According to www.scmp.com, China now supplies 40 per cent of global active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), the core chemicals that confer therapeutic effect in medicines.
Strategic dependency deepens upstream
The vulnerability extends beyond finished drugs to foundational inputs: nearly 41 per cent of key starting materials (KSMs) — basic chemical precursors used to synthesize APIs for drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — are sourced exclusively from China, according to the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
This concentration has triggered high-level alarm. In November 2026, the Atlantic Council urged coordinated action among the United States, the European Union, India, and Mexico to strengthen medical supply chain resilience and reduce reliance on Chinese-sourced KSMs and APIs. The report emphasized multilateral collaboration as essential to mitigating single-source risk.
Think tanks sound the alarm
The Council on Foreign Relations, an American think tank, warned in a report published last month that dependence on Chinese pharmaceutical ingredients could provide Beijing with geopolitical leverage comparable to its dominance in rare earth elements — a strategic advantage repeatedly demonstrated during the 2025 trade dispute.
“Dependence on Chinese pharmaceutical ingredients could provide Beijing with leverage comparable to its dominance in rare earths.” — Council on Foreign Relations, report published June 2026
The warning reflects growing institutional consensus. As noted by Alice Li, senior economics reporter at the South China Morning Post, the concern is not about retail pharmacy inventory but about the upstream chemical infrastructure — where petroleum-derived compounds and biological feedstocks are converted into API building blocks. That segment has seen rapid expansion in China over the past five years, with output growth accelerating markedly since 2021.
Geopolitical parallels and policy responses
U.S. policymakers have drawn direct analogies between pharmaceutical inputs and other critical supply chains — notably rare earth elements and commercial drones — where China holds near-monopoly positions in production, extraction, or refining. These dependencies conferred tangible negotiating power during bilateral friction in 2025, reinforcing fears that medical supply chains could become instruments of coercion.
Efforts to diversify are already underway. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched the $1.2 billion Advanced Manufacturing Medical Countermeasures program in Q3 2025, targeting domestic API synthesis capacity. Meanwhile, the European Commission activated emergency provisions under the EU Pharmaceutical Strategy in May 2026 to fast-track regulatory approvals for non-Chinese KSM suppliers.
Structural barriers to de-risking
Despite these initiatives, experts caution that nearshoring or friend-shoring pharmaceutical inputs faces steep technical and economic hurdles. API manufacturing requires highly specialized infrastructure, stringent regulatory validation (often taking 18–24 months per facility), and economies of scale that China achieved over two decades.
As Alice Li reported on 16 July 2026, Western efforts remain in early stages: no single non-Chinese country currently supplies more than 7 per cent of global APIs, and India — the largest alternative supplier — still relies on Chinese-sourced KSMs for over 65 per cent of its own API output. This layered dependency underscores why supply chain professionals view API resilience as a multi-year, capital-intensive challenge rather than a near-term fix.
Source: South China Morning Post
Compiled from international media by the SCI.AI editorial team.
