AstraZeneca Says Its Employees Under Investigation by Chinese Authorities

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The new probe into pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca comes as foreign investors’ confidence in the world’s second-largest economy wanes.

Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca confirmed on Thursday that “a small number” of its employees are under investigation by the Chinese authorities.

In an email statement to The Epoch Times, an AstraZeneca spokesperson said the company is aware that “a small number of our employees in China are under investigation” and that it has “no further information to share at this point.”

Media reports earlier on Thursday said that AstraZeneca employees had been taken into custody by the Chinese authorities for allegedly breaching China’s data law and importing medicine that didn’t have approval. Bloomberg, which broke the news based on anonymous sources, said that the detained staff are Chinese citizens, and police in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen led the probe.

According to its website, the British-headquartered drugmaker has set up offices in multiple Chinese cities—including Shanghai, Beijing, and the southern export hub Guangzhou—since it entered the Chinese market in 1993.

AstraZeneca has employed more than 16,000 people in China across different sectors, including research and development, production, and marketing, according to David Fredrickson, executive vice president of AstraZeneca. The British-Swedish drugmaker has 90,000 employees globally.

The probe into AstraZeneca comes after a series of raids and arrests of foreign companies’ employees that cast a chilling effect on foreign investors.

In August, Japan’s Astellas Pharma said one of its employees, who had been detained in China since March 2023 on suspicion of espionage, was indicted by Chinese prosecutors. The Japanese drugmaker didn’t identify the individual or disclose the charges.

Chinese police raided Mintz Group’s Beijing office in May 2023 and detained five of its local employees. Beijing authorities later fined the U.S. due diligence firm $1.5 million for conducting what they called “foreign-related statistical investigations” without approval.

Also, in May last year, state media confirmed that officers from the Ministry of State Security, China’s top foreign intelligence agency, raided Capvision’s offices in Beijing, Shanghai, and several other Chinese cities.

In April 2023, Chinese authorities questioned employees of U.S. consulting firm Bain & Co. in Shanghai.

In recent years, the Chinese regime has revised a host of laws and regulations to tighten its control of information flows to the United States and other countries. These efforts include requiring businesses operating in China to store collected data in local servers and banning the transfer of information that the regime considers to be related to national security.

In one of its latest moves, Beijing broadened its already stringent state secrets law in February, including the concept of “work secrets,” information that is not state secrets but would cause “certain adverse impact if leaked.”

This month, new rules for implementing the updated state security law came into effect. The regulation, which focuses on data security, adds to concerns among businesses that they could be targeted for engaging in regular intelligence-gathering activities.

The new investigation also comes as foreign investors’ confidence in the world’s second-largest economy wanes. In the second quarter of this year, record amounts of funds were pulled out of China, with foreign direct investment in the country plunging to $14.8 billion, according to primary data from China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange.