G7 counter Belt and Road Initiative + Foray into cancer medicine
G7 faces Belt and Road Initiative with counter-initiative
Pharmaceutical companies develop cancer drugs
Agnes Chow released from prison
Spahn calls for more independence from imports
Loans: KfW could help Montenegro
Alibaba to build self-driving trucks
Baidu, Huawei and Xiaomi form AI alliance
200,000 foreigners vaccinated
Heads: Headmaster Andreas Merzhaeuser
Dear reader,
The G7 was first pronounced dead, then suffered the contempt of the previous US president. With Joe Biden, they are now experiencing a new beginning as an influential summit format. The main topic on the weekend was China. The old industrial nations want to move closer together to counter the Belt and Road Initiative with their own projects, reports Felix Lee. This may well have positive effects: Competition stimulates business. China and the West are now vying for investment in the Global South. At the same time, the nervousness of the G7 shows the economic and technical level that China has already reached.
This way, the Chinese industry is now advancing into spheres where Western competition felt safe until recently. China is becoming a world-class player in cancer therapies, as Frank Sieren reports. Not only are the drugs similarly good, but they may also be cheaper in the future. This also opens up opportunities in the German market. After all, health insurance companies must economize.
Agnes Chow is free for the time being.The Hong Kong activist has spent six months and 20 days in detention. Her crime: She helped organize a protest. However, her release is now by no means a positive sign, but only an interim status. China’s security law has relegated Hong Kong’s basic rule of law to the second tier. According to Instagram, the brave activist herself is now one thing above all: exhausted.
Your Finn Mayer-Kuckuk
Feature
G7 faces Belt and Road Initiative with counter-initiative
Seven good-humored heads of state and government, plus the President of the EU Commission and the President of the EU Council, are on a podium on Cornwall beach and beam into the cameras. In the middle stands Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, host of the summit, arms wide open as if to signal: We’re all in agreement. There is a general harmony, hardly any bickering: After the G7 was on the verge of splitting in the Trump era, the Western economic powers are presenting themselves as reborn at their summit.
But the impression is deceptive. Behind the scenes, there was friction. Especially on the topic of China, which the new US administration under Joe Biden, but also Great Britain and Canada put on the summit agenda as a top issue, the governments were at odds until the very last day. The biggest blocker this time was the German government.
After a long struggle, the governments of the US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Canada and Italy have agreed on a tougher course toward China. In the final declaration of their summit, they spoke out clearly against unfair trade practices and human rights violations in the Uyghur province of Xinjiang, but also against the harsh approach of the Chinese leadership in Hong Kong toward the democracy movement.
In dealing with the world’s second-largest economy, however, the G7 only agreed to “strengthen their collective action to challenge anti-market policies and practices that undermine the fair and transparent functioning of the global economy.” The G7 countries also want to “promote their shared values.” This includes calling on China to respect fundamental freedoms “especially with regard to Xinjiang and those rights, freedoms and the high degree of autonomy enshrined for Hong Kong in the China-UK Joint Declaration and Basic Law.” However, there was no agreement on what consequences this might have in concrete dealings with China.
G7 response: ‘rebuilding a better world’
In addition, the G7 agreed on a US-initiated infrastructure program for developing and emerging countries. At least verbally, this was not directly directed against China. According to US calculations, infrastructure worth $40 trillion is needed in many parts of the world. The Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative, as this new program is called, is intended to mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars in public and private funds for investment in developing countries, according to US figures. Implementation is to be done “in a transparent and sustainable manner – financially, environmentally and socially,” the US government promised. Low- and middle-income countries, in particular, will benefit from the program.
But to avoid angering Beijing, the German government does not want this program to be too concrete yet. For the time being, there will only be a working group, which should name the first projects, said Chancellor Angela Merkel. “But we have not yet reached the point where we would have specified financial resources.”
Since 2013, China has been in the process of opening up trade routes to Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America with the Belt and Road Initiative (China.Table reported). What was smiled at as illusory in the West until recently is already a reality in many regions. More than 100 countries have signed cooperation agreements with the People’s Republic for the construction of railway lines, roads, ports, and airports (China.Table reported on Budapest Airport). Around $1 trillion has been announced by the leadership in Beijing for this comprehensive program until 2025. It has already invested or firmly planned to invest almost $730 billion by 2019.
Federal Government has ambivalent relationship
Participating countries tried to tone down the confrontation with China during the summit. “It’s not about countries having to choose between us and China,” said a senior US administration official. Rather, he said, the idea is to offer “a positive, alternative vision” that countries can choose. Critics of the Belt and Road Initiative have warned for some time that poor countries are becoming financially and politically dependent on, and therefore vulnerable to, China’s authoritarian leadership. Often, only Chinese companies get a piece of the action. The US accuses Beijing of a “lack of transparency, poor environmental and labor standards” and an approach that ultimately leaves many countries worse off.
But the German government is also ambivalent about the Belt and Road Initiative. On the one hand, it is aware that Beijing is increasingly aggressive in its foreign policy and is using dubious methods to secure raw material deposits and influence. On the other hand, Germany benefits from a strong, well-connected China. Last but not least, Germany is a target region of the project: Duisburg is one of the more important end stations of the Silk Road connections. Many Dax companies are now also Chinese companies with dozens of locations and tens of thousands of employees in the People’s Republic. The German government does not want to jeopardizethese investments.
China’s leaders reacted angrily to the G7’s move and questioned its standing in general. “The days when global decisions were dictated by a small group of countries are long gone,” said a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in London. All states, whether large or small, strong or weak, poor or rich, are equal, he said. But what consequences the Chinese leadership will draw from the G7’s new anti-China course remained unclear for the time being.
Angela Merkel
Geopolitics
New Silk Road
Cancer therapy: pharmaceutical companies to shake up the world market
In the USA, a year of therapy with checkpoint inhibitors costs up to $175,000. Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturers are now taking up this challenge. These new Chinese players include Shanghai Junshi Biosciences Co. and Beijing-based Innovent Biologics Inc. Their drugs have already shown promising results in studies.
According to a US financial services firm Cowen & Co survey, US doctors said lower-cost inhibitors could quickly capture up to 30 percent of the $150 billion global market. Junshi Biosciences and Innovent Biologics thus want to play a role not only in China but also in the international market – though none of their products are sold outside their home country yet. To do so, they must become even better and cheaper than their Western competitors.
However, at least in the Chinese market, the share of proprietary developments is growing. As many as twelve out of 44 new cancer drugs approved in China between 2018 and August 2020 have already been developed locally. Although China still lags behind the West in most biotech areas, the country is already globally competitive, if not leading, in some segments, such as chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy (CAR-T-cell therapy), a new form of cancer therapy based on the genetic modification of certain immune cells. Before the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, American patients had reportedly traveled to China specifically to receive treatment there.
In doing so, China is building on international research: US immunologist James P. Allison and his Japanese colleague Tasuko Honjo, whose work formed the basis for the development of checkpoint inhibitors, were awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
The results are so promising that there is “no reason to price it low,” says Li Ning, Chief Executive Officer of Junshi. He expects the price of Toripalimab to be between 80 and 120 percent of already known Western drugs, possibly even higher.
AstraZeneca as a European partner
Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturers are looking for Western partners with whom they can jointly offer their products in the lucrative US and EU markets. Junshi is working with California-based Coherus Biosciences, which is listed on the US technology exchange Nasdaq. Another partner is the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca which became world famous for its Covid vaccine.
The Beijing-based company Beigene found a partner in Novartis AG in Basel at the beginning of this year. The partnership is about the cancer product Tislelizumab, an antibody drug to be marketed jointly in Europe and the USA. This is a licensing agreement.
And Innovent Biologics from Suzhou near Shanghai is currently trying to get approval for the American market for its lung cancer product in cooperation with the US company Eli Lilly. On June 3, China’s National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) approved a new product from the two partners that fight non-small cell lung cancer, which accounts for 85 percent of lung cancer deaths in China, under the brand name TYVYT. Lung cancer is the leading cause of death in the country of 1.4 billion people, followed by stomach and liver cancer.
Growing demand at home
An economic decoupling of the West from China is apparently not yet a trend in the pharmaceutical industry either. On the contrary. Western partners are hoping for better access to the Chinese market. Cancer therapies often involve the simultaneous administration of several products from different manufacturers. China is now the second-largest pharmaceutical market in the world and has the largest number of cancer patients globally. In 2018 alone, four million new cases were diagnosed – more than twice as many as in the US.
With the aging population, the number of cancer patients in the People’s Republic is growing steadily. Despite significant progress in healthcare and low production costs for active medical ingredients, China still has a gap with Western industrialized nations in many areas. According to China’s National Health Commission, only 40.5 percent of the country’s cancer patients survived five or more years after diagnosis in 2020. In the United States, the rate was 67 percent.
In terms of clinical trials, China has only about ten percent of the volume of the US so far. The new generation of drugs that significantly increase the chances of cancer survival has so far been produced mainly by the US and European pharmaceutical giants. Their prices often cannot be afforded by ordinary Chinese patients. Moreover, healthcare resources in China remain unevenly distributed. Many patients usually go to wealthy cities with better hospitals for initial diagnosis and treatment. In Beijing and Shanghai, about 70 or 45 percent of the patient population is from outside the respective cities.
State influence and ‘Thousand Talents’ program
In addition to anti-smoking campaigns and the fight against environmental and, above all, air pollution, Beijing wants to continuously expand insurance coverage in the country under the motto “Healthy China 2030″, reduce treatment costs and encourage pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices. The approval of promising domestic drug candidates has been accelerated.
41 cancer drugs were added to the National Reimbursement Drugs List (NRDL) in 2018 and 2019 – at prices significantly lower than similar products from the West. China’s hospitals saw a 15 percent increase in the selection of reduced-price cancer drugs in 2020 compared to 2019, including checkpoint inhibitors from Innovent, Junshi, Beigene, and Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine, which were forced by the state to cut their prices by up to 80 percent for social reasons. This could now change the price structure in the global market.
Beijing has also defined biotechnology as one of the ten key sectors in its industrial strategy “Made in China 2025” and wants to further promote the formation of “internationally competitive biopharmaceutical industry clusters.” To this end, the state invested $340 billion in research and development of science and technology last year. Just under $10 billion went into the pharmaceutical sector.
Beijing also wants to lure scientists back home with top salaries and lavish research budgets through its “Thousand Talents” program. The companies Beigene, Junshi Bio and Innovent Bio were all founded by Chinese-American or Chinese scientists who had previously worked at leading US universities and important medical research institutes. Today, there are about 663,000 biotech companies in China, nearly half of which were registered only in the last six years.
Agnes Chow was sentenced to prison for calling for protests in 2019 to preserve democracy in Hong Kong. Her actions included a 15-hour siege at police headquarters. Videos show Chow leaving the jail and immediately surrounded by supporters and reporters. Only one person present dared to make a political statement by unfurling a yellow umbrella. The yellow umbrella was the symbol of the democratic movement. Chow, 24, was a co-founder of the now-defunct civil rights party Demosisto, which sought to push back Beijing’s rising influence in the city. Her fellow activist Joshua Wong is still in jail. Another former party colleague, Nathan Law, is in exile in Britain. fin
Chinese Communist Party
Umbrella Movement
Spahn: becoming independent with vital products
German Health Minister Jens Spahn calls for a reduction in dependence on China for the supply of medical materials and medicines. “If there is one thing we have really experienced painfully in this pandemic, it is the far too great dependence on China,” Spahn said at the “Day of the German Family Business” in Berlin. Germany is dependent on imports from the Far East for too many vital products, he said. “But we are also too dependent on China as a sales market.” fin
Antibiotics
Coronavirus
Health
Jens Spahn
Report: Montenegro talks with EU about financial aid
EU candidates Montenegro and Brussels are in talks over financial aid to refinance a Chinese loan, according to a statement (as reported by China.Table). The EU Commission has reportedly approached Germany’s Reconstruction Loan Corporation (KfW), France’s state-owned development agency AFD and Italy’s sovereign lender CDP to set an aid plan for Montenegro in motion. Reuters reported this, citing an EU representative. The plan is to get offers from the three lending institutions and then bring them together. A solution should be found before summer. The idea of the EU directly refinancing the Chinese loan to Montenegro has been rejected as it would have required Beijing’s approval, the EU representative said, according to the report. There was initially no confirmation from Brussels or the lenders.
Montenegro received a loan of more than €800 millionfrom China’s Exim Bankin 2014 to build the first of three sections of a highway from the coastal town of Bar to the Serbian border (China.Table reported). The road will be built by the China Road and Bridge Corporation. The latter was due to complete the work in 2019 but has extended the deadline to November 2021. Next month, the first tranche of the repayment was due – but Montenegro is having payment difficulties. Most recently, China offered to postpone the deadline (China.Table reported). In April, Montenegro had already turned to Brussels for financial aid, but the request was rejected. ari
Finance
Geopolitics
Loans
Montenegro
New Silk Road
Alibaba develops self-driving trucks
Online retail giant Alibaba is now also looking to develop self-driving trucks in the business. The company’s logistics arm, Cainiao, plans to develop the necessary technology, the company’s chief technology officer said at the Global Smart Logistics Summit conference. The company also plans to field test 1,000 Xiaomanlü (小蛮驴, “Little Robust Donkey”) delivery robots – but only in manageable application areas such as universities. The company did not disclose any further details.
The market for self-driving trucks is considered the entry segment for autonomous driving. Initially, the trucks will only drive autonomously in convoys on motorways or find their way to the logistics center on rural roads. Human drivers are still needed for mixed traffic in the city with pedestrians and cyclists. fin
Alibaba
Car Industry
Truck
Baidu forms AI alliance with DiDi, Huawei and Megvii
phone giants China Telecom, China Mobile and Unicom,
the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence.
What the alliance’s goals are and how it will benefit its members remains to be seen. However, the AI alliance is promising because it brings together the elite of China’s tech industry. The companies mentioned include many of the most talked-about applications of artificial intelligence, from pattern recognition to calculating consumer behavior. fin
Didi
Hundreds of thousands of foreigners vaccinated in China
So far, more than 200,000 foreigners have been vaccinated against Covid-19 in China, according to official figures. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said foreign nationals in the eligible age groups have been integrated into the national vaccination program. Cooperation will be stepped up with “some relevant countries” next, the spokesman announced. The government wants to make getting the vaccination for their citizens living in China easier. Before the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, about one million foreigners were reported to be in the country, including about 15,000 Germans.
In the People’s Republic, only Chinese active ingredients from the state-owned manufacturer Sinopharm and the private provider Sinovac are administered. Both substances have so far only received emergency approval from the World Health Organization (WHO) (China.Table reported). Their efficacy ranges from 50 to 78 percent. A few weeks ago, the country announced to facilitate entry into China only for those foreigners who have been immunized with a Chinese vaccine. grz
Health
Pharma
Heads
Andreas Merzhaeuser – headmaster with a digital agenda
Andreas Merzhaeuser, Headmaster of the German Embassy School in Beijing
At the beginning of 2020, precisely on the Chinese New Year, Andreas Merzhäuser came to China. Apart from his political interest, the German studies and history graduate had no connection to the country. Curiosity about the unknown and the chance to get up close and personal with a rising China that wants to shape the history of the 21st century brought Merzhaeuser to the German Embassy School in Beijing. This is not his first teaching stay abroad. At the turn of the millennium, Andreas Merzhaeuser was already working in London as a teacher and later as Deputy Headmaster. This initially opened new doors for him in Germany, where he ran a grammar schoolforover 14 years before deciding to go to China.
Similar to a school in Germany
Around 500 students currently study at the embassy school in grades one to twelve. The institution is subject to federal school supervision, independent of Chinese regulations, and awards both the Mittlere Reife (a school-leaving certificate in Germany that is usually awarded after ten years of schooling) and the Abitur (a qualification granted at the end of secondary education in Germany). The teachers are mostly civil servants on leave from Germany working in Beijing for a certain period of time. Some teachers have family ties to Beijing.
One of the school’s main tasks is to prepare children and young people for a smooth change of school when they move to a new country with their parents. Many students are children of so-called ex-pats, i.e., employees of German companies, for example, automotive companies, who usually only live in China for a few years before the next location calls. They are taught mainly in German, with English and Chinese joining them in the schoolyard to form a colorful mix of languages. However, anyone who wants to study here must have non-Chinese citizenship. China does not allow its own children to attend foreign embassy schools.
Andreas Merzhaeuser’s goal during the planned six years of his stay in China is to advance the school’s development, especially in terms of digitization. And things are certainly moving forward, he notes. The embassy school now has two staff members who are only concerned with the educational component of digitization. Since the number of children from bilingual households is increasing, Merzhaeuser would also like to focus more intensively on the promotion of German and expand this area. Teaching the German language is to become the focus of every lesson.
School as the center of community
The German embassy school also plays another important role: “It is the center of the community with after-school programs for pupils and parents until the evening and numerous events,” says Merzhaeuser. The cohesion within the German-speaking community in Beijing is great. Newcomers receive a wide range of support. The school offers assistance and takes care of bureaucratic matters for the teachers.
This is another reason why Andreas Merzhaeuser has settled well in the city. “Basically, you only need four things to live wellin China: a SIM card, a residence permit, a bank account and WeChat. The rest almost takes care of itself,” he says. The Chinese language, on the other hand, he admits, is still a barrier. The grammar isn’t too complex, but the pronunciation doesn’t make it easy for him. Anastasia Franz
G7 faces Belt and Road Initiative with counter-initiative
Pharmaceutical companies develop cancer drugs
Agnes Chow released from prison
Spahn calls for more independence from imports
Loans: KfW could help Montenegro
Alibaba to build self-driving trucks
Baidu, Huawei and Xiaomi form AI alliance
200,000 foreigners vaccinated
Heads: Headmaster Andreas Merzhaeuser
Dear reader,
The G7 was first pronounced dead, then suffered the contempt of the previous US president. With Joe Biden, they are now experiencing a new beginning as an influential summit format. The main topic on the weekend was China. The old industrial nations want to move closer together to counter the Belt and Road Initiative with their own projects, reports Felix Lee. This may well have positive effects: Competition stimulates business. China and the West are now vying for investment in the Global South. At the same time, the nervousness of the G7 shows the economic and technical level that China has already reached.
This way, the Chinese industry is now advancing into spheres where Western competition felt safe until recently. China is becoming a world-class player in cancer therapies, as Frank Sieren reports. Not only are the drugs similarly good, but they may also be cheaper in the future. This also opens up opportunities in the German market. After all, health insurance companies must economize.
Agnes Chow is free for the time being.The Hong Kong activist has spent six months and 20 days in detention. Her crime: She helped organize a protest. However, her release is now by no means a positive sign, but only an interim status. China’s security law has relegated Hong Kong’s basic rule of law to the second tier. According to Instagram, the brave activist herself is now one thing above all: exhausted.
Your Finn Mayer-Kuckuk
Feature
G7 faces Belt and Road Initiative with counter-initiative
Seven good-humored heads of state and government, plus the President of the EU Commission and the President of the EU Council, are on a podium on Cornwall beach and beam into the cameras. In the middle stands Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, host of the summit, arms wide open as if to signal: We’re all in agreement. There is a general harmony, hardly any bickering: After the G7 was on the verge of splitting in the Trump era, the Western economic powers are presenting themselves as reborn at their summit.
But the impression is deceptive. Behind the scenes, there was friction. Especially on the topic of China, which the new US administration under Joe Biden, but also Great Britain and Canada put on the summit agenda as a top issue, the governments were at odds until the very last day. The biggest blocker this time was the German government.
After a long struggle, the governments of the US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Canada and Italy have agreed on a tougher course toward China. In the final declaration of their summit, they spoke out clearly against unfair trade practices and human rights violations in the Uyghur province of Xinjiang, but also against the harsh approach of the Chinese leadership in Hong Kong toward the democracy movement.
In dealing with the world’s second-largest economy, however, the G7 only agreed to “strengthen their collective action to challenge anti-market policies and practices that undermine the fair and transparent functioning of the global economy.” The G7 countries also want to “promote their shared values.” This includes calling on China to respect fundamental freedoms “especially with regard to Xinjiang and those rights, freedoms and the high degree of autonomy enshrined for Hong Kong in the China-UK Joint Declaration and Basic Law.” However, there was no agreement on what consequences this might have in concrete dealings with China.
G7 response: ‘rebuilding a better world’
In addition, the G7 agreed on a US-initiated infrastructure program for developing and emerging countries. At least verbally, this was not directly directed against China. According to US calculations, infrastructure worth $40 trillion is needed in many parts of the world. The Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative, as this new program is called, is intended to mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars in public and private funds for investment in developing countries, according to US figures. Implementation is to be done “in a transparent and sustainable manner – financially, environmentally and socially,” the US government promised. Low- and middle-income countries, in particular, will benefit from the program.
But to avoid angering Beijing, the German government does not want this program to be too concrete yet. For the time being, there will only be a working group, which should name the first projects, said Chancellor Angela Merkel. “But we have not yet reached the point where we would have specified financial resources.”
Since 2013, China has been in the process of opening up trade routes to Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America with the Belt and Road Initiative (China.Table reported). What was smiled at as illusory in the West until recently is already a reality in many regions. More than 100 countries have signed cooperation agreements with the People’s Republic for the construction of railway lines, roads, ports, and airports (China.Table reported on Budapest Airport). Around $1 trillion has been announced by the leadership in Beijing for this comprehensive program until 2025. It has already invested or firmly planned to invest almost $730 billion by 2019.
Federal Government has ambivalent relationship
Participating countries tried to tone down the confrontation with China during the summit. “It’s not about countries having to choose between us and China,” said a senior US administration official. Rather, he said, the idea is to offer “a positive, alternative vision” that countries can choose. Critics of the Belt and Road Initiative have warned for some time that poor countries are becoming financially and politically dependent on, and therefore vulnerable to, China’s authoritarian leadership. Often, only Chinese companies get a piece of the action. The US accuses Beijing of a “lack of transparency, poor environmental and labor standards” and an approach that ultimately leaves many countries worse off.
But the German government is also ambivalent about the Belt and Road Initiative. On the one hand, it is aware that Beijing is increasingly aggressive in its foreign policy and is using dubious methods to secure raw material deposits and influence. On the other hand, Germany benefits from a strong, well-connected China. Last but not least, Germany is a target region of the project: Duisburg is one of the more important end stations of the Silk Road connections. Many Dax companies are now also Chinese companies with dozens of locations and tens of thousands of employees in the People’s Republic. The German government does not want to jeopardizethese investments.
China’s leaders reacted angrily to the G7’s move and questioned its standing in general. “The days when global decisions were dictated by a small group of countries are long gone,” said a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in London. All states, whether large or small, strong or weak, poor or rich, are equal, he said. But what consequences the Chinese leadership will draw from the G7’s new anti-China course remained unclear for the time being.
Angela Merkel
Geopolitics
New Silk Road
Cancer therapy: pharmaceutical companies to shake up the world market
In the USA, a year of therapy with checkpoint inhibitors costs up to $175,000. Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturers are now taking up this challenge. These new Chinese players include Shanghai Junshi Biosciences Co. and Beijing-based Innovent Biologics Inc. Their drugs have already shown promising results in studies.
According to a US financial services firm Cowen & Co survey, US doctors said lower-cost inhibitors could quickly capture up to 30 percent of the $150 billion global market. Junshi Biosciences and Innovent Biologics thus want to play a role not only in China but also in the international market – though none of their products are sold outside their home country yet. To do so, they must become even better and cheaper than their Western competitors.
However, at least in the Chinese market, the share of proprietary developments is growing. As many as twelve out of 44 new cancer drugs approved in China between 2018 and August 2020 have already been developed locally. Although China still lags behind the West in most biotech areas, the country is already globally competitive, if not leading, in some segments, such as chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy (CAR-T-cell therapy), a new form of cancer therapy based on the genetic modification of certain immune cells. Before the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, American patients had reportedly traveled to China specifically to receive treatment there.
In doing so, China is building on international research: US immunologist James P. Allison and his Japanese colleague Tasuko Honjo, whose work formed the basis for the development of checkpoint inhibitors, were awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
The results are so promising that there is “no reason to price it low,” says Li Ning, Chief Executive Officer of Junshi. He expects the price of Toripalimab to be between 80 and 120 percent of already known Western drugs, possibly even higher.
AstraZeneca as a European partner
Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturers are looking for Western partners with whom they can jointly offer their products in the lucrative US and EU markets. Junshi is working with California-based Coherus Biosciences, which is listed on the US technology exchange Nasdaq. Another partner is the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca which became world famous for its Covid vaccine.
The Beijing-based company Beigene found a partner in Novartis AG in Basel at the beginning of this year. The partnership is about the cancer product Tislelizumab, an antibody drug to be marketed jointly in Europe and the USA. This is a licensing agreement.
And Innovent Biologics from Suzhou near Shanghai is currently trying to get approval for the American market for its lung cancer product in cooperation with the US company Eli Lilly. On June 3, China’s National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) approved a new product from the two partners that fight non-small cell lung cancer, which accounts for 85 percent of lung cancer deaths in China, under the brand name TYVYT. Lung cancer is the leading cause of death in the country of 1.4 billion people, followed by stomach and liver cancer.
Growing demand at home
An economic decoupling of the West from China is apparently not yet a trend in the pharmaceutical industry either. On the contrary. Western partners are hoping for better access to the Chinese market. Cancer therapies often involve the simultaneous administration of several products from different manufacturers. China is now the second-largest pharmaceutical market in the world and has the largest number of cancer patients globally. In 2018 alone, four million new cases were diagnosed – more than twice as many as in the US.
With the aging population, the number of cancer patients in the People’s Republic is growing steadily. Despite significant progress in healthcare and low production costs for active medical ingredients, China still has a gap with Western industrialized nations in many areas. According to China’s National Health Commission, only 40.5 percent of the country’s cancer patients survived five or more years after diagnosis in 2020. In the United States, the rate was 67 percent.
In terms of clinical trials, China has only about ten percent of the volume of the US so far. The new generation of drugs that significantly increase the chances of cancer survival has so far been produced mainly by the US and European pharmaceutical giants. Their prices often cannot be afforded by ordinary Chinese patients. Moreover, healthcare resources in China remain unevenly distributed. Many patients usually go to wealthy cities with better hospitals for initial diagnosis and treatment. In Beijing and Shanghai, about 70 or 45 percent of the patient population is from outside the respective cities.
State influence and ‘Thousand Talents’ program
In addition to anti-smoking campaigns and the fight against environmental and, above all, air pollution, Beijing wants to continuously expand insurance coverage in the country under the motto “Healthy China 2030″, reduce treatment costs and encourage pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices. The approval of promising domestic drug candidates has been accelerated.
41 cancer drugs were added to the National Reimbursement Drugs List (NRDL) in 2018 and 2019 – at prices significantly lower than similar products from the West. China’s hospitals saw a 15 percent increase in the selection of reduced-price cancer drugs in 2020 compared to 2019, including checkpoint inhibitors from Innovent, Junshi, Beigene, and Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine, which were forced by the state to cut their prices by up to 80 percent for social reasons. This could now change the price structure in the global market.
Beijing has also defined biotechnology as one of the ten key sectors in its industrial strategy “Made in China 2025” and wants to further promote the formation of “internationally competitive biopharmaceutical industry clusters.” To this end, the state invested $340 billion in research and development of science and technology last year. Just under $10 billion went into the pharmaceutical sector.
Beijing also wants to lure scientists back home with top salaries and lavish research budgets through its “Thousand Talents” program. The companies Beigene, Junshi Bio and Innovent Bio were all founded by Chinese-American or Chinese scientists who had previously worked at leading US universities and important medical research institutes. Today, there are about 663,000 biotech companies in China, nearly half of which were registered only in the last six years.
Agnes Chow was sentenced to prison for calling for protests in 2019 to preserve democracy in Hong Kong. Her actions included a 15-hour siege at police headquarters. Videos show Chow leaving the jail and immediately surrounded by supporters and reporters. Only one person present dared to make a political statement by unfurling a yellow umbrella. The yellow umbrella was the symbol of the democratic movement. Chow, 24, was a co-founder of the now-defunct civil rights party Demosisto, which sought to push back Beijing’s rising influence in the city. Her fellow activist Joshua Wong is still in jail. Another former party colleague, Nathan Law, is in exile in Britain. fin
Chinese Communist Party
Umbrella Movement
Spahn: becoming independent with vital products
German Health Minister Jens Spahn calls for a reduction in dependence on China for the supply of medical materials and medicines. “If there is one thing we have really experienced painfully in this pandemic, it is the far too great dependence on China,” Spahn said at the “Day of the German Family Business” in Berlin. Germany is dependent on imports from the Far East for too many vital products, he said. “But we are also too dependent on China as a sales market.” fin
Antibiotics
Coronavirus
Health
Jens Spahn
Report: Montenegro talks with EU about financial aid
EU candidates Montenegro and Brussels are in talks over financial aid to refinance a Chinese loan, according to a statement (as reported by China.Table). The EU Commission has reportedly approached Germany’s Reconstruction Loan Corporation (KfW), France’s state-owned development agency AFD and Italy’s sovereign lender CDP to set an aid plan for Montenegro in motion. Reuters reported this, citing an EU representative. The plan is to get offers from the three lending institutions and then bring them together. A solution should be found before summer. The idea of the EU directly refinancing the Chinese loan to Montenegro has been rejected as it would have required Beijing’s approval, the EU representative said, according to the report. There was initially no confirmation from Brussels or the lenders.
Montenegro received a loan of more than €800 millionfrom China’s Exim Bankin 2014 to build the first of three sections of a highway from the coastal town of Bar to the Serbian border (China.Table reported). The road will be built by the China Road and Bridge Corporation. The latter was due to complete the work in 2019 but has extended the deadline to November 2021. Next month, the first tranche of the repayment was due – but Montenegro is having payment difficulties. Most recently, China offered to postpone the deadline (China.Table reported). In April, Montenegro had already turned to Brussels for financial aid, but the request was rejected. ari
Finance
Geopolitics
Loans
Montenegro
New Silk Road
Alibaba develops self-driving trucks
Online retail giant Alibaba is now also looking to develop self-driving trucks in the business. The company’s logistics arm, Cainiao, plans to develop the necessary technology, the company’s chief technology officer said at the Global Smart Logistics Summit conference. The company also plans to field test 1,000 Xiaomanlü (小蛮驴, “Little Robust Donkey”) delivery robots – but only in manageable application areas such as universities. The company did not disclose any further details.
The market for self-driving trucks is considered the entry segment for autonomous driving. Initially, the trucks will only drive autonomously in convoys on motorways or find their way to the logistics center on rural roads. Human drivers are still needed for mixed traffic in the city with pedestrians and cyclists. fin
Alibaba
Car Industry
Truck
Baidu forms AI alliance with DiDi, Huawei and Megvii
phone giants China Telecom, China Mobile and Unicom,
the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence.
What the alliance’s goals are and how it will benefit its members remains to be seen. However, the AI alliance is promising because it brings together the elite of China’s tech industry. The companies mentioned include many of the most talked-about applications of artificial intelligence, from pattern recognition to calculating consumer behavior. fin
Didi
Hundreds of thousands of foreigners vaccinated in China
So far, more than 200,000 foreigners have been vaccinated against Covid-19 in China, according to official figures. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said foreign nationals in the eligible age groups have been integrated into the national vaccination program. Cooperation will be stepped up with “some relevant countries” next, the spokesman announced. The government wants to make getting the vaccination for their citizens living in China easier. Before the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, about one million foreigners were reported to be in the country, including about 15,000 Germans.
In the People’s Republic, only Chinese active ingredients from the state-owned manufacturer Sinopharm and the private provider Sinovac are administered. Both substances have so far only received emergency approval from the World Health Organization (WHO) (China.Table reported). Their efficacy ranges from 50 to 78 percent. A few weeks ago, the country announced to facilitate entry into China only for those foreigners who have been immunized with a Chinese vaccine. grz
Health
Pharma
Heads
Andreas Merzhaeuser – headmaster with a digital agenda
Andreas Merzhaeuser, Headmaster of the German Embassy School in Beijing
At the beginning of 2020, precisely on the Chinese New Year, Andreas Merzhäuser came to China. Apart from his political interest, the German studies and history graduate had no connection to the country. Curiosity about the unknown and the chance to get up close and personal with a rising China that wants to shape the history of the 21st century brought Merzhaeuser to the German Embassy School in Beijing. This is not his first teaching stay abroad. At the turn of the millennium, Andreas Merzhaeuser was already working in London as a teacher and later as Deputy Headmaster. This initially opened new doors for him in Germany, where he ran a grammar schoolforover 14 years before deciding to go to China.
Similar to a school in Germany
Around 500 students currently study at the embassy school in grades one to twelve. The institution is subject to federal school supervision, independent of Chinese regulations, and awards both the Mittlere Reife (a school-leaving certificate in Germany that is usually awarded after ten years of schooling) and the Abitur (a qualification granted at the end of secondary education in Germany). The teachers are mostly civil servants on leave from Germany working in Beijing for a certain period of time. Some teachers have family ties to Beijing.
One of the school’s main tasks is to prepare children and young people for a smooth change of school when they move to a new country with their parents. Many students are children of so-called ex-pats, i.e., employees of German companies, for example, automotive companies, who usually only live in China for a few years before the next location calls. They are taught mainly in German, with English and Chinese joining them in the schoolyard to form a colorful mix of languages. However, anyone who wants to study here must have non-Chinese citizenship. China does not allow its own children to attend foreign embassy schools.
Andreas Merzhaeuser’s goal during the planned six years of his stay in China is to advance the school’s development, especially in terms of digitization. And things are certainly moving forward, he notes. The embassy school now has two staff members who are only concerned with the educational component of digitization. Since the number of children from bilingual households is increasing, Merzhaeuser would also like to focus more intensively on the promotion of German and expand this area. Teaching the German language is to become the focus of every lesson.
School as the center of community
The German embassy school also plays another important role: “It is the center of the community with after-school programs for pupils and parents until the evening and numerous events,” says Merzhaeuser. The cohesion within the German-speaking community in Beijing is great. Newcomers receive a wide range of support. The school offers assistance and takes care of bureaucratic matters for the teachers.
This is another reason why Andreas Merzhaeuser has settled well in the city. “Basically, you only need four things to live wellin China: a SIM card, a residence permit, a bank account and WeChat. The rest almost takes care of itself,” he says. The Chinese language, on the other hand, he admits, is still a barrier. The grammar isn’t too complex, but the pronunciation doesn’t make it easy for him. Anastasia Franz
