System Feasibility of China's Biomanufacturing Industry: An Analytical Framework, Boundary Mechanisms, and Enhancement Pathways
Huimin Yun , Biqiang Chen , Tianwei Tan
Strategic Study of CAE ›› : 1 -14.
Biomanufacturing has emerged as a strategic driver for advancing the green and low-carbon transformation of manufacturing, fostering future industries, and building a modern industrial system. However, existing studies have largely focused on individual technological components, such as microbial strains, enzymes, and fermentation processes, with technology readiness and technical feasibility serving as the primary evaluation criteria. A systematic framework for assessing whether different technological pathways can achieve scalable, low-carbon, and sustainable deployment under specific resource, energy, engineering, industrial, and institutional conditions remains lacking. From the perspective of industrial system resilience, this study develops a four-dimensional analytical framework comprising resource endowment, technology deployment, industrial ecosystem, and institutional governance. Building upon this framework, we propose the concepts of system feasibility and the system feasibility boundary (SFB) and elucidate the mechanisms governing SFB formation. System feasibility is defined as the integrated capability of a biomanufacturing technology to achieve low-carbon, economically viable, scalable, certifiable, and resilient deployment under the constraints of resource endowment, energy structure, engineering scale-up capability, industrial ecosystem, and institutional environment. The SFB represents the dynamic boundary jointly shaped by these interacting system conditions. The analysis demonstrates that the low-carbon advantage of biomanufacturing is not an inherent property of the technology itself, but rather a systemic outcome resulting from the interaction of resource endowment, technology deployment, industrial ecosystem, and institutional governance. Different regions and technological pathways exhibit distinct system feasibility boundaries, which evolve dynamically with changes in resource availability, energy structure, engineering scale-up capability, industrial coordination, and institutional arrangements, and may contract over time, implying that technical feasibility does not necessarily translate into industrial feasibility. Based on this framework, the study further examines the foundations of system feasibility, regional enabling conditions, and the mechanisms of boundary contraction for China's biomanufacturing industry. It argues that future development should shift from pursuing isolated technological breakthroughs toward strengthening system capabilities by enhancing resource endowment, technology deployment, industrial ecosystem development, and institutional governance, while establishing an intelligent governance system driven by the integration of data, knowledge, models, and institutional rules. By extending industrial assessment from technical feasibility to system feasibility, this study enriches the theoretical foundation of industrial system resilience and provides a new analytical paradigm for industrial planning, technology pathway selection, and the development of a modern biomanufacturing industry.
biomanufacturing / system security / system feasibility boundary / industrial system resilience / whole life cycle assessment / system governance
Funding project: Chinese Academy of Engineering project "Research on Several Major Issues for Enhancing the Security of Emerging Industrial Systems"(2025-PP-11)
National Key Research and Development Program of China(2024YFB4206205)
Central-Funded Base Project "Construction of a High-Spatial-Resolution Biomass Database"(JD2633)
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