As President Donald Trump lands in Beijing, one major industry is missing from his business delegation—pharma.
Medtech company Illumina’s CEO, Jacob Thaysen, is the sole representative from the life sciences industry.
According to a list by The New York Times, the 17-member delegation is dominated by Wall Street and tech giants, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Tesla’s Elon Musk, as well as the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, BlackRock and Blackstone. Brian Sikes of Cargill is the only one for agriculture and food.
But pharma isn’t the only absence from Trump’s side. No entities in wholesale, retail or culture were included.
In his two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, Trump is expected to focus on trade “more than anything else,” he told reporters before leaving Washington Tuesday. Trump also wants to talk about the creation of a “board of investment” and a “board of trade” with China, Reuters reports.
Still, this lack of pharma representation stands in contrast to similar recent visits to Beijing led by Trump’s British and German counterparts.
In February, Bayer CEO Bill Anderson reportedly joined an economic delegation accompanying German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on a state visit to China.
Leaders of AstraZeneca and GSK joined U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and about 50 other delegates on his trip to China in January. During the visit, AZ unveiled a $15 billion investment in the country with plans spanning drug R&D and manufacturing.
U.S. pharma companies are apparently interested in China. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and Eli Lilly chief David Ricks attended the annual China Development Forum in Beijing in March. The two execs were also among a group of more than 40 international business leaders who met with Xi in Beijing in March 2025, shortly after Trump unleashed a round of tariffs on Chinese imports.
Deals and collaborations do not require high-profile state visits. As Trump headed to China, Bristol Myers Squibb on Tuesday unveiled a broad partnership with China’s Hengrui Pharma in a potential $15.2 billion deal encompassing 13 drug programs from the two firms.
The missing pharma voice in Trump’s delegation mirrors the topic’s relatively lower priority on the President’s agenda compared with semiconductors and artificial intelligence, or it could simply reflect the direction of the flow of investment. After all, Trump is apparently keen on wringing more investment in the U.S. from China, and not the other way around, like what many pharmas are doing.
Trump’s visit comes as sections of Washington and the industry have become increasingly wary of China’s rapid rise in the global biotech scene, even as Big Pharma and venture capitalists race to leverage the country’s innovation and fast R&D speed for the U.S. market.
Just a few days ago, the House Appropriations Committee issued a draft spending bill report that would bar the FDA from accepting clinical data generated in China, Russia, Iran or North Korea in investigational new drug applications, which are filed by sponsors with the FDA to begin clinical trials in the U.S.
“The Committee is deeply concerned about the growing influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain and drug development ecosystem,” the report says, while comparing conducting early-phase trials in China to “transferring know-how to our adversary.”
While the report is non-binding and unlikely to be adopted as is, it sends a strong signal to the agency on how Congress thinks federal funding should be spent.
In a separate opinion piece published Tuesday in Stat, Olivia Kosloff, a co-chair of a working group with the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations, argued that by licensing from Chinese biotechs, U.S. biopharma companies are giving up “the long-term viability of American biotech” in favor of chasing “short-term financial gains.”
She called for American pharmaceutical leaders to advocate for policies that could prevent American investments in Chinese biotech assets.