RA Capital's work in China: A personal viewpoint
I found the photograph in my mother’s basement: my father, dressed in the uniform of the American executive class, a Burberry trenchcoat, standing before the enormous portrait of Chairman Mao that looms over Tiananmen Square. It was spring 1977. Mao had been dead for less than a year. The Gang of Four had just fallen. And here was my father, part of United Technologies Corp.’s first tentative outreach to a nation that had just lurched, blinking, back into the world.
To understand what that photograph means, you must understand what China had just come through.
For decades, Mao demanded transformation through suffering. Farmers melted plows and pots into “backyard steel furnaces” – useless, ruinous heaps of metal – in the name of rapid industrialization. Millions of young people were turned into Red Guards and set loose to destroy temples, books, teachers, their own families. Tens of millions, dead.
When it was finally over, China’s new leaders did something remarkable: they simply decided to be pragmatic. As Deng Xiaoping famously put it, it didn’t matter what color the cat was, as long as it caught mice.
My father was one of the first cats to find its way through the door, on the understanding that China was good for UTC and UTC was good for China. By the 1980s, UTC had established manufacturing joint ventures across China – Tianjin Otis Elevators became one of the most recognizable.
Fifty years later we still can’t quite decide what China is to us. We are awed by its rise and afraid of what that rise means. We treat it as a rival to be beaten rather than a people to be understood. Countries like Japan and Germany – once genuine enemies, against whom we fought actual wars – became allies we barely think twice about. Could we find that same footing with China?
My road to Fudan
A few months after my father’s trip, three Chinese officials in town visiting UTC came to dinner at our house in Connecticut. My father included me, an act of generosity he’d later consider a serious miscalculation.
I was thirteen, and I had recently read The Search for Peking Man, which argued that 400,000-year-old skeletal remains – the fossils of our prehistoric ancestors – had been smuggled out of China by US Marines during World War II and never returned.
The officials arrived in their dark Mao suits, reserved and formal. When they mentioned they were from Peking, I seized my moment. On behalf of the United States of America, I launched into a full and heartfelt apology for the theft of Peking Man.
They lit up. One of them, who had been quietly polite all evening, became animated. He had a daughter my age. Would I like to come spend part of the summer in China, where his daughter and I could serve as ambassadors for US-China friendship?
I said I would love that very much.
Not long afterwards, my father returned to China for another trip. At an official dinner, the same gentleman rose to toast US-China friendship … and the forthcoming visit of Mr. Burgess’ daughter, who would soon be staying with his own daughter, in a further bonding of the two great nations.
My father arrived home in a towering rage. I had made an “international commitment” without his knowledge or permission. Under no circumstances would I be going to China. The subject was closed. I was sent to my room.
Naturally, that day it became my life’s mission to go to China.
Five years later, I declared East Asian Studies as my undergraduate major at Harvard and began learning Chinese. My father was apoplectic. He was certain I would never find a job. It was difficult to convince him that my college did not, in fact, offer an undergraduate major in accounting.
By my third year, I had mastered a kind of irony: a supposed expert on China, who’d never set foot there. In 1984, Harvard had over six thousand undergraduates and considered itself a cosmopolitan institution. There was exactly one undergraduate student from the PRC. My advisor introduced me to him and we are still close friends today.
My advisor also called the president of Fudan University in Shanghai and reminded him about the many Fudan students earning free PhDs in biology and chemistry at Harvard. And he asked for a single scholarship – room, board, and a living stipend – for me. Fudan said yes. (Harvard, at the time unable to see the value of an education anywhere but its own campus, called it a “gap year” and declined to recognize the credits.)
I couldn’t ask my father for money. I had to present the whole thing as a fait accompli.
In 1985, I made it to China.
I spent one of the most alive years of my life at Fudan. I traveled everywhere I could reach — hard-seat trains, transport trucks, the occasional donkey cart. Tibet. Xinjiang. Xishuangbanna. Harbin in the dead of winter, for the ice sculpture festival. All the 名胜古迹 (“historic sites and scenic spots”) in between. I never got to meet the daughter of that Chinese official who had invited me to Beijing. But my best friend to this day is a classmate I met at Fudan.
Fighting a common enemy
Fifty years after my father stood in front of Mao’s portrait, my work at RA Capital brings me back to this world I’ve loved my whole life. I work in the biotech and pharmaceutical investment industry, which is built on fundamental human biology shared by Americans and Chinese, and everyone else. We get the same cancers. We suffer from the same neurodegenerative diseases. We all lose family members to disease too soon. The researchers trying to stop those diseases don’t think in terms of geopolitical rivalry. They think in terms of the problem in front of them.
When nations are in tension, it is always the threads of shared purpose that eventually become the scaffolding for something better. What better scaffolding than the search for treatments and cures.
I’m not naïve. I understand the risks of supply chain dependence. I’m an American and I want this country to be strong and self-sufficient in medicine. But I also know – from a lifetime of experience, from a dinner table in Connecticut to a donkey cart in Yunnan – that the Chinese people are not our enemies. Disease is. And we will cure more of it together than apart.
If you haven’t already, I urge you to read the policy proposals my colleagues have prepared, which examine the serious downsides of broad R&D collaboration bans – and offer a better path: targeted supply chain protections and governance safeguards, combined with real investment in making US clinical research infrastructure more competitive. We don’t have to choose between protecting America and working with China on science. We never did.