More on China's biomedical science from a long-time expert

My interview with Harvard's Bill Kirby

Last week, I had a column out in Science on the rise of biopharma in China that included comments from Noubar Afeyan, an industry leader in the US. Noubar’s full interview is here. I also interviewed and quoted Bill Kirby, a longstanding expert on both China and higher education. His most recent book, Empires of Ideas, chronicles the rise of universities in different countries over its history, concluding with the great Chinese universities, Tsinghua and Peking University.

Here is my full interview with Bill. He’s a wordy professor, but there is a lot of really interesting stuff based on his deep scholarship. When you get to the end, you’ll see that his solution is more cooperation, not less, because, as he says, “the US cannot lead alone.”

What explains China’s extraordinary rise in biopharma?

I would say that we’re seeing both the results of very long-term developments and some very remarkable short-term developments. In the long-term, of course, over the course of the 20th century, the American universities, research universities, and particularly in the sciences rose to be the leaders of the world, the position that the Germans had been in until 1933. But we’re in a moment in which, as the Germans showed in the 1930s, it’s possible to self-destruct. We’re not self-destructing in quite the same way that the Germans did with immediate purges and unleashing a war that would destroy them physically. But the leading universities in the world probably through the 1920s, maybe eight of the 10 leading universities in the world were German.

And today it’s rare that a single German university reaches the top 50 in the world. Whereas our friends in China have five of the top 50 in the world. The Americans, of course, have much more, but we’re an increasingly declining share. That’s one general point. If you look at the American scene, we’re looking at not just this wanton attack on universities by the Trump administration, which bizarrely is targeting — because it’s the one thing that they really control — the financing of science, which is the least political area in which these universities engage, but it is targeting them and setting us back significantly. But at the same time, we are in a position to reflect on the gradual and steady defunding of science, and particularly of science and public higher education institutions over the course of more than the last three decades. If you were to look at the budgets of the great public universities, Michigan, Berkeley, University of Washington, and places also with extraordinary medical schools, out of 50 American states, 43 have disinvested per capita in public higher education since the Great Recession of 2008 and continue to disinvest.

And so we have a slow motion decline as well as a more immediate and dramatic attack. Whereas in the Chinese scene, if you’re looking at how they have risen so dramatically, on the one hand, it is very dramatic over the last 20 years and the last 30 years. On the other hand, they began a foundation of serious work in higher education and serious research also in the sciences more than a century ago for national defense purposes, and then taking a page out of both the German and American books for what they would call domestic self-strengthening, a strong foundation of small but powerful research universities before the communist takeover. The communists set them back dramatically from 1950 to the 1980s, nearly destroying the system, places like Tsinghua, which had been one of the best research universities in Asia, nearly destroyed Peking University, all of them brought to their knees in the cultural revolution.

But particularly since about 1997, an extraordinary amount of investment in higher education institution has brought them really to the forefront in so many different disciplines. So you have today, university rankings only matter up to some degree, but you have Peking University and Tsinghua University ranked globally according to QS higher than all but two of the so- called Ivy League.

And you can add to that the University of Hong Kong and very close behind that, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. And so three Hong Kong universities also in the top 50 in that regard. And this is, as you know, eight of the top 10 universities in Nature’s 2024 institutional rankings are Chinese institutions, mainland Chinese institutions. If you just look at universities, Harvard, if I’m not mistaken, is like number one and MIT is number 10 and everybody in between except the Max Planck Institutes which is not really a university, but everyone in between is a Chinese university. And the Chinese Academy of Science is bigger than everybody. And if you look at your own journals, China, what is about 2022 overtook the US for its contribution to natural science journals tracked by the Nature Index and only a slight blip during the COVID years, but returning an even more powerful upward trajectory after that.

For us, for Science, which is the most selective, we expect China to pass the US probably in the next three or four years. And for Science Advances, which is kind of our next level down in terms of selectivity, Chinese papers are already passing the US.

So if you were to go to that bizarre domestic ranking operation, the US News and World Report, the old news magazine that found a new lease on life by inventing the rankings game. So according to US news, in the top 10 global universities for computer science, number one, of course, Tsinghua. Top Global University for material science, Tsinghua. Top Global University for Engineering, Tsinghua. It’s not by accident, and it’s not just money. It’s also an ecosystem in which they encourage their very best and brightest after college to test themselves against the best in the world by going to American, European, Japanese doctoral programs. Just like in the late 19th century, you could not get a professorship in several leading American universities without having studied in Germany. You can’t get a job in a leading Chinese university and still largely cannot without an international PhD from a prestigious place in the highest ranked of those universities. And so they are encouraging international engagement, international partnerships.

It’s kind of infamous for all the wrong reasons, but tou remember the so-called Thousand Talents Program, which has recruited many more than a thousand people, but it’s basically doing what you did at WashU, what I did when I was dean at Harvard. You recruit the best and the brightest from wherever you can.

Every university worth its salt has a thousand talents program if they can go that high, if they have the resources. It’s what universities do. And just in money, Tsinghua University, its budget is just barely behind Harvard’s. It’s annual budget, and it will soon easily surpass it.

One could just go on and on and on, but it’s a matter of long-term investment, obviously national strategy. We had a national strategy too in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and have not sustained it.

So our readers will probably know what you said about Tsinghua and where they’re number one, but I think one of the things that I’m wanting to help them understand is the rise that China has had in biomedical science. Westlake is as good a place as any, including Harvard Medical School, to do science. As Noubar points out in his article, a third of in-licensed drugs in the US are licensed from China now. So do you have any insight into how they also made this huge surge in medicine or why materials came first?

Engineering on the whole came first, this massive number of people in STEM disciplines goes far beyond engineering and so on. And in medical science is an area of comparatively more recent rise, although with a strong foundation, China had one of the best small medical schools in the world with the founding of Peaking Union Medical College, I think in 1919 with Rockefeller Foundation assistance. And it is now basically the medical school for both Tsinghua and Paking University, but every major university itself of the top five or seven, top five anyway, have strong medical schools, but not as well known or not as internationally famous or prestigious as their American counterparts. Part of it also must have to do with the massive international cooperation, and the massive international investment by Western pharma in China.

Just like Apple.

Yeah, just like Apple. If you look at Apple, and here’s an example from a different industry. So one of my recent HBS cases is on the company Xiaomi. Xiaomi makes a phone that looks remarkable like an iPhone, and it’s a very good one, but they now make a car that looks remarkably like a Porsche, except that it’s an EV and handles even better and goes zero to 60 in 2.3 seconds. And this part is actually one thing I meant to mention earlier, a lot of the big Western pharma companies, Novartis and others, are in industrial parks in China. These are industrial parks that are established not just by the central government, but mostly by local governments competing with each other, also to be leaders in science and leaders in medicine. And so the one in Shanghai is called the Xiangshan Industrial Park.

And I remember this vividly, maybe 15 years ago, we were establishing Harvard’s first office in Shanghai, and we didn’t have a place yet. And Novartis had this new campus, and they invited me to come out to look and see if we wanted to cohabit with them for a few years. And I went out there. It was a big dusty place just being built and so on. And in honor of my coming, they tore down the last village on the site, and the dust was still settling when I got there. So I just felt awful about it and I decided not to do that, but I was just stunned at the scope of the investment there.

And in that industrial park today is Shanghai Tech, this new locally funded, Shanghai-funded public research university, which aims to be a little bit like Westlake University, the Caltech of China. And the founding president of that, a guy named Jiang Mianheng is the son of late President Jiang Zemin, the man who began the seriously huge investment in higher education in the 1990s. But you can look, you can go to outside of Zhejiang University, you can go to Wuhan University, and every city in which there’s a major university also has a high-tech park and many secondary and even tertiary cities will have high-tech parks. Duke University, I helped them start their campus there in Kunshan, and that’s in the Kunshan High Tech Park. Now that’s a liberal arts college more than anything else. But the initial aspiration, I am sure from the city of Kunshan was would be a science-forwarded university. And it will be strong enough in science, but it’s not going to be a major player in the same in quite the same way. But that’s a local initiative. And if you look at almost every industry in which China is a leader today, and higher education is among them, you have both national priorities and local competition leading their rise to the top. There are 1150 or so, maybe 130 today, electric vehicle companies in China, every one of them competing to be one of the five or 10 winners at the end of the day of a ruthlessly competitive internal operation. Competing universities today in China compete in the way that American universities compete for talent, but even in many cases, more ruthlessly.

So that’s part of the story as well.

And so my next question is, given all this, why aren’t we having a Sputnik moment in the US? I mean, there’s the attacks on science for the administration, but in 1945, people were scared because the Nazis almost got the bomb. In the 50s, they were scared because the Russians launched the rocket. Now China, which is overtaking us on all these things, and it’s hard to get it to register with the American public.

It is remarkable. I’m working right now on the draft outline of a potential book called, Why Are We So Afraid of China? And what’s remarkable under the Trump administration, we’ve gone from a bipartisan paranoia about everything China to a kind of ... Yes, you demonize it now and again, but you basically are showing no sustained response to it. And I think part of it is the rise, if you can look at almost every area, whether it’s universities, of course, if you look at electric vehicles, you look at industries in which China has just dominated solar, drones and so on, the American response is occasionally to demonize it, but with the exception of some areas of the Biden administration, like in semiconductors and so on, not a serious collective effort to compete. You have some efforts by the part of Congress to restrict our cooperation with China, as you know, in universities, to restrict Chinese graduate students.

And on the one hand, Duke has been told that they should close their campus in China, which they’re not going to do, but there’s no serious response of what we do at home. I think it’s a sense of they’ve won in many of these areas, and there’s not a sense that these are areas in which we actually can win despite the rhetoric. We have a sense of paranoia about China, but a sense of an inevitability of American decline and nowhere more obvious in the funding of higher education and the funding of research with no leadership in this regard. And you won’t expect it from this administration, but it’s remarkable how little there is even on the part of meeting supporters of science funding in Congress.

You have a moment in which a lot of people feel politically cowed in this country as well, but I don’t know if you have a better explanation than that.

So let’s say, yeah, they won on engineering and the areas we’ve been talking about. They probably haven’t won yet when it comes to medicine, but it’s close and they’re going to. So they’re going to, if there aren’t changes in the US, or maybe it’s already too late. I mean, that’s debatable. So what would be the sort of cultural argument to say, oh, but the US has, we have the innovators, we have the IP protection, we have the ... Is there an argument for how the US is going to sort of be okay economically anyway?

Our approach has been to condemn them and to limit cooperation. The likely operation, the likely takeaway is that is to actually, first of all, to take several pages out of China’s playbook, develop an enduring industrial and investment policy that invests in universities, R&D, workforce development, advanced manufacturing, infrastructure, all of that. China’s government sector spent twice as much as the US federal government to support R&D in 2023.

Elite Chinese universities have twice the amount of government funding compared to their American peers, and this is before the advent of the Trump administration, but money isn’t everything. And we have led the way by being open at our universities, in particular by open to scholars from all parts of the world, and we have to remain open, and actually we need to cooperate more, not less with China and elsewhere. And any American university that isn’t open to talent from every part of the world, in particularly China, India, is going to be on a glide path to decline. Our response to China’s technological rise can’t rely on sanctions, blacklists, visa restrictions, and tariffs. It should be defined instead by strategic investment, openness, and confidence somehow in our own capacity to lead. But at the end of the day, and this is the big takeaway from that, to me, from the Biden years where every confrontation with China was the one in which we have to win.

We can’t lead alone. We have to be realistic and to accommodate. Why do we have to win a semiconductor war? Why should we resist advanced Chinese technology and electric vehicles, energy, and infrastructure? A policy of containment, which is still there in part, not only doesn’t limit China’s progress, but we have to work with China to advance a model on selective engagement, managed coexistence, and real cooperation where it makes sense to us.