Lots of people in biology writing about China focus on clinical trials as the source of speed. Clinical trials are important, but China is doing lots of things to make things go faster. Everything is vertically-integrated in a way that will be difficult for the U.S. to match.
Consider BCIs:
The most recent five-year plan (adopted in March 2026) lists brain-computer interfaces as one of six “frontier” technologies to be prioritized in China through 2030. When the government sets a national strategy, the country organizes around it.
Many of the LPs in China’s VC funds are government. Many VCs are focused on specific regions. These regional VCs often make investments into companies that are contingent on those companies moving to their city. Hangzhou is wealthy right now, and so they are investing in BCI companies and coaxing them to move into the area. Valuations for BCI companies go up, because the VC funds want to compete under this five-year plan handed down by the central government.
As the companies come in, the region builds infrastructure. Shanghai, for example, already has an entire floor in a hospital that just implants BCIs into patients. Across the street, construction has begun on a hospital devoted solely to BCIs. There are many non-human primate facilities nearby,so companies can rapidly implant their devices. Not far away, at Fudan University, is one of the world’s largest brain imaging centers for research, with many 3T, 5T and 7T MRI machines. This is all located in a relatively small area.
The landlords who run the business parks also compete to attract companies. They offer sweetheart deals. We visited one neurotech company that gets 10% of their research costs reimbursed by their landlord.
The government doesn’t sit idly after issuing the five-year plan, either. They also allocate capital to support the priorities. At Westlake University, there is an academic group that designs chips for BCIs. They said that the government reimburses two of their main costs:
1. Subscriptions to Cadence, the software that engineers use to design chips. Each seat costs about $10,000 *per month* in the United States, but this is reimbursed in China.
2. Tapeout costs. When the researchers send their designs to TSMC, those costs get paid back to them. This means BCI researchers can move super fast and don’t need to worry as much about raising capital ahead of time.
And then, of course, there are the clinical trials. BCIs can be implanted under existing IIT (or investigator-initiated trial) rules, which enables these companies to move faster than their U.S. counterparts. There are apparently a dozen-plus BCI companies in China now, many of them quite new. STAIRMED and Gestala are explicitly competing with Neuralink and Merge, for example, and seem to be making rapid progress.
Similar rules apply to other biotechnologies. Vertical-integration like this is difficult to match in a capitalist republic.
