Pharmaceutical corporate power, traditional medical knowledge, and intellectual property governance in China

Abstract

In China, recent years have witnessed significant growth in the pharmaceutical industry and an acceleration in pharmaceutical innovation. As a knowledge-intensive sector, the growth of the pharmaceutical industry in China marks an increasing need for protecting the enormous amounts of money invested in research and development. Arguably, the most efficient way for industry actors to recover their investments is through granting a limited duration of exclusive IP rights for the use and production of their products. Against this backdrop, over the past decades, China has adopted a series of IP-related laws and regulatory policies in China. On this basis, corporate demands and legislative efforts in China have led us to believe that a sound IP system that is compatible with China’s development needs would necessarily help stimulate investment, facilitate technology transfer, and more importantly, allocate the rights and benefits over knowledge and resources among various stakeholders. This is because, at first sight, the IP rights approach contains an obvious solution to the problem of misappropriation or free riding by addressing the problem of non-excludability of traditional medical knowledge (TMK) and associated genetic resources. However, the real picture couldn’t be more complex and different. The analysis of this article finds that China’s existing IP systems supply a conducive context for pharmaceutical corporations to exploit the system’s full strategic potential in plundering TMK and associated genetic resources. This situation has placed local communities and other TMK holders in China at a disadvantage.