“Give me a Patch and I will Create a Market”: Pharmaceutical Innovation in Neuroscience in China

• In Event: The Geopolitics of Technology and Innovation

Abstract

This article examines the pharmaceuticalization of tic disorders (TD) in China, using ADHD as a comparative shadow case, to explain how a marginal diagnosis and a modest drug came to anchor a national expertise network. Drawing on the sociology of translation and actor-network theory, I trace the trajectory of LittlePatch—a clonidine transdermal patch—to show how a pharmaceutical artifact gradually aligned actors across three ecologies: pediatricians confronting surging neurodevelopmental cases and seeking professional advancement; pharmaceutical corporations navigating regulatory barriers and mixed-ownership reforms; and local officials managing economic crisis while pursuing industrial upgrading. Based on interviews with fifteen pediatricians, ethnographic observations at six medical conferences, and extensive archival research, I argue that LittlePatch acted as a “hinge” that linked parallel struggles across fields and enrolled heterogeneous actors into a coherent expertise network surrounding neurodevelopmental disorders and pharmaceutical innovation. The analysis shows how shared positions—between a marginalized pediatric subspecialty, a financially strained pharmaceutical firm, and a coal-dependent local state—enabled a cross-field alliance through a little patch, and how the artifact, in turn, reshaped actors’ interests and identities through successive translation processes. In doing so, the patch does more than promise cure to care-seeking families—it stitches together jurisdictional claims, market aspirations, and political ambitions. And most of all, it grows.

Author

• Yanze Yu, Columbia University