The pharmaceutical manufacturing industry is one of China’s industries that opened to the outside world at the earliest. Since reform and opening up began, China, by virtue of its competitive labor, preferential industrial policies and huge consumer markets, has attracted foreign-funded pharmaceutical enterprises to invest in and lay out their pharmaceutical manufacturing business in China and promoted continuous developmental of China's pharmaceutical manufacturing industry.

Over recent years, China has intensively issued a series of policies to promote the reform in the pharmaceutical field and to support and standardize the development of pharmaceutical industry, providing a good institutional and policy guarantee for the sound development of pharmaceutical manufacturing industry and the fair competition between domestically-funded and foreign-funded enterprises.

China, the world's second-largest economy and pharmaceutical market, only after the United States, has been playing an increasingly growing role in the global pharmaceutical market, both as a consumer country and as a crucial link in the global pharmaceutical industrial and supply chains.

Sectors such as biomedicine, vaccines, antivirus solutions, and in particular, rare diseases and chronic disease treatments, have especially huge growth potential.

China's continuous opening-up has attracted an increasing number of multinational pharmaceutical companies to fully participate in China's market, initially being distributed in coastal cities such as Shanghai, Tianjin, as well as Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, Suzhou in Jiangsu province and Guangzhou in Guangdong province.

Their investments have expanded to cities in inner regions, such as Changsha in Hunan province, Wuhan in Hubei province, Chengdu in Sichuan province and Xi'an in Shaanxi province. They have also expanded investments from focusing on market and manufacturing to R&D in China.