Weblog with daily updates of the news on a frugal, fair and beautiful China, from the perspective of internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and president of the China Speakers Bureau Fons Tuinstra
Drug deals dominated much of the international relations between biotech companies. But now, another change: the way China’s biotech companies structure their innovation shows a major shift, known widely as “NewCo,” says long-term China lawyer Mark Schaubon the website of his law firm, King&Wood.
Mark Schaub:
Perhaps the biggest development in China biotech dealmaking right now isn’t a drug but a new way of structuring deals.
Known widely as “NewCo” this model involves a Chinese biotech licensing out the international rights to one or more drug pipelines/candidates to a newly formed offshore company funded by foreign investors.
In most cases the NewCo is run by an international management team with the plan of a future IPO or trade sale to a pharma company. The model has rapidly gained traction in 2025/2026.
The beauty of this structure is that it solves three problems at once: 1) Chinese parent retains a stake in the international economic upside of its assets; 2) foreign investors have a clean, ring-fenced platform to fund and operate without being involved in the Chinese parent’s broader local operations; and 3) allows parties to have a clearer financing and exit path than an open-ended joint venture.
The NewCo solves the dilemma of Chinese innovators and Western capital wishing to work together to globalise Chinese-developed drugs without foreign funders being overly involved in the China business where their added value may be limited. The Chinese innovator can continue developing and commercialising the product in China, where it already has management capability, clinical infrastructure and access to domestic funding. The foreign investors can concentrate their capital and expertise on their strength which is international development.
Although clever, the structure depends on careful and creative drafting – the parties will need to agree on governance rights, IP carve-outs, IP improvements, milestone triggers, and exit mechanics. These cannot be left to be worked out later – by its nature the parties’ interests will diverge along with the technology. In many cases the Chinese and Western products may look very different over time despite sharing a common ancestor. Like the VIE structure before it, the NewCo structure can solve a lot of problems but if it is not set up and implemented properly it can also lead to a lot of problems.
Marketing guru Ashley Dudarenok analyses on her website 25 of China’s most famous brands and looks into how they change the world, both in China and globally. They include Anta, Li-Ning, Bosideng, Ep Yaying and many others.
Ashley Dudarenok:
Chinese fashion brands now influence far more than domestic wardrobes. They shape sportswear technology, premium outerwear, digital retail, contemporary tailoring and the international understanding of Chinese design.
This shift comes during a more selective consumer cycle. China’s retail sales reached RMB 50.12 trillion in 2025, up 3.7 percent, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Buyers still spend, but product quality, price credibility and brand distinction carry more weight.
The strongest Chinese clothing brands respond with focused identities and stronger operating models. Some use performance technology and supply chain scale. Others translate Chinese craftsmanship and cultural confidence into modern clothing that works across Shanghai, Seoul, Paris and London.
AI innovation expert Alvin Wang Graylin explains why the AI fight between China and the US is wrongly seen as a zero-sum game. The struggle is wrongly perceived as a race to a finish line, but that line does not exist, he tells at Moonshots.
Ian Johnson, author of China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future and founder and director of China Unofficial Archives, discusses critical issues facing China at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. “Reclaiming Historical Memory and the Struggle for China’s Future”.
Ian Johnson is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.
China’s citizens have profoundly changed their view of the United States and their president, Trump, journalist Zhang Lijia writes at Democracy Asia. He is called the “nation builder”, helping to improve the global standing of the country worldwide. “Many Chinese believe his erratic behaviour and foreign policy blunders weakened the United States and gave China greater diplomatic room to manoeuvre,” she writes.
Zhang Lijia:
At first, Trump was seen less as a politician than as a reality television character who had somehow wandered into the White House. Chinese netizens mocked his hair, marvelled at his rhetorical excesses and, for a time, even admired his supposed business success. Over the years, however, amusement has faded, and hostility has grown.
This shift reflects not only changing Chinese perceptions of America, but also a deeper transformation in how China sees itself and its place in the world. Most revealing was the nickname Chinese netizens gave Trump: ‘Chuan Jianguo’ (川建国), which roughly translates as ‘Trump the nation builder’.
Jianguo is an immensely popular Chinese name, borne by nearly a million people. The joke was that Trump was actually helping to make China stronger. By launching trade wars and trying to cut China off from advanced technologies, he unintentionally accelerated Beijing’s push for technological self-reliance and fuelled nationalist sentiment. More importantly, many Chinese believe his erratic behaviour and foreign policy blunders weakened the United States and gave China greater diplomatic room to manoeuvre.
China’s restaurant industry is no longer experimenting with automation. The question has shifted from “if” to “how fast” and “how much.”
In 2025, the country’s service robot market was projected to reach $40 billion, with growth at a compound annual rate of 17.1 percent to $195 billion by 2035. For restaurant operators facing relentless labor pressure and thinning margins, robot waiters have become a commercial necessity rather than a novelty.
China’s catering income reached approximately $680 billion in the first 10 months of 2025, up 3.3 percent year-on-year. The sector accounted for 11.2 percent of total retail sales in October.
For executives, the real question is no longer novelty. It is operational leverage. A restaurant robot must reduce pressure during peak-hour service, support human staff, and fit into a broader digital stack that may include POS integration, table service automation, fleet management, and RaaS models.
In the past, China purchased licenses to sell medicines from Western companies. But today, China sells its own medicines to the West. The previously attractive market has changed profoundly, says China lawyer Mark Schaub on the website of his law firm King&Wood. “For many international companies if the question is “How do we sell into China?” then they may be increasingly playing yesterday’s game,” he writes
Mark Schaub:
In 2025, the direction of deal flow changed. Chinese biotechs signed approximately US$135 billion in outbound licensing deals, licensing their own molecules to multinational pharmaceutical companies. By contrast, inbound licensing (i.e. where Chinese companies acquired rights to foreign drugs) fell to below US$1 billion. This is not a narrowing gap. The tide has turned.
The reason is straightforward. Large multinational pharmaceutical companies are approaching a patent cliff, with exclusivity over many of their highest-selling products coming to an end and no pipeline to replace the lost revenue. After more than a decade of sustained investment in R&D, China’s biotech sector increasingly has what the doctor ordered: clinical-stage assets in oncology, metabolic disease and antibody engineering, often developed faster and at significantly lower cost than comparable Western programmes.
This shift requires multinational pharma and medtech companies to rethink what a China strategy actually means. If China becomes a sourcing market and not simply a distribution market this means you need different relationships in China and different transaction structures.
Sourcing requires due diligence on your counterpart’s intellectual property, clinical data, manufacturing capability and regulatory compliance. It means thinking like a buyer rather than a seller. Many international companies have commercial teams that have spent decades developing expertise in selling into China but buying innovation requires a different set of commercial and legal capabilities.
For many international companies if the question is “How do we sell into China?” then they may be increasingly playing yesterday’s game. The more important question for 2026 may be “How do we buy from China and how do we structure this business to protect our interests and preserving strategic flexibility?”
AI and robots are taking over many industries in China. Innovation expert Ashley Dudarenok sees how robots take over the country’s warehouses; she explains on her blog, Chozan. “This is a fundamental rewiring of how goods move through the world’s largest manufacturing and e-commerce economy,” she writes.
Ashley Dudarenok:
China’s logistics sector is in the midst of a structural transformation, and warehouse robots sit at the center of that shift. The numbers tell a clear story. In 2025, the Chinese industrial mobile robot (AGV/AMR) market reached approximately 28 billion yuan, growing at an annual rate of around 28 percent, making it one of the fastest-growing segments in logistics automation.
Industry projections place the 2026 logistics AGV市场规模 at 12.5 to 15 billion yuan, with year-on-year growth between 22 and 26 percent. This is not an incremental improvement. This is a fundamental rewiring of how goods move through the world’s largest manufacturing and e-commerce economy.
The strategic question is no longer if automation will reshape Chinese logistics, but how fast and through which technologies. The answer hinges on a clear understanding of autonomous warehouse robots, their AGV predecessors, and the broader logistics automation strategy taking shape across Chinese industry.
AI expert Alvin Wang Graylin explains how China’s open-source strategy developed, not as a big plan by the communist party, but because they were forced by US policies, he says on Facebook.
Western e-commerce companies have brought few new developments over the past decade, and only China offers new solutions we can learn from, argues Bjorn Ognibeni, co-founder of China Briefs at the E-Commerce Expo in Berlin. Learning from China is crucial for e-commerce in the West, he adds.
In Northern China, the building of the new city Xiongan New Area is in full swing, writes China expert Ashley Dudarenokon her weblog. “These developments signaled serious progress toward creating a liveable, diverse city rather than a sterile administrative zone,” she writes.
Ashley Dudarenok:
In northern China, a new urban district is transforming expectations of what a city can be. The Xiongan New Area is being developed roughly 100 kilometers southwest of Beijing as part of a deliberate policy to disperse some non‑capital functions and promote coordinated development across the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region.
Starting in 2025, the area entered a high‑quality construction phase, with operational headquarters, universities, hospitals, a smart urban network, and green spaces rapidly taking shape. Chinese authorities describe it as a “city of the future” that blends smart infrastructure, environmental restoration, innovation clusters, and human‑centered design…
In April 2025, Xiongan had reached a pivotal stage. Large‑scale infrastructure projects and relocation efforts were underway simultaneously. New sports and cultural facilities appeared; a 40,000‑seat stadium opened in March that year.
Crucially, centrally administered state‑owned enterprises (SOEs) began moving their headquarters into the new area. The China Satellite Network Group Co., Ltd. (CSCN), for example, started operations at the end of 2024, while other SOEs were constructing headquarters nearby.
This cluster effect attracted about sixty aerospace‑information enterprises and catalyzed an industrial ecosystem spanning satellite internet, spatiotemporal information, aerospace vehicles, and intelligent manufacturing.
Relocation efforts extended beyond corporate offices. In early 2025, over 4,000 enterprises originally based in Beijing had registered operations in Xiongan. Education and healthcare institutions followed. Four universities from Beijing began building campuses, and the Xiongan branch of Peking Union Medical College Hospital was scheduled to start construction soon.
The reform and development bureau reported that investments in the new area exceeded 860 billion yuan in February 2025. These developments signaled serious progress toward creating a liveable, diverse city rather than a sterile administrative zone.
China has arrived as a superpower and wants its recognition as a superpower from the US, says Victor Shih, the Ho Miu Lam Chair in China and Pacific Relations at the University of California, San Diego, in a discussion at the National Committee on US-China Relations. That is a major shift from the past, he adds.
