China’s health-tech advantage is becoming a global supply of drugs, devices and clinical scale

China’s consumer health system is built on digital rails that Western hospitals often have to add later. Patients can book hospital appointments through WeChat or Alipay, use telemedicine platforms and consult AI avatars. This improves convenience across a country of 1.4bn people with weak primary care and a persistent urban-rural gap, while also normalizing forms of data collection and automated guidance that many Western patients would resist.

The more consequential change is in biotechnology. More clinical trials are now conducted in China than in the United States, and Chinese laboratories account for about half of global drug-licensing deals. Physician and consultant Ruby Wang estimates that the share of global out-licensing could reach 60% this year. Pfizer and other Western groups are paying billions for rights to Chinese cancer candidates rather than treating the sector merely as a low-cost manufacturing base.

China’s advantages reinforce one another: returned scientific talent, large patient populations, major clinical centres, lower operating costs, electronics manufacturing, AI expertise and state support for moving products from research into approval. The same stack extends into brain-computer interfaces, imaging equipment and surgical robots. China approved Neuracle’s invasive NEO interface in March, described as the first commercial approval of such a medical device.

There are limits. China is strongest in oncology and less mature in fields such as immunology; many companies are better at developing a candidate than commercializing it globally, which helps explain the licensing boom. Security rules in the US could also restrict partnerships. The policy tradeoff is unusually concrete: reducing dependency and protecting sensitive data may be legitimate, but broad exclusion could also delay cheaper medicines and equipment—especially in lower-income countries whose health systems resemble rural China more than an American academic hospital.