A development plan for the high-quality growth of the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) industry from 2026 to 2030 has been jointly issued by eight government bodies, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The plan outlines objectives for the next five years, aiming to establish a preliminary collaborative development system across the entire TCM industrial chain by 2030. Key goals include enhancing the stable supply capacity of crucial TCM raw materials, significantly advancing digital and green transformation, achieving breakthroughs in core technologies, and substantially improving collaborative innovation within the sector.
The strategy focuses on four main areas. First, it aims to markedly improve development quality by steadily increasing the scale and efficiency of the TCM industry, raising the level of industrial concentration, and enhancing quality management. The plan calls for nurturing a group of leading TCM enterprises with strong leadership and fostering 60 high-standard raw material production bases.
Second, the plan seeks to create a more robust collaborative system, strengthening coordination between upstream and downstream segments such as herbal cultivation and processing, R&D, production, and distribution services. It also involves establishing five centers dedicated to upholding tradition while fostering innovation in TCM manufacturing.
Third, the initiative aims to stimulate the continuous emergence of innovative products. This includes facilitating the market approval of a batch of innovative TCM drugs, cultivating 10 new major proprietary Chinese medicine varieties, and promoting the conversion of certain hospital-prepared TCM formulations into innovative medicines.
Fourth, the strategy targets breakthroughs in digital and green upgrades. This will involve formulating or revising 10 industry standards related to digital technologies in TCM production, supporting the construction of digital innovation platforms, encouraging corporate digital transformation, publicizing 20 exemplary cases of digital upgrades, building 20 smart factories, and establishing 10 green factories.
To achieve these objectives, the plan proposes 15 specific tasks across six key action areas: improving raw material quality and stable supply, enhancing collaborative innovation, upgrading manufacturing capabilities, revitalizing ethnic medicine industries, promoting renowned TCM products, and cultivating卓越 enterprises.
Regarding the promotion of famous TCM products, the plan emphasizes creating high-quality proprietary Chinese medicines. It advocates for stronger protection of intellectual property related to time-honored brands, trademarks, and traditional techniques. Companies are encouraged to refine production processes and formulations for existing medicines to improve patient compliance and ease of use, thereby boosting both clinical and market value. The plan also involves identifying TCM varieties with significant clinical potential in batches to develop new major products. Collaboration between TCM manufacturers, e-commerce platforms, and media is encouraged to provide patients with convenient and efficient medication access. Furthermore, leveraging platforms like China's list of famous consumer products will help systematically build a portfolio of renowned TCM items.
Ensuring a stable supply of raw materials is another critical focus. The plan calls for establishing high-standard raw material production bases, encouraging leading companies to leverage their resources to build such bases in key producing regions. Support will be given to distribution enterprises to develop intelligent logistics and storage management systems for medicinal herbs. Enhancing primary processing at the source, upgrading key technologies and quality standards, and accelerating the development and application of technical specifications for production and processing are also prioritized. Research into the wild cultivation, artificial breeding, and development of substitutes for rare medicinal materials will be supported to alleviate resource shortages.
Concurrently, the plan includes actions to enhance manufacturing capability, such as increasing the centralized production level of prepared herbal slices, accelerating the establishment of national standards for processing and formula granules, and improving the quality standard system. Promoting digital and green transformation in TCM manufacturing is emphasized, encouraging joint research on key common digital technologies to develop intelligent production systems for critical processes like production, quality control, inspection, and dispensing, ensuring consistent quality. Optimizing the end-to-end quality traceability system is also highlighted, with industry associations and leading enterprises encouraged to develop and promote traceability information management systems.
According to data released by the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine in March 2025, a national survey of TCM resources identified over 18,000 types of medicinal resources and their distribution. Among the 600 commonly used herbs, more than 300 can now be cultivated or farmed artificially, and the industrial production of substitutes or artificial breeding methods for rare materials like artificial musk has been achieved.
A company representative noted that the plan treats the stable supply of TCM resources as a cornerstone for the industry. Current challenges include insufficient standardization in cultivation, a predominance of small-scale growers, immature breeding techniques for certain herbs, and incomplete traceability systems, which hinder high-quality development. The plan addresses these by promoting the development of TCM seed industries, standardizing field management, strengthening Good Agricultural Practice (GAP) base construction, and establishing a comprehensive traceability system to ensure control from "seed source" to "raw material."
Regarding collaborative innovation, the plan proposes strengthening the collaborative innovation system, enhancing the transformation and application of scientific and technological achievements in the TCM field, and cultivating new quality productive forces. It aims to deeply empower the R&D of new TCM drugs by utilizing next-generation information technologies like artificial intelligence and big data to build knowledge graphs and graph neural networks for classical formulas and renowned TCM practitioners' experiential prescriptions. Innovation and improvement of already-marketed proprietary Chinese medicines are encouraged to enhance efficacy. Support for clinical trials of new TCM drugs and the construction of an open collaborative R&D system are also emphasized to accelerate discovery and innovation, shorten development cycles, and reduce costs.
Another pharmaceutical company commented that the plan specifically addresses the innovative improvement of classical formulas after they enter the market. It stresses the importance of post-market research as a key lever, alongside accelerating the transformation of results, to better serve clinical needs and benefit patients. Implementing this requires a coordinated effort between supply-side achievement transformation and demand-side application guidance, fostering the full-lifecycle cultivation of classical formulas. This involves ensuring successful market entry by refining key information verification and promoting differentiated development based on major clinical needs to increase the variety of available classical formula products. It also entails strengthening post-market clinical research, conducting re-evaluations using real-world evidence, continuously supplementing efficacy and safety data, generating reliable evidence for specific conditions and suitable populations, and optimizing medication protocols.