I’m sitting on the plane winging my way back from Shanghai to Los Angeles, pondering what the future holds for the biotechnology industry in this rapidly changing world, and how America’s role as the current industry leader might change.

I had been an invited speaker at the Shanghai International Biopharma Investor Forum in Shanghai, where everyone was very upbeat on the future of the biotechnology industry and the growing collaboration between China and America. I then flew south to Shenzhen to attend the 9th China Venture Capital and Private Equity Forum, where I saw Tim Draper of Draper, Fisher and Jurvetson speak (and sing, but we won’t go into that). In his keynote speech, he predicted that China would be the #1 world power within fifteen years – a forecast that I can see happening, given their rapid growth and the government’s commitment to that goal.

He then put forth a very sobering thought: historically, each shift of world power from one country to another has been accompanied by war. He referenced France’s loss of power to England, and England’s loss to the U.S. But he added that he hoped – and expected – that this cycle would be broken when the U.S. hands the #1 baton to China because of what is at stake if the world’s two super-powers do not continue to cooperate and build toward the future.

For the sake of the biotechnology industry and the world as a whole, I certainly hope he is correct. But many others are much less optimistic and have sided with the doomsayers. I recently received an email from a subscriber saying he had no interest in investing in China because war with them was imminent based on articles he had read in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. And there is the controversial book, The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can Be Won, by Dr. Peter Navarro, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at University of California, Irvine, in which the author details the factors driving us inevitably to war with China.

Dr. Navarro believes “...we and our children are destined to fight a complex and highly interrelated series of wars with China on many, many fronts... A reckless and ruthless Chinese government is directly to blame for many of these Coming China Wars. ”

If we believe there will be war and we behave as though there will be war, we are destined to make the prophecy self-fulfilling. By withdrawing from China and isolating ourselves, reacting in fear to what we think might happen, we are only fostering the ill will that could ultimately propel us to war, regardless of the other party’s intent.

Wouldn’t it be better to cooperate with China, building the new world order together, so that in fact Mr. Draper’s vision, not Dr. Navarro’s, is the correct one? Only through cooperation can we build a global biotech industry that leverages the best the world has to offer, no matter what the country of origin, ridding the world of its most deadly diseases.