I came across this January 2009 Research Report on Chinese High-Tech Industries while doing some research.  It was published by the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), and while it’s a little dated I think it’s still a worthwhile summary of the state of the biotech industry in China.  Best of all, it has some great details on the development of the biotech industry away from the coast.

The report analyzes three “sunrise industries” in China: biotech, nanotech, and electro-optics, mostly because developments in these fields have some important implications for U.S. and Chinese national power.  I only looked at the biotech section, but while there are some nice throwaway statistics, they aren’t presented in a very clear manner.

For instance, It reports that the modern biotech industry in China is ~8.8 billion USD in size, sales from “traditional biotech” reached ~44 billion USD, and 2,800 biotech firms employ ~40,000 researchers.  I am not really sure what they mean by the “size of the biotech industry,” maybe I just don’t know enough about that type of metric.  I wanted to compare some of this with U.S. stats, just as a frame of reference, so I looked up the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s statistics (this organization seems to be a lobbying/advocacy group for bioindustry) on the American biotech industry.  The first thing that popped out at me was that the U.S. had only 1,452 biotech companies, 336 of which were publicly held.  But in 2008 the total value of publicly traded biotech companies was $360 billion!  I wonder what that number would be if you threw in all the private firms?  And I wonder if that is the “industry size” they are referring to.  So that’s a question.  That BIO site actually has a bunch of interesting information, hopefully it will satiate me, because I don’t think I could afford any real market research.

And now that I think about it, I’m not really sure of the scope of biotech in either the USCC or BIO context.  The USCC report does mention some examples and talks about a “traditional biotech industry,” but I can’t really be sure if they’re being consistent every time they talk about it.  BIO’s Guide to Biotechnology seems to cast the widest possible net, calling every technology with its roots in biology a biotechnology. I suppose whenever I do research myself I’ll have to clarify this more!

The report does spend a bit of time on current biotech industry efforts and linkages with government/foreign institutions in five different cities, which is pretty interesting, albeit list-ful.  They go through Beijing (Biotech capital of China!), Shanghai, Tianjin, and more interesting to me–Harbin and Kunming.

Biotechnology is apparently one of the five major backbone industries of Harbin, and it has dozens of government and international projects.  The report focuses on a number of the Chinese-foreign collaborations, with countries/regions such as the U.S., the E.U., Israel, Japan, Korea, and of course, Russia.  All in all, it looks like things are looking up in that frozen corner of the world.  Maybe they save a lot of money with natural sample freezing!

They Kunming statistics are also very hopeful, although the report seems to jump between using Kunming and using Yunnan statistics.  Kunming’s government described biotech as a “huge resource, but small industry.”  And weirdly, 80% of Yunnan’s 320 biotech companies are involved in “the production and business of natural components and Spirulina.” I had to look it up on wikipedia, but that’s a type of cyanobacteria used in human dietary supplements and as animal feed in the aqua and fowl industries.  It seems pretty weird that that many companies are involved in this.  And what are natural components?  Maybe decades down the line after severe overpopulation, environmental degradation, and food crises, Yunnan  will become China’s “bacteria basket!”

Then the report goes on to talk about government policies, initiatives, and subsidies that benefit the the biotech industry, but I’ll spare you all that!