Miami — Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley traded shots onstage Wednesday evening over their records on courting Chinese businesses while serving as governor in Florida and South Carolina, respectively. But one Republican presidential candidate who largely escaped those China-specific attacks on the debate stage Wednesday evening was former pharmaceutical CEO Vivek Ramaswamy, whose prior business ties to China were vast, as National Review reported earlier this week.

While serving as founder and CEO of the pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences, Ramaswamy delivered a keynote address at the 2018 U.S.-China Biopharma Innovation & Investment Summit in Shanghai. National Review has learned that summit attendees included CEOs from multiple Chinese biopharmaceutical companies directly affiliated with a controversial Chinese-government-sponsored program called the Thousand Talents Plan (TTP). TTP is the most prominent overseas talent-recruitment program in China.

In recent years, the U.S. government as well as think tanks have released reports accusing hundreds of China’s “talent” programs of recruiting overseas entrepreneurs and researchers to do the CCP’s bidding. Scientific professionals working in foreign research institutions, according to the reports, were recruited to engage in espionage and illicit technology transfers.

Note that the Ramaswamy campaign did not refute the accuracy of a transcript NR unearthed from that 2018 conference, in which he praised Chinese pharmaceutical development.

Also damaging to Ramaswamy’s current tough-on-China stance is a previously unreported excerpt of his 2018 conference remarks posted on Xueqiu, a Chinese digital-media forum for value investors. The website includes a Chinese transcript of Ramaswamy’s remarks, which conclude with these three paragraphs, according to a rough English translation:

Finally, as an individual, I not only hope to see the development of Chinese pharmaceutical companies, but also hope that Chinese companies will make great progress. We have also established a company in China, which is the first step in our journey in China, and we believe that both Chinese and American companies will be reborn to establish a new paradigm and establish a new normal.

In the past 40 years, China’s biopharmaceutical industry has achieved tremendous development due to the reform and opening-up policy. Now at the development node of China’s 40 years of reform and opening up, we are very optimistic about the future of China’s biopharmaceutical industry.

As a new generation, we hope to open a new page with China; we are willing to build a new industrial system from scratch; we are willing to cooperate closely with Chinese enterprises. We feel that the opportunities here are very great.

. . .

The previously unreported details about the 2018 summit participants and his own remarks would appear to cut against the decoupling policies that Ramaswamy has since made a critical part of his presidential campaign, especially with respect to pharmaceutical development. Some U.S.-based foreign-policy experts suggest that if China invades Taiwan in the coming years, Beijing could hold pharmaceutical supply chains hostage. By making key components of therapeutic drugs unobtainable, China could leave millions of Americans whose well-being depends on those drugs in the lurch.

The presidential candidate’s wife, Dr. Apoorva Tewari Ramaswamy, told National Review in a brief post-debate interview that Ramaswamy’s previous business associations make him better equipped than other Republican presidential candidates to combat the Chinese Communist Party.

“He’s the reason why people understand the economic risks about China. He is the one who wrote the book because of his experiences,” Ramaswamy said in reference to her husband’s 2021 book Woke, Inc., which argues for U.S. economic independence from China. “Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis were going around with his book because they learned from his experience. So for them to call him out on it is just saying that they resent someone who taught them something. It’s hypocritical.”

“You learn from doing things, not by sitting in your little castle,” she added.