China as an ‘Emerging Biotech Power’

Asia's dramatic entry on to the global biotech scene has not gone unnoticed by commentators and social scientists. Countries like China, India, South Korea and Singapore have been identified as ‘emerging biotech powers’. Consequently scholars have begun examining the particularities of how biotechnologies (eg stem cell science, genetic testing and reproductive medicine) have come to be taken up and grounded in a variety of cultural, legal and socioeconomic contexts. They have also examined how governments, scientists, clinicians and others have been engaged in efforts to build up endogenous biotech sectors as a part of nation-building strategies. In this article, rather than attempting to answer questions of what makes biotechnology particularly Asian, I will instead investigate how demarcations and boundaries are mooted in global negotiations of what constitutes ‘good’ biotechnology. The analysis is based on a collaborative project between Chinese and European scientists and experts on the ethical governance of biomedical and biological research. I show how an underlying condition for the negotiations that took place within this collaboration was the proposition that difference matters when it comes to developing, organising, carrying out and overseeing biotechnological research in a particular country.