation networks.

 

For Reed, these realities explain why scientific collaboration cannot be understood solely through the lens of geopolitical competition. The biology that underlies human disease does not recognize national borders, and neither, ultimately, does the need to treat it.

 

 

04、A False Choice

 

Not long ago, Sarah Reed's colleagues prepared a policy memorandum examining the unintended consequences of broadly prohibiting scientific collaboration with China. Rather than advocating blanket restrictions, the paper proposed an alternative approach: targeted safeguards for genuinely sensitive areas, coupled with meaningful investment to strengthen America's own research infrastructure.

 

To Reed, the debate has too often been framed as a binary choice.

 

Should the United States protect its national interests, or should it continue scientific collaboration with China?

 

In her view, that is the wrong question.

 

It is a false choice.

 

The modern biopharmaceutical innovation ecosystem is inherently global. Bringing a new medicine from target validation to regulatory approval routinely requires collaboration that spans multiple countries, institutions, and specialized capabilities. Scientific discovery, clinical development, manufacturing, and commercialization have evolved into an interconnected value chain rather than a series of isolated national industries.

 

Simply severing those connections will not cause equivalent capabilities to materialize overnight within the United States.

 

Instead, America faces challenges of its own.

 

Its clinical research infrastructure is aging. Patient recruitment remains difficult, shortages of research nurses persist, and activating clinical trial sites can take more than a year. These structural bottlenecks slow innovation regardless of developments elsewhere.

 

None of those problems, Reed argues, can be solved simply by restricting collaboration with China.

 

The alternative proposals advanced by her colleagues point toward two complementary policy approaches.

 

The first is defensive. Rather than imposing sweeping prohibitions on scientific cooperation, policymakers should establish carefully designed guardrails around genuinely sensitive areas, including genetic sequencing, pathogen-related data, and personal health information. Protecting national security does not require treating every research partnership as a security threat.

 

The second is offensive. The United States should invest in strengthening its own competitive advantages by expanding funding for clinical and translational science through the National Institutes of Health, streamlining ethics review and trial initiation processes, and building a nationwide infrastructure for patient recruitment.

 

Only by combining these two approaches—protecting what is genuinely sensitive while investing in domestic capabilities—can the United States enhance its long-term biopharmaceutical security without sacrificing scientific progress.

 

Ultimately, the question is not whether America should protect itself.

 

The question is how.

 

Protection through decoupling carries a cost: slower global pharmaceutical innovation and delayed access to new therapies, consequences that will ultimately affect American patients as well.

 

Protection through investment also carries a cost—it requires sustained financial commitment—but its return is long-term competitiveness and a stronger innovation ecosystem.

 

The story of U.S.-China relations is no longer one of a single country opening itself to another. The relationship has become more complex, more competitive, and more politically contested.

 

Yet one reality remains unchanged.

 

People still get sick.

 

When confronted with cancer, Alzheimer's disease, or the next unknown pandemic, pathogens do not ask what passport their host carries. Scientists do not begin every collaboration by examining one another's political beliefs. And patients do not stop coughing, suffering, or waiting simply because geopolitical tensions have intensified.

 

The thirteen-year-old girl who once stood in her family's dining room and apologized for the disappearance of the Peking Man fossils eventually became the General Counsel of a life sciences investment firm. Looking back across that journey, she arrives at a remarkably simple conclusion:

 

One can love one's own country while still choosing to work alongside people from another.

 

Because disease is humanity's common enemy.

 

And the search for cures is a language shared by us all.

 

Recent industry developments suggest that the market may be reaching a similar conclusion.

 

Cross-border partnerships involving Chinese biotechnology companies have continued to accelerate this year. AstraZeneca and CSPC Pharmaceutical Group announced a strategic R&D collaboration and licensing agreement with a total potential value of approximately $18.5 billion. Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, agreed to pay up to $1.7 billion for rights to an RNAi therapeutic candidate from Sanegene. Sanofi and China Biopharmaceutical entered into a collaboration valued at more than $1.5 billion, representing the largest outbound licensing transaction by a Chinese pharmaceutical company in the transplantation field.

 

Around the same time that Sarah Reed's essay was published, Pfizer and Innovent Biologics announced a collaboration worth up to $10.5 billion, focused on twelve innovative oncology programs.

 

These transactions do not, by themselves, resolve the policy debate over decoupling.

 

They do, however, illustrate a striking reality: even as legislative efforts to separate the two ecosystems continue to advance, scientific and commercial integration continues to find its own momentum.

 

References

RA Capital's Work in China: A Personal Viewpoint

RA Capital Targets China with Latest SPAC Deal

House Bill Aims to Crack Down on China Biotech Deals

Biopharma Sentiment Index | Q2 2026

The Paradox of Biotech Protectionism: Why Walling Off China Biotech Weakens America