Pharma can’t get to China fast enough. While AstraZeneca fumbles over plans to manufacture drugs there, Glaxo is talking about doing more discovery in China, and Lilly expects the Asian nation to be its second-biggest market in a few years.

GlaxoSmithKline, for instance, plans to sink $100 million by the end of next year into a neuroscience research centre in Shanghai that will become central to its global drug development. “For us, China is not about outsourcing and cheap labour,” Moncef Slaoui, Glaxo’s R&D chief, tells The Financial Times. “We don’t want to give them the crumbs. It’s about different science. We will link our fate to their fate. Within five to ten years we will be moving from ‘made in China’ to ‘discovered in China’.”

He notes that there are an estimated 63,000 holders of scientific doctorates in China, including 35,000 who trained in the West and have returned in recent years to their home country, as well as on publications in journals such as Science, Cell and Neuron. Glaxo, by the way, has an R&D facility in the Pudong district of Shanghai, which will be shifted to the new center, and there are plans to hire 1,000 scientists within six years.

Meanwhile, Lilly believes China, with its population of 1.3 billion, will overtake Japan and the European Union as its largest market outside the US. “For sales, there’s no doubt China is one of the biggest markets,” Lorenzo Tallarigo, who heads Lilly’s international business, tells Bloomberg News. “One of our main areas of development there is in diabetes drugs. It’s a disease that’s underdiagnosed there.”

As Bloomberg notes, China has 300 million people now considered middle-class and will be the fifth-largest drug market in two years and may be the world’s biggest in 40 years, Bloomberg notes, citing data from PricewaterhouseCoopers. And the country’s pharmaceutical market was $14 billion last year, or 2 percent of the world market, according to IMS Health. “In terms of a market, China is a long-term opportunity for growth,” Linda Bannister, analyst at Edward Jones, tells Bloomberg. “It’s possible that in time, given the population, China could be as big a market as the US.”