China’s 2035 Biotech Strategy, Explained by an Ex-Teva CEO
China's biotech ambition is not improvised, and it is not a secret. It is a written, sequenced industrial strategy that has been running for roughly twenty-five years and carries an explicit 2035 target. That is the argument Jeremy Levin makes, and he is worth listening to on it: he ran Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, sat on the executive committee of Bristol-Myers Squibb, and is a former chairman of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization.
His central point is that the industry keeps asking the wrong question.
The question here is not, is China a force in biotech? The question is, when will it become the dominant force?
What is China's biotech strategy?
It is a staged plan, not a single initiative. Levin describes a sequence the country has followed deliberately and in public, beginning with basic chemical manufacturing and moving up the value chain from there.
It has been articulated for 25 years.
In his account the early stages built manufacturing capability, a middle stage built the ability to replicate biologics, and the current stage is aimed at originating new medicines outright. Origination is the hard part, and Levin has been on the other side of it: the acquisition he pushed through that delivered the first checkpoint inhibitor. Each stage assumes the one beneath it. That is what makes it a strategy rather than a series of investments, and it is why he treats the direction as more informative than any single year's numbers.
What is China's 2035 biotech goal?
Levin puts the destination plainly, as he understands it.
they had said at the outset that they wished to become the predominant provider of novel medicines by 2035
The published Chinese strategy is worded differently, and the difference is worth keeping straight. China's Development Strategy of Emerging Industries (2035) states the objective of becoming, by 2035, the world center of biological science and technology and the innovation highland of the biological industry, naming life science and biotechnology, brain science and pharmaceutical innovation among the frontier technologies it targets. Levin's phrasing is his own compression of that; the horizon and the ambition are documented.
How is the strategy built underneath the goal?
The part Levin emphasizes is not the target but the plumbing. A goal announced without an industrial base behind it is a press release. He argues China assembled the base first, and across every input at once.
It means the way they deal with capital, the way that they send people, the way that they educate people, their clinical trials approach, their approach with their FDA equivalent.
The contrast Levin draws is with capital that is not directed at all. On the US side the same conversation describes private money reorganizing itself into family-office groups rather than following any published plan.
Capital allocation, education pipelines, where students are sent, trial infrastructure and the regulator are all pointed at the same destination. His word for it is knit-together, and the contrast he draws is with countries whose biotech policy is a collection of separate decisions that happen to coexist. The same directed posture shows up outside biotech, in how China is reshaping global health funding, where the model is bilateral and infrastructure-first.
Is the strategy actually working?
The output has moved, and it is measurable rather than rhetorical. We have written separately on whether China has passed the US in research spending, which is the input side of the same ledger. Category 1 innovative drug approvals in China rose from 12 in 2019 to 46 in 2024, and biomanufacturing was named a core strategic emerging industry in the 15th Five-Year Plan of November 2025. Those are measurable changes in a short window, and they are the kind of evidence that matters more than stated intent.
It is also worth being precise about what this does not prove. A rising launch count is not the same as global leadership in novel mechanisms, and the pipeline data underneath it is contested. Levin's claim is about trajectory, not about a finished result, and the useful question for an operator is what the trajectory implies for planning horizons rather than who is ahead today.
There is a second reason to weight trajectory over position. A drug approved in 2024 was designed years earlier, so today's launch counts describe decisions taken well before now. If the strategy Levin describes has been compounding for twenty-five years, the visible output is a lagging indicator of it, and the interesting number is not this year's total but the slope.
What does this mean for a biotech operating today?
The practical consequence is that "China as a competitor" and "China as a place to run part of your program" are no longer opposite positions. Sara Jane Demy, whose Biotech CEO Summit puts chief executives in a room together, reports that her members are already treating it as somewhere to source research and run trials, a shift covered in more detail in our piece on whether clinical trials in China are considered reliable.
For a founder, the near-term question is less geopolitical than financial: where the money for the next program comes from, given how much harder conventional rounds have become. That is the subject of our companion piece on family offices as a biotech capital source.
What is the argument against reading this as decline?
Levin does not present the United States as finished, and it would misrepresent him to say so. In the same conversation he points at Miami as a place a founder can go and find capital, and Sara Jane Demy adds Houston and several Midwestern states, together sketching a wider map of where US biotech is being built. He is explicit that the innovation engine, the capital markets, the willingness to take risk and the entrepreneur base are all still in place, and that the question is whether the choices get made. The failure mode he describes is not collapse but drift, which is a slower and more recoverable thing.
His warning is that the response to uncertainty is rarely dramatic. Work moves, quietly, one decision at a time, and the capital follows it.
This account is drawn from the recorded, on-the-record conversation on Open Door Salon with Jeremy Levin and Sara Jane Demy, hosted by Lori Ellis. Interested in sponsoring Open Door Salon?