A steady march of investments in U.S. high-technology sectors by Chinese companies from telecom to biotech will come into focus this week in high-level talks in Washington, DC, that will cover a proposed bilateral investment treaty, Reuters reports.
Top officials from the U.S. and China are slated to meet Tuesday and Wednesday as part of broader security talks linked to the investment treaty, Reuters said.
The meeting comes at a time of enhanced tech investment in the U.S. by China that is paying off, Reuters said. Citing an analysis of a Thomson Reuters global intellectual property database, the news agency said that China is "pouring capital into U.S. research as well as buying other assets."
Inventions patented by companies from China with at least one U.S. researcher named almost doubled worldwide in the last three years, reaching 910 in 2014, according to Reuters.
"We have established a beachhead," Vincent Xiang, who heads international investment at Humanwell Healthcare Group, a Chinese drug company, told Reuters.
The company has invested more than $50 million into a New Jersey subsidiary.
But many of the research efforts are incremental as well, Reuters noted, citing the case of Humanwell as it looks initially at tweaks to existing drugs such as making a pill form over an existing injection.
Reuters also noted that at the other end, foreign direct investment in China from the United States makes up just over 1% of the FDI sunk into Chinese businesses by all nations, citing U.S. government figures.
In biotech, China has pushed genomic research at home and abroad with companies like Nasdaq-listed WuXi AppTec ($WX) building new cell manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and offering a global web of big data applications to expand its expertise through WuXi NextCODE.
- here's the story from Reuters