The Pacific Divide · an investigation
China licenses foreign-linked drug trials, keeps the genetic samples inside its borders, and until 2023 published every approval. Washington used those approvals as evidence against the laboratory company behind many of the trials. One American investor chairs a company whose trials appear in both files, and none of the rules reviewed here, in either country, addresses a seat of that kind.
A review of China’s published human-genetic-resources approvals, Hong Kong stock-exchange filings, a federal court record, federal lobbying reports and company announcements. One picture fills in as you scroll, and every claim carries the document it rests on.
Scroll to cross the Pacific
What was reviewed
The ledgerChina’s published approval batches for human genetic resources from 2017 to September 2023; the Hong Kong listing documents and reports of Hua Medicine, Brii Biosciences and JW Therapeutics; the memorandum opinion in WuXi AppTec’s suit against the Department of Defense; PhRMA’s federal lobbying reports; budgets and plans from Wuhan and Beijing; and announcements by Anthropic, Novartis, ARCH Venture Partners and the companies they back. Nothing here was leaked, because all of it was disclosed.
DisclosureResearch for this piece was assisted by Claude, a model made by Anthropic, which is one of the companies described here. Every claim rests on the linked document, not on the model.
Seven dates
June 2020Beijing approves Hua Medicine’s pivotal trial on its international-cooperation track, with WuXi AppTec’s Shanghai laboratory among the central labs.
Oct. 2022The science ministry publishes a batch naming WuXi as the testing lab on trials for Novartis and other Western drugmakers.
Sept. 2023The ministry’s public approval lists stop.
Feb. 2024Robert Nelsen, Hua’s chairman, argues against banning WuXi.
Apr. 2026Novartis’s chief executive joins Anthropic’s board.
Aug. 2026A federal judge suspends WuXi’s Pentagon designation, and ARCH founds a US company to license a Chinese drug.
Sept. 2026A federal appeals court upholds the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk.
What follows is who sits where, according to what each of them filed.
The terms
Seven words recur on this page, and each stands for a category in the filings.
The wallA government’s gate for one kind of asset: companies and models in Washington, samples and data in Beijing.
The licenceA numbered Chinese approval to collect, store or research human genetic material.
The rowOne line in an approval list, naming the sponsor, the hospital, the trial contractor and the testing lab.
The stakeAn equity holding as a filing discloses it, always dated.
The seatA directorship or chairmanship as a company lists it.
The supply lineA lab, trial-management or supplier relationship shown in a filing.
The gapWhat neither wall’s rules, as reviewed here, address.
The figure has three bands: Beijing’s wall at the top, Washington’s at the bottom, and the Pacific between them, where the seats sit. Green belongs to Beijing’s side and blue to Washington’s; every line is a document, and every circle opens its filing when tapped.
Part one
Each government runs a licensing or listing system for a particular kind of asset, and each looks at something different.
Step one · the first wall
Several US controls on biotechnology work through lists. Section 1260H lets the Pentagon designate companies it finds to be Chinese military companies; the BIOSECURE Act, enacted on December 18, 2025 as section 851 of the annual defense bill, requires a list of biotechnology companies of concern that federal money cannot touch, with the first list due in December 2026. The newest gate is run by a company: in September 2026 Anthropic opened a verification program that decides which life-sciences organizations receive more permissive biology capabilities from its models, working with the US government.
Section 1260HA 2021 defense-law provision under which the Pentagon publishes an annual list of companies it finds to be Chinese military companies operating in the United States.
Each of these instruments names a company, a contractor or a model. As written, none of them addresses who sits on a company’s board or where that director’s other seats are.
Receipt: WuXi v. DoD opinion · Public Law 119-60, sec. 851 · Anthropic, Sept. 17, 2026
The map of the United States brightens at the bottom of the figure. A circle marks Washington’s lists, and another marks Anthropic in South San Francisco.
Step two · the second wall
Chinese law places human genetic material under state licensing. Collecting it, storing it or using it in research with a foreign party requires a licence, issued by the science ministry until May 2024 and by the National Health Commission since. Leftover trial samples go back to the hospital or are destroyed, anything kept long-term must sit in an approved biobank, and data bound for another country must first be backed up with the state bioinformatics centre in Beijing.
Human genetic resourcesThe regulatory term (人类遗传资源) for human tissue, blood, cells and DNA, and the information drawn from them, governed by State Council Decree 717 of 2019.
The commission’s 2025 guidance says leftover samples may be returned to the provider or held at the declared site for the declared period and then destroyed, and that samples kept long-term “should be stored in an approved biobank.” A draft revision issued in May 2026 would confirm trial filings on the same working day when no genetic data leaves China.
Receipt: NHC guidance, 2025 · Handover notice, 2024 · Data prior-report procedure · Draft rules notice, 2026
The map of China brightens at the top, and a circle marks the licence office and the bioinformatics centre in Beijing.
Step three · the licences, 2020 to 2023
Each licence to store genetic material carries a public number. The first under the 2019 rules, BC0001 in January 2020, went to a company in Wuhan’s East Lake zone, whose management committee now pays it about ¥150 million over five years to run. By September 2023, when the public lists stop, the ministry had published 208 of them. As you scroll, the year advances and the dots fill in city by city: hospitals in cream, universities and state bodies in gray, and the thin layer of companies in green.
Preservation licencePermission to store human genetic resources long-term (保藏), numbered BC, with a new series each year.
Counts from the ministry’s published batches: 16 in 2020, 63 in 2021, 79 mapped of 80 in 2022, and 50 through September 2023. Fifteen companies appear; the rest are hospitals, universities, disease-control centres and state institutes. Gaps in the numbering match applications received minus those approved. A 2025 study counts 92 preservation permits for all of 2023 and 82 for 2024, and the zone’s 2026 budget sets ¥40 million for the Wuhan biobank’s operations that year.
Receipt: 2020 batch 1 · Wuhan institute budget, 2026 · Frontiers in Genetics, 2025
A year counter in the Pacific band advances from 2020 to 2023 as you scroll. Dots appear across China, clustering most densely in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen; green company dots are scattered and few.
Step four · penalize, then readmit
The record shows penalties followed by later approvals. In October 2016 the ministry penalized WuXi AppTec’s Suzhou subsidiary for sending 5,165 human serum samples abroad declared as canine plasma; WuXi says remediation was confirmed in June 2017. In 2018 it penalized Kunhao Ruicheng for receiving and storing 567 AstraZeneca samples without a licence. Both names appear as testing labs on approvals the ministry published in October 2022.
Receipt: 国科罚〔2016〕1号 · 国科罚〔2018〕3号 · 2022 batch 21
The licence dots dim. A red ring marks Suzhou, and a note lists both penalties and their return as testing labs in 2022.
Part two
Beijing published who handled its samples, row by row, and Washington read the rows.
Step five · anatomy of a row
Every international-cooperation approval is a row: the sponsor that pays, the hospital that leads, the contractor that runs the trial and the third-party laboratory that tests the samples. Together the rows form the most detailed public record of who handles China’s clinical samples, and until 2023 anyone could read them.
International-cooperation trackThe approval route (国际合作科学研究审批, numbered GH) for research in which a foreign party takes part.
Receipt: Ministry approval notices
An empty approval card appears over China with four fields: sponsor, hospital, contractor and lab.
Step six · June 16, 2020
Batch 11 lists approval GH1301, a Phase III trial of the diabetes drug dorzagliatin sponsored by Hua Medicine’s Shanghai company, led by Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital and run by Tigermed, with three central labs: KingMed, Covance Shanghai and WuXi AppTec’s Shanghai laboratory. The regulator placed it on the international-cooperation track. Hua’s 2018 listing documents describe the filing rule for “a foreign-invested sponsor” and say Hua and its hospitals filed for the Phase III trials; its Shanghai company was set up in 2011 as wholly foreign-owned.
Row 108 of the same batch, GH1302, is a kidney-impairment study of the same drug with WuXi’s Shanghai lab as the only central lab. The trial’s companion study with metformin, GH2455, followed in September 2020 with the same three labs.
Receipt: 2020 batch 11, rows 107–108 · Hua filing, regulatory overview · Hua filing, history
The card fills in. A circle lights at Shanghai for Hua Medicine, and a dashed supply line connects it to WuXi’s lab.
Step seven · October 31, 2022
Batch 21 lists WuXi AppTec as the testing lab on approvals for Novartis, Bristol Myers Squibb, AbbVie, Eli Lilly and Merck, among others, including two Novartis trials at Peking University People’s Hospital. The batch shows WuXi serving many Western sponsors, and the ministry published the list.
Receipt: 2022 batch 21
The card changes to batch 21, listing Novartis and other Western sponsors with WuXi as the lab.
Step eight · August 7, 2026
When the Pentagon designated WuXi AppTec a Chinese military company, all five of its findings, the court wrote, derived from a single source, the ministry’s October 2022 compilation of genetic-resource approvals, including a PLA General Hospital study that lists Novo Nordisk as the applicant; WuXi sued, and on August 7, 2026, Chief Judge James Boasberg suspended the designation with a preliminary injunction that the department continues to contest.
The opinion also shows that the record’s “5.32%” figure for an aviation-industry fund was a share of that fund’s portfolio, not ownership of WuXi. The case is WuXi AppTec v. Department of Defense, No. 26-2069, in the District of Columbia.
Receipt: Memorandum opinion · BioWorld, Sept. 22, 2026
The card lifts off China, crosses the Pacific band and settles beside Washington. A red dotted designation line runs from the court to WuXi.
Step nine · after September 2023
The ministry’s last published batch is dated September 18, 2023. Oversight moved to the National Health Commission on May 1, 2024, and its results could not be reached from outside China for this review; approvals continue, at more than 80 preservation permits a year, but rows of the kind the Pentagon cited are no longer publicly posted in the same form. The records reviewed do not say why.
ReviewCause undocumented. The 2024 handover is a plausible explanation and the page does not suggest otherwise.Receipt: Handover notice · Frontiers in Genetics, 2025
The licence dots and the card turn gray, and a note reads that the public lists end on September 18, 2023.
Part three
The map now gives way to relationships, and every circle moves to its role.
Step ten · Shanghai
Hua Medicine is a Shanghai drugmaker founded by Chen Li and listed in Hong Kong. Robert Nelsen of ARCH Venture Partners joined its board in April 2010, and the company’s 2011 financing added one new investor, WuXi PharmaTech’s corporate venture arm, alongside ARCH, Fidelity Biosciences and Venrock.
Receipt: Hua governance · Hua, Sept. 20, 2011
Every circle slides from its city to its role. China’s regulators sit at the left of the top band, WuXi at its center, Hua to the right; Washington’s gates sit at the left of the bottom band. A green licence line runs from the licence office to Hua.
Step eleven · the supply lines
WuXi appears in Hua’s filings in five capacities. It was a shareholder, at 7.01 percent at the end of 2024; it held a board seat through a WuXi investment manager who served from October 2023 to June 2025; it managed Hua’s clinical trials, for RMB 9.7 million in 2017 under a 2018 cap of RMB 50.5 million; it tested the trial samples as a central lab; and in 2025 it was Hua’s largest supplier, at 31.9 percent of purchases, still described as controlled by a substantial shareholder.
Hua announced the director’s appointment on October 12, 2023, describing him as a senior investment manager at a WuXi AppTec subsidiary, and his resignation on June 25, 2025. Hua’s 2025 annual report still describes the WuXi group as controlled by a substantial shareholder. The page reports the dates and assigns no motive.
Receipt: Hua annual report, 2024 · Director appointment, 2023 · Resignation, 2025 · Hua annual report, 2025 · Hua filing, connected transactions · 2020 batch 11
Five lines draw one at a time from WuXi to Hua, labeled stake, board seat, trial manager, central lab and 31.9 percent of purchases.
Part four
One person holds roles on both shores, each of them disclosed in a filing.
Step twelve · the chairman
Nelsen, a co-founder of ARCH, is Hua’s non-executive chairman, and an ARCH fund holds 11.84 percent of the company. On the figure he sits in the Pacific because his seats reach both shores, and every one of them is disclosed in a filing.
SeatA directorship or chairmanship as a company’s own filings list it.
Receipt: Hua interim report, 2026
A cream circle appears in the Pacific band, labeled Nelsen, with a seat line up to Hua. ARCH appears in the bottom band with a blue stake line to Hua.
Step thirteen · February 22, 2024
In a February 2024 interview Nelsen warned against banning WuXi: “we should be encouraging U.S. manufacturing, we should be encouraging the reimagining of manufacturing in biology.” BioCentury’s article identified him as Hua’s chairman; its written account does not show whether he raised the role himself. WuXi later reprinted his words in its own compilation, “BIOSECURE ACT: What They’re Saying,” attributed to ARCH and without mentioning Hua, and the record does not show whether he knew.
Receipt: BioCentury · WuXi compilation
The quote appears in the Pacific band, and a gray dotted advocacy line runs from Nelsen to WuXi.
Step fourteen · the other shore
ARCH co-founded Xaira, an AI drug-discovery company in South San Francisco, and Nelsen sits on its board. On September 17, 2026, Anthropic named Xaira as an early-access organization in its Life Sciences Verification Program. F-Prime Capital, the renamed Fidelity Biosciences, invested in Hua’s 2011 round and now holds a Xaira board seat, so a second investor has held roles at both companies.
ReviewNo F-Prime or Fidelity entity appears among Hua’s holders of 5 percent or more at Dec. 31, 2024 (2024 annual report, p. 35), so any current stake is below the disclosure line or nil; the line to Hua is drawn as a past investment.Receipt: Xaira team · Anthropic, Sept. 17, 2026 · Business Wire, 2015
Xaira appears in the bottom band with a seat line from Nelsen and a blue dotted access line into Anthropic. F-Prime appears beside ARCH with lines to both Xaira and Hua.
Part five
One fund’s China investing, and the year the direction reversed.
Step fifteen · 2010 to 2026
ARCH’s own list of current and past holdings names 17 companies that are based in China or came through WuXi. As you scroll, the years advance and they fill in, with WuXi’s role marked where one exists: it co-founded JW Therapeutics in 2016, invested in CStone and AnchorDx, and signed a priority-access agreement at Brii’s launch, and in 2015 it bought NextCODE, which ARCH had funded two years earlier. Nelsen sat on Brii’s board until mid-2024 and is a current director of SciNeuro, launched in Shanghai in 2020.
ARCH funds held 6.18 percent of Brii each through two vehicles at June 30, 2025, and 1.69 percent of JW Therapeutics at its 2020 listing. WuXi Healthcare Ventures, an early CStone investor, is now a 6 Dimensions Capital fund.
Receipt: ARCH portfolio list, 2024 · JW prospectus · WuXi 6-K, 2015 · Brii launch · SciNeuro board
A year counter advances from 2010 to 2026. Companies appear along the bottom of the China band as ARCH invests, each with a blue stake line from ARCH; late in the sequence dashed WuXi lines reach JW, CStone, AnchorDx and Brii.
Step sixteen · the reversal
In February 2024 Nelsen said ARCH was “watching and thinking about China, rather than actively investing.” In August 2026 ARCH founded Sentivera, a US company licensing a drug from Chengdu’s Haisco for every market outside Greater China, and Novartis has licensed Chinese-discovered drugs from Argo, Legend and Baiyu. Capital and drug rights now cross the Pacific in both directions, while Chinese rules require the samples behind them to stay in licensed labs and the data to be backed up in Beijing before it leaves.
Receipt: Haisco–Sentivera · Argo–Novartis · Legend–Novartis · Baiyu–Novartis
Dashed blue deal lines run from Haisco to Sentivera and from Argo, Legend and Baiyu to Novartis. A lock appears over China with the note that samples and data stay.
Part six
A second seat on the Pacific, this one inside the company that runs the private gate.
Step seventeen · April 14, 2026
Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust appointed Novartis chief executive Vas Narasimhan to the company’s board, and his appointment gave the trust’s appointees a majority. Novartis now lists “Board member, Anthropic” among his current roles.
A month before the appointment, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk under a federal procurement-security law, after the company declined to remove contract restrictions on fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. On August 27, 2026, a federal district judge vacated a related designation and a government-wide directive, and on September 25 a divided federal appeals court upheld the March designation.
Long-Term Benefit TrustAnthropic’s independent trust, which appoints a share of the company’s directors.
Receipt: Anthropic, Apr. 14, 2026 · Novartis executive profile · Anthropic, Feb. 26, 2026 · National Law Review, Aug. 2026 · Courthouse News, Sept. 25, 2026
A dotted ring appears around Anthropic. A second cream circle appears in the Pacific band, labeled Narasimhan, with seat lines to Anthropic and to Novartis.
Step eighteen · in the rows, then out
The October 2022 batch lists WuXi’s Shanghai lab on two Novartis trials. In April 2024 Novartis’s chief financial officer, Harry Kirsch, told reporters the company was reworking its Chinese contractor relationships so that, by the time BIOSECURE took effect, “we will have no exposure from our planning.” In March 2026 Novartis also pledged more than RMB 3.3 billion for its Beijing plant and Shanghai campus.
ReviewPart of the Shanghai campus money is co-funded with other investors, per Chinanews. Kirsch named no company.Receipt: 2022 batch 21 · Fierce Pharma, Apr. 2024 · Chinanews, Mar. 2026
A dashed supply line runs from WuXi to Novartis, marked as past. A blue stake line runs from Novartis up to Novartis China, labeled with the pledge, and a note quotes the chief financial officer.
Step nineteen · the association
Narasimhan chaired PhRMA’s board from February 2023 to February 2024 and remains a director. PhRMA’s federal lobbying reports list the BIOSECURE bills in every quarter of 2024 and again in the third quarter of 2025, while in public the association took no position on them.
ReviewLobbying forms show which bills were lobbied on, not what was asked for. The page says “lobbied on,” never “lobbied against.”Receipt: PhRMA, 2023 · PhRMA lobbying report, Q1 2024 · BioPharma Dive, Sept. 2024
PhRMA appears in the bottom band with a seat line from Narasimhan and a gray dotted advocacy line to the BIOSECURE list.
Step twenty · 1914
Anthropic’s verification program decides which organizations receive more permissive biology capability. Its board includes a pharmaceutical chief executive, and one of its first participants has a director who chairs a Shanghai drugmaker in China’s approval rows. The United States once wrote a rule for this shape: Section 8 of the Clayton Act, passed in 1914, bars one person from serving on the boards of competing companies without any proof of collusion, on the view that the shared seat itself creates the risk, and in October 2022 seven directors resigned from five boards after the Justice Department raised it. Section 8 reaches only competitors, and none of the rules reviewed here, on either side, includes a comparable provision for seats that span both walls.
Receipt: 15 U.S.C. § 19 · Justice Department, Oct. 19, 2022
A gray template appears in the Pacific band: two boxes labeled rival A and rival B joined by one director, the shape Section 8 forbids.
Part seven
The one thing this page does not contain.
Step twenty-one · the empty gate
The records reviewed show no transfer of Anthropic’s models, research data or biological materials to Hua Medicine, WuXi or the Wuhan biobank, and in the approvals published through 2020, Hua’s samples were tested at licensed labs, WuXi’s Shanghai laboratory among them, under Chinese approvals. Each wall’s rules, as reviewed here, address a particular kind of asset, and the seats described on this page fall outside those categories.
Every seat on this page appears in a public filing, and none of the rules reviewed here addresses it.
Questions the records reviewed do not answer: which labs and biobanks have held Hua’s trial samples, and whether leftovers were returned or destroyed; how Hua’s Shanghai company is classified for genetic-resource purposes; whether Nelsen knew WuXi reprinted his words; whether any Xaira project involves Hua or WuXi; and whether Anthropic’s verification considers participants’ directors’ other seats.
Receipt: this page, steps one through twenty.
The full figure, every line in place. In the Pacific band an empty dashed gate stands with the label who watches the seat.
Two pictures, both drawn from filings.
Every line in this story can be read through those two pictures. When Hua’s trials were approved on the international-cooperation track with WuXi as the lab, that was a row in Beijing’s ledger; when the Pentagon cited the same kind of row, the ledger became evidence; when WuXi reprinted Nelsen’s words, a contractor quoted a chairman of its client; and when a drugmaker’s chief joined the board of the company that runs a private biology gate, the second seat appeared.
All of this is on the public record. The filings show the seats, and the rules reviewed here address companies, contractors, models, samples and data.
Every system you do not understand is a system that can manipulate you.
You understand this one.