TRADE MISSION NOTES:

2 Days before Trade Mission to China

Jason Kuo, Rheoblast

09/11/10

It is two days before my trip to Beijing and Shanghai as a member of Washington state’s trade mission. I am excited to have an opportunity to meet with representatives from China’s pharmaceutical industry and tour the technology parks.

Recent efforts in Asia to foster the growth of biotech industry have been truly impressive. Asian countries that benefitted from the semiconductor industry recognize that it is important to ride the technology wave; those that did not ride the semiconductor industry wave face decades of catching up in terms of manufacturing infrastructure, technology know-how, and worker wage. Asian countries that I have visited in general deem the biotech industry to be the next wave, and they are positioning themselves for it.

To encourage startups, Asian governments do directly invest in small companies. Sometimes that is done as a matching fund to encourage larger corporations to invest in small startups. Sometimes the money is distributed to various incubators set up by universities, nonprofits, and hospitals. Here in the US, recent job-creating legislations tend to use tax credit, which in reality only help the large corporations. We need to re-think about how to strike a proper balance so that small businesses can also have the resource to create jobs.