His appearance at the 2018 pharma summit raises questions about his presidential campaign’s commitment to decoupling from China.
His appearance at the 2018 pharma summit raises questions about his presidential campaign’s commitment to decoupling from China.
T he participation of CCP-aligned executives at a 2018 biopharmaceutical conference in China that Vivek Ramaswamy attended raises new questions about his presidential campaign’s commitment to ending U.S. dependence on Chinese pharmaceuticals.
In his effort to win the Republican presidential nomination, Ramaswamy has centered his foreign-policy strategy on combating the Chinese Communist Party, even dedicating an entire issues tab of his campaign website to declaring economic independence from Beijing. Ramaswamy’s prior business connections to CCP-aligned companies are extensive, but his appearance with executives affiliated with a controversial CCP program provides an uncomfortable contrast with his present-day platform.
While serving as founder and CEO of the pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences, Ramaswamy delivered a keynote address at the 2018 U.S.-China Biopharma Innovation & Investment Summit in Shanghai. National Review has learned that summit attendees included CEOs from multiple Chinese biopharmaceutical companies directly affiliated with a controversial Chinese-government-sponsored program called the Thousand Talents Plan (TTP). TTP is the most prominent overseas talent-recruitment program in China.
In recent years, the U.S. government as well as think tanks have released reports accusing hundreds of China’s “talent” programs of recruiting overseas entrepreneurs and researchers to do the CCP’s bidding. Scientific professionals working in foreign research institutions, according to the reports, were recruited to engage in espionage and illicit technology transfers.
Ramaswamy’s 2018 conference co-panelists with connections to the controversial program include Lianyong (Leon) Chen, the CEO of 6 Dimensions Capital, founder of Frontline BioVentures, and a member of the Chinese central government’s Thousand Talents Plan’s expert review panel, as well as Yao-Chang Xu, the CEO of Abbisko Therapeutics, and Samantha Du, the CEO of Zai Lab, according to their business profiles on the professional business platform Crunchbase. A website with photos of conference panelists confirms their attendance at the summit in October 2018, notably three months after Roivant publicly announced its partnership with CITIC Private Equity Funds Management, a CCP-owned firm, to form the China-based pharmaceutical company Sinovant (though the company began operating in 2017, according to a company press release). In 2019, Roivant, Sinovant, and CITIC Securities launched Cytovant, another China-based company.
CITIC Securities and its subsidiaries are swarming with CCP security and propaganda officials, as the New York Times and Washington Post have reported at length. But a review of photographs and blog posts from the 2018 conference suggests that Ramaswamy’s public business associations with Chinese government officials and CCP-aligned investors were more extensive than previously known. Days after the conference ended, summit co-host Endpoints News published an article that includes a photo of Ramaswamy listening to a “real-time translation” of a keynote address from Dr. Jinhui Gu, the head of one of China’s top drug-development agencies. “With more than 15 years working experience in China’s highest regulatory agencies, he made it clear that there is a clear mandate for Chinese-led innovative drug development right from the top,” Endpoints News founder Arsalan Arif wrote at the time.
That same article references many other panelists’ connections to the Chinese government, including that of speaker Leon Chen. “Dr. Chen is a member of the Expert Review Panel for the Chinese Central Government’s ‘1000 Talents Project’ and thus has keen insights into the recent phenomenon of Chinese talent coming back after training and getting a foothold in America,” the article reads. According to his Crunchbase profile, Chen is also director of the board and acting CFO of CITIC Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of the same CCP-embedded parent company whose private-equity firm has numerous prior business connections to Ramaswamy.
The Thousand Talents Plan’s connections to the Chinese government are well documented. In 2015, a U.S. Senate subcommittee issued a lengthy staff report detailing the direct national-security threat to U.S. scientific research posed by Chinese talent-recruitment programs. The CCP’s talent programs recruited 60,000 overseas scientific and business professionals between 2008 and 2016, according to a recent report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Scrutiny of the program ramped up in 2019, when the U.S. Department of Energy began banning researchers from joining the Chinese talent programs. Department officials had discovered that several U.S.-based employees had been recruited to share sensitive information with Beijing in exchange for lucrative research contracts. In recent years, the Justice Department has charged multiple U.S.-based individuals for lying about their involvement with Chinese talent-recruitment programs.
Also damaging to Ramaswamy’s current tough-on-China stance is a previously unreported excerpt of his 2018 conference remarks posted on Xueqiu, a Chinese digital-media forum for value investors. The website includes a Chinese transcript of Ramaswamy’s remarks, which conclude with these three paragraphs, according to a rough English translation:
Finally, as an individual, I not only hope to see the development of Chinese pharmaceutical companies, but also hope that Chinese companies will make great progress. We have also established a company in China, which is the first step in our journey in China, and we believe that both Chinese and American companies will be reborn to establish a new paradigm and establish a new normal.
In the past 40 years, China’s biopharmaceutical industry has achieved tremendous development due to the reform and opening-up policy. Now at the development node of China’s 40 years of reform and opening up, we are very optimistic about the future of China’s biopharmaceutical industry.
As a new generation, we hope to open a new page with China; we are willing to build a new industrial system from scratch; we are willing to cooperate closely with Chinese enterprises. We feel that the opportunities here are very great.
National Review could not independently verify the excerpt of the speech; Ramaswamy declined to provide a transcript or recording of his remarks and did not respond to a question from NR about this translation’s accuracy. His spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal in August that the campaign could not track down his remarks, which according to the 2018 conference website include a keynote address and at least two panel discussions. Conference co-hosts Pharmcube and Endpoints News also did not respond to requests for a transcript or video recording of Ramaswamy’s 2018 address.
Notably, the excerpt includes photos of slide decks from Ramaswamy’s speech along with references to a 2035 biopharmaceutical timeline. That timeline is referenced in a post-conference article in Endpoints News in which Arif wrote: “Vivek Ramaswamy gave one of the most provocative speeches of the summit, and then immediately sat down with John Carroll for a fireside chat to defend his predictions. His bold call that biopharma will have figured out all of its ‘collective action problems’ by 2035 instantly sent local WeChat groups abuzz with chatter.” He continued: “Local Chinese investors and entrepreneurs that I spoke with were keenly aware of the $4 billion Vivek has raised for his Vants and the 34 programs they’ve got in the clinic. Later on in the day I saw him around the Four Seasons, having lunch with several delegates and being interrogated about his plans for Sinovant and Datavant.”
Ramaswamy’s campaign told National Review that his views on U.S.–China business relations have changed over the years, and that his own prior business dealings better equip him to deal with the China threat.
“Roivant opened a subsidiary in China at a time when thousands of other businesses were doing the same,” spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said of Ramaswamy, who stepped down from Roivant’s board in February to launch his presidential campaign. “Roivant shut down its operations there as the risks became apparent. When Vivek started his next company Strive to compete with BlackRock, he made a Day 1 commitment that no other asset manager has: he committed NOT to do business in China, and he has become the most outspoken U.S. CEO about China-specific risks.”
The previously unreported details about the 2018 summit participants and his own remarks would appear to cut against the decoupling policies that Ramaswamy has since made a critical part of his presidential campaign, especially with respect to pharmaceutical development. Some U.S.-based foreign-policy experts suggest that if China invades Taiwan in the coming years, Beijing could hold pharmaceutical supply chains hostage. By making key components of therapeutic drugs unobtainable, China could leave millions of Americans whose well-being depends on those drugs in the lurch.