The manufacturers of Viagra face competition from a mainland pharmacist's own

IN a dingy office in a government building in the industrial city of Shenyang, an expert in sex medicines is plotting the marketing coup of the year, pitting his small company against a global pharmaceutical giant. Jiang Wei, a thick-set man who smokes five packets of cigarettes a day, launched on the Chinese market last week a blue pill to combat impotence and improve sexual performance. His pill is called Wei-Ge (Big Brother), the word Chinese use to describe Viagra, the anti-impotency pill developed by the US company Pfizer, which is undergoing tests in China and should be approved by the Ministry of Health for sale in September. Both pills seek to satisfy an insatiable appetite that has resulted from a sexual revolution in mainland cities over the last 10 years. For the first 40 years of communist rule, the main concern of people was to stay out of political trouble, get enough to eat and wear, a warm apartment and colour television, refrigerator and other appliances to make it comfortable. Millions of urban Chinese have achieved this objective and, like people in other countries, are looking for new pleasures such as foreign and domestic travel, more varied cuisine, collecting stamps or antiques and a better sex life. To meet this demand, sex shops, massage parlours and nightclubs have sprung up everywhere, as well as traders selling pornographic magazines and videos under the counter. The sex shops offer a variety of the paraphernalia found in the West. Prostitution has proliferated, in hotels, coffee shops, nightclubs, barber shops and, in southern cities, on the streets. Local officials have proposed setting up official red-light districts, but the government has always vetoed the idea. 'When you visit Beijing, you realise how weak your political connections are,' runs one common witticism. 'When you visit Hainan, you realise how weak your body is.' Access to sexual stimulants and mistresses has been a privilege of rich and powerful Chinese for centuries. Nothing changed after the communists took power in 1949. While the party rounded up street prostitutes and sent them to re-education centres, the leaders continued to enjoy such stimulants, both local and imported, and a plentiful supply of women. Most lascivious of all was Mao Zedong, whose sexual appetite matched that of a medieval emperor. 'For the first 10 years or so of communist rule and during the Cultural Revolution [1966-76], the party enforced puritanism among the common people, although not among the leaders,' one social scientist said. 'People were too poor and too well supervised to think of sexual adventures.' The party boasted that it had eradicated prostitution. Newspapers wrote that masturbation was bad for the revolution and a man wrote to complain he had slept next to his wife for 10 years but that they had had no children. 'But, after the reforms began in the early 1980s, things changed,' the social scientist said. 'Living standards improved and, their basic needs satisfied, people demanded a better sex life. From being a taboo, sex has become a matter for public discussion. There is a huge market for products like Viagra.' The rich and powerful continue to set the pace. Newspapers every week report cases of senior government and Communist Party officials arrested for using public money to fund sexual adventures. The best known case was former Beijing mayor Chen Xitong who was sentenced last July to 16 years for corruption. His extra-marital affairs are as famous as his corruption and are detailed in several books - part fact, part fiction - which have sold like hot cakes. One describes how he videotaped his bedroom performances with his top mistress using a foreign camera - combining his two main interests. He was a keen collector of expensive photographic equipment and businessmen who dealt with him gave him the latest Nikons, Canons and Hasselblads. These activities inspire envy as much as anger among men in Beijing. 'Chen did what all of us would like to do,' one taxi driver said. 'He had the money and means to get away with it for so long. Most of us are not so fortunate. We have to be content with one wife and no mistresses.' The sexual adventures of these officials have inspired a stream of comic rhymes. While they do not translate easily into English, here is one example: 'Senior cadres study Tyson [Mike Tyson, famous for his womanising past], Middle-ranking cadres study Baosen [Wang Baosen, one of Chen's vice-mayors], Lower cadres study Fansen [Kong Fansen, a model cadre in Tibet who had no known mistresses and died while carrying out his work].' So who will exploit this market better: Mr Jiang's Wei-Ge pill or Pfizer's Viagra, the latter of which is available on the black market in many cities for 300 to 400 yuan (HK$281-$374) a pill? Mr Jiang's pills cost about 10 yuan each. Mr Jiang boasts he has stolen a march on Pfizer by registering the brand and getting his product on to the market first. But he has only about half a year before the arrival of Viagra, which Pfizer plans to produce at its factory in Dalian. There is also the question of whether Mr Jiang's product actually lives up to his claims. It has not been subjected to external review or rigorous trials by Western scientists, whereas Viagra's potency has been well-documented. And mainland products have an uncanny knack of streaming on to the huge local market as virtual replicas of Western products. Pfizer officials in Beijing and Dalian declined comment. Mr Jiang's pill was tested on humans and guinea pigs before it was approved and is undergoing more tests on cats and rabbits. The standards it had to meet were certainly lower than that for Viagra, because his pill is a 'health product', while Viagra is a medicine that will be used in hospitals. The battle pits Mr Jiang's company, Flying Dragon Health Products Co, a corporate minnow with assets of 200 million yuan and sales last year of 112 million, against Pfizer whose turnover is equal to that of the entire mainland pharmaceutical industry. Most Chinese believe Wei-Ge is the American one and do not know of Mr Jiang's pill. It has a blue and white packet, with Wei-Ge printed on one side in large characters and at the bottom, in Chinese, a product of Wisdom (US) Development Company Ltd - the name of a company Mr Jiang owns in Los Angeles that is run by his wife. ON the other side are seven pictures of men and women performing sex, with an explanation in English: 'Freeing vessels and supplementing kidney yang. Mainly for syndrome of men and women erectile dysfunction, sexual apathy, premature ejaculation, impotence, prostatomegaly, menopausal syndrome etc.' Inside, in Chinese, is an analysis of how the product was developed and a comparison with Viagra, saying that rats given his pill were aroused sooner, had more intercourse and were more active than those given Viagra. Mr Jiang plans a nationwide advertising campaign later this year. In the meantime, he has been giving interviews to as many Chinese newspapers as possible. The articles do not go into detail about the benefits of his pill but describe the history of his company and present Mr Jiang as a dogged mainland entrepreneur fighting a mighty multinational, in an attempt to offset the worship of US consumer products. 'The United States has Viagra, China has Wei-Ge. Jiang Wei has become a hero of the nation,' the Beijing Economic Daily said. The China Business Times yesterday quoted Mr Jiang as saying that the foreign share of the Chinese pharmaceutical market soared from 14 per cent in 1992 to 85 per cent last year. His own life is remarkable enough. He was born in August 1955, the son of the deputy chief police of Shenyang, one of China's most important industrial cities and capital of Liaoning province. In 1969 his father was sent to a remote village in the north of Liaoning, one of millions of officials sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Mr Jiang was sent with him. 'We had no grain to eat but lived off wild mushrooms and corn mixed with tree flowers. The nearest school was 15 kilometres away or two hours away by foot. There were no buses or bicycles.' He left home in the morning pretending to go to school, but ran off to play on the mountainside, where he acquired an intimate knowledge of plants and wildlife. In 1972 he went back to the city for three years study before returning to the village, where he became the head of a production brigade. At the end of 1977 he passed an exam to enter university. His first choice was specialty chemicals at Beijing University but his grades were not good enough, so he reluctantly went to study Chinese medicine at Liaoning Chinese Medicine College instead. On graduation, he was assigned to a Chinese medical research institute where he worked for four years before going into business in 1986. His specialty was medicine to alleviate sexual problems. His most successful product has been Yansheng Hubaoye, which promotes the function of the kidney which Chinese believe determines a person's sexual ability - and has clocked up three billion yuan in sales over the past nine years. The best years were 1993 and 1994, when sales reached 2.1 billion yuan. In 1994 the company was nearly listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange before underwriters Peregrine withdrew at the last minute because of a difference of opinion among the directors. Mr Jiang could not find another underwriter. In 1994, he became a director of the China Sexology Association and was chosen as an outstanding young businessman and model worker. The next three years were difficult, with sales flat. The company spent 70 million yuan on new products, including the anti-impotency pill. 'There are three ways to improve sexual performance,' Mr Jiang said. 'One is to stimulate the organ, which has been the traditional way in China, using the sexual organs of animals.' Look in any medicine shop or airport sales counter and you will find organs of deer, snake, bull and other beasts. 'The second is to stimulate the nervous system, but this is not so good as it is harmful to health. The third way, which we and Pfizer have both used in our new products, is to enlarge the blood vessels in the penis. 'But, as this is against traditional Chinese medical theory, I had to use many ways to persuade the Chinese experts to approve it. We spent 20 million yuan and five years of research to come up with our product,' he said. 'Our pill is very effective and has no side-effects. Viagra has side-effects, which is common among Western medicines. I will not say ours is better. Once you have taken it, you will know.' But, curiously, this master of sexual potions leads an abstemious life. In 1995, he sent his wife and son to live in Los Angeles, where she runs a part of the company and their son goes to school. 'I go there once a year and she comes here once a year. We are making this sacrifice for the next generation. For me, it is very lonely and rigorous.'