Weaponising China’s export of medicines is wrong, immoral and should be denounced
- High-profile economist Li Daokui said that Beijing could restrict drug exports to the US if the Trump administration was to cut China’s access to semiconductors
- Washington has been ratcheting up attacks on Chinese tech firms, including starving Huawei of components made by American companies
It is wrong for several reasons. First, with or without a pandemic, for an individual of any country, unaffected access to medicines is both a right and a necessity. Safe and effective medicines are not just another category of ordinary products. They are produced and traded to meet the needs of residents of countries around the world for treatment of diseases and improvement of health.
Deliberate foreign tempering with access to medicines in a country amounts to direct attack on the well-being of present and potential patients and, by extension, healthy residents in the event of an epidemic. Continuing development of the Chinese economy depends as much on control of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Chinese society as it does for other countries. Everything else being equal, trade and investment make up the tangible linkage between China and the rest of the world.
A curb on exports of medicinal products is almost certainly going to result in either a reduction or complete removal of foreign pharmaceutical production in China. Chinese medicinal consumers are bound to suffer at least as much from a purposeful disruption of the globalised pharmaceutical industry chain.
Claims of one country controlling the medicine chest of another is without factual merit
Third, in a material sense, China may not be that much of a swing factor in the world’s medicine industry chain in the first place. It is beyond the layman’s capacity to evaluate claims of ‘over dependency’ on medicines and APIs made in China.
Methodologies and processes of turning APIs into final dosage forms are trade secrets known only to those corporations and professionals who handle them. As a matter of fact, even for government regulators of drug safety, it is possible to back-trace only to the factory source of a particular API. Most governmental drug quality regulators opt for strengthening inspection of imported products at the point of entry.
The science of pharmaceutical engineering is certainly capable of alternative sourcing both in terms of location of production and even in content used. Claims of one country controlling the medicine chest of another is without factual merit.
Last, but not least, China’s drug quality control agencies have had a solid history of technical collaboration with their US counterparts in ensuring that defective production of a particular API that originated in China was rectified. The most notable case is the 2007-08 joint investigation of a factory in China that was found to have exported defective Heparin sodium to the US. The facility in question was eventually closed, but the US approach is viewed in Chinese drug quality control circles as a positive example to emulate.
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For China, international cooperation in assurance of medicine quality is essential, and it requires that flows of pharmaceutical products and industry interests be free from political intervention if they are to be sustained.
The reasons that suggesting the curtailment of medicine exports is dangerous are only too obvious. Such utterances from a prominent Chinese scholar add fuel to the fire in the war of words between those Chinese and Americans who, erroneously, wish the other side could simply disappear. The truth of the matter is that even in times of active warfare, access to medicines is not something to be tempered with.
In recent years, cooperation between governmental authorities of China and the US in cracking down on flows of such illicit materials as fentanyl is a good indicator of cooperation that runs parallel to disputes over other matters.
Advocacy to punish the US at all costs are therefore out of tune with policy actions.
The most important reason for arguing against tampering with market access to medicines – by China or by any other party, with or without the push toward ‘decoupling’ – is that it is just such an utterly self-defeating proposition. Unprovoked and politically-motivated decoupling of the medicinal industry only hurts the party that initiates it, as it will mean a loss of foreign materials and know-how that have already been delivered to the door of a society.
Weaponising China’s export of medicines is a plainly wrong proposition. It is immoral. Such a self-defeating proposition never ought to be contemplated as a policy choice
Besides, how can a society, American or any other, support reduction of diplomatic tensions with China after it is being punished through loss of needed drugs? Further escalation of the conflict is a sure outcome.
In a nutshell, yes, when the US government relentlessly ratchets up punitive actions against China, on one product after another and one entity after another, there is cause for angry thinking about China’s development needs and pursuit of its own interests.
But weaponising China’s export of medicines is a plainly wrong proposition. It is immoral. Such a self-defeating proposition never ought to be contemplated as a policy choice.
Here is that ancient Chinese saying: “Don’t do unto others what you don’t want done unto you.” Simple as that. Period.
Zha Daojiong is a professor of international political economy at the School of International Studies and Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development within Peking University in Beijing.
