Benchmarking Biotech
Assessing U.S.–China competition across the bioeconomy — and whether America's current lead can hold through 2030.
The United States leads biotechnology today — but the trajectory could favor China by 2030.
Biotechnology turns biological material into medicines, crops, materials, fuels, and other products. The United States and China compete across biopharmaceuticals, bioagriculture, and bioindustrials. The evidence weighs biopharmaceuticals most heavily because they command the largest markets, attract the deepest investment, and carry the most immediate national-security exposure.
Leadership is an ecosystem that repeatedly converts discovery into products at scale. The scorecard evaluates five dimensions of that ecosystem: innovation leadership, industrial capacity, market ecosystem, talent pipeline, and national leverage. Biomanufacturing is a cross-cutting production layer.
America's inherited advantages — foundational research, risk capital, commercialization, and globally attractive institutions — still produce the stronger overall position. China leads in industrial capacity and national leverage, and it is approaching parity in the drug pipeline's early stages while expanding research volume, clinical-trial capacity, manufacturing, and state-backed investment.
The next phase turns on AI-assisted biology, access to talent and biological data, pharmaceutical supply-chain exposure, and the speed of moving discoveries through trials and manufacturing. AI may widen the American lead in discovery or amplify China's data and scale advantages downstream. Current trends point toward China inching ahead by the end of the decade, but the path is far from fixed.
SCSP Tech Scorecard
Measuring the
Balance of Power
The SCSP Tech Scorecard evaluates national competitiveness across five distinct categories of positional advantage. On a 1–5 scale, the United States leads three of five dimensions — Innovation Leadership, Market Ecosystem, and Talent Pipeline — while China leads two: Industrial Capacity and National Leverage.
1 — Negligible/Nascent | 2 — Emerging/Minor | 3 — Competitive/Mainstream | 4 — Advanced/Leading | 5 — State-of-the-Art/Dominant
Innovation Leadership
The United States retains the lead in realized innovation output, built on foundational research, risk capital, and institutions that convert discoveries into first-in-class products. China now leads or matches the United States on high-quality publication share, early-stage pipeline share, first-in-human starts, and novel trial initiations.
The output lead is vulnerable: China held 32.3% of early-stage drug programs in 2024 versus 37.4% for the United States. Excluding generics and traditional medicines, China was narrowly ahead in novel clinical-trial starts, roughly 2,400 to 2,200.
Industrial Capacity
China holds a slight lead because it controls key inputs and is rapidly building biomanufacturing and clinical-trial capacity. The United States still leads in laboratory space, research-grade genomic data, and large-scale deployment of bioengineered crops, but China’s upstream supply-chain control is difficult to substitute.
China controls upstream inputs: China produces an estimated 41% of the sole-sourced key starting materials used in American active pharmaceutical ingredients, while the United States produces under 1% of its own. China also ran more than 7,000 clinical trials in 2024 versus about 6,000 in the United States.
Market Ecosystem
American capital, pharmaceutical revenues, startups, and technology-transfer institutions remain unmatched. The United States still owns much of the market and commercialization machinery, even as a growing share of the science sold there originates in China. China is expanding quickly through state-backed funding and licensing, but its domestic market and university-to-industry links remain less mature.
China is becoming a source, not just a customer: Chinese biotech out-licensing reached roughly $137 billion in headline potential value across 157 transactions in 2025, but actual upfront payments were about $5.6–7 billion. The gap is a meaningful signal of interest, not guaranteed revenue.
Talent Pipeline
The United States leads in talent quality and in attracting and retaining international researchers. China leads on population-scale STEM production and is increasingly keeping scientists at home. The American advantage is contingent: visa uncertainty, funding constraints, and a smaller incoming international cohort could erode the ecosystem that has supplied its edge.
Scale is not the whole story: Immigrants make up 30% of U.S. life scientists with a bachelor’s degree or higher but contributed 79% of pharmaceutical patents at leading U.S. research universities. China awards more total STEM degrees, yet the countries matched in math and science doctoral output in 2023.
National Leverage
China has made biotechnology a coordinated national priority, linking basic research, patient capital, commercialization support, regulatory reform, and biosecurity controls. The United States has strong basic research and regulatory institutions, but its support remains fragmented and focused on enabling private-sector success.
Coordination compounds over time: Chinese guidance funds invested an estimated $56–90 billion in life sciences from 2000–2023, while state programs support firms from pilot facilities through commercialization. China has also built the world’s most extensive regime for collecting and securitizing genomic data.
1 — Negligible/Nascent | 2 — Emerging/Minor | 3 — Competitive/Mainstream | 4 — Advanced/Leading | 5 — State-of-the-Art/Dominant
Read the Full
Assessment
Dive deeper into the strategic stakes, data, and methodology behind the U.S.–China competition for leadership in biotechnology, biopharmaceuticals, and the bioeconomy.
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