Boao Lecheng: China’s medical special zone, explained

What the Boao Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone is, why the State Council created it in 2013, what its hospitals may do that no other hospital on the mainland can, and what that means for a guest arriving from abroad.

The short answer

Boao Lecheng is mainland China’s only medical special zone: a State Council–chartered district on Hainan’s east coast where hospitals may prescribe drugs and devices approved abroad but not yet registered in China, translate completed research into licensed treatment, and report every outcome into a national real-world data program. Five approval batches have published twenty licensed cell and gene therapies there, each for a named disease under filed inclusion criteria. The zone sits inside the Hainan Free Trade Port, which began island-wide independent customs operation in December 2025 — a change to how goods cross the island’s boundary, not to how patients enter. Anti-ageing is not among the licensed uses, here or anywhere else on the mainland.

What the zone is

The Hainan Boao Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone — Lecheng for short — is mainland China’s only “medical special zone”. It sits in Boao town, on the east coast of Hainan island in Qionghai city, beside the venue of the Boao Forum for Asia, about thirty minutes from Qionghai Bo’ao airport. Inside its boundary, hospitals operate under a different rulebook from the rest of the country: drugs and devices approved abroad but not yet in China can be prescribed here; frontier techniques can be studied and, once licensed, delivered as treatment; and the data from that use feeds back into national regulation. Outside the boundary, none of that applies.

It is not a resort with a clinic attached. It is a planned district of tertiary hospitals, research institutes, a dedicated medical-products regulator, a bonded warehouse for imported medicines, a real-world data institute and — around them — the villas, gardens and wellness houses where a guest actually stays. By 2026 seventeen medical institutions were open and more than twenty were under construction.

Why it exists

On 28 February 2013 the State Council approved the zone and granted it nine special policies, summarised locally as four “licences”: licensed medicine, licensed research, licensed operation and licensed international exchange. The stated missions were three — let Chinese patients use the world’s most advanced drugs and devices sooner, grow a health industry, and pilot reforms for the national system. In practice the zone became the country’s test bed for a question every regulator faces: how do you let patients reach frontier medicine before every approval is complete, without abandoning supervision?

The answer Lecheng arrived at is early access inside real hospitals, with mandatory data. That principle runs through everything below, and it is the reason a cell-therapy program here is a different proposition from one in a private clinic anywhere else.

The three things only Lecheng can do

1. Licensed imported drugs and devices

A medicine or device approved in the United States, Europe or Japan but not yet registered in China can be imported and used in the zone under its “licensed drugs and devices” policy — the flagship of the nine. By March 2025 the zone had brought in 464 such products and used them for more than 110,000 patient-visits; the world’s thirty largest pharmaceutical and device companies all work with it directly. The zone runs the country’s only full-chain tracing platform for these products and its only bonded warehouse for them, so a licensed drug can be on a ward days after it is requested rather than months.

2. Real-world data that changes national approvals

In 2019 Lecheng became the first place in China to pilot the use of clinical real-world data in regulatory decisions. A glaucoma drainage device approved in 2020 was the first product in the country registered on the strength of evidence generated here; several drugs and devices have followed, and the zone now hosts the national regulator’s key laboratory for real-world research and a graduate program devoted to it. For a patient, the practical meaning is that treatment in the zone is recorded — the outcome of your course becomes part of a dataset the regulator reads.

3. Licensed cell and gene therapy for disease

This is the chapter that brings most of our guests here. From 2015–16 stem cell and immune-cell work on the mainland was confined to free research protocols. A Hainan regulation effective 1 February 2025 gave the zone’s hospitals the first lawful route to translate completed research into licensed, fee-charging treatment — for a named disease, under filed inclusion criteria, with every course reported into the real-world data program. Approval batches followed through 2025 and 2026: five batches have published twenty cell and gene technologies in all, with 784 recorded patient-uses by the time the fifth was announced. The licensed indications run wider than cell therapy’s public reputation suggests — knee osteoarthritis, decompensated liver cirrhosis, type-2 diabetes, chronic lung disease, ischaemic heart failure, periodontal disease, graft-versus-host disease and an inherited retinal dystrophy — alongside a set of autologous immune-cell programs, natural-killer and dendritic-cell, for patients with solid tumours or blood cancers, several of them as adjuncts after surgery. The national rules that arrived in May 2026 confirm the same principle nationwide. What the licences do not cover, here or anywhere on the mainland, is anti-ageing or rejuvenation; cell therapy is disease treatment, and the zone’s hospitals hold their approvals on that basis. Is stem cell therapy legal in China? The rules in full →

The zone inside the Hainan Free Trade Port

Lecheng is one district inside a far larger project. The whole of Hainan — an island about the size of Belgium — is the Hainan Free Trade Port, created by a State Council master plan in 2020 and intended to become China’s most open economic territory. Lecheng was one of the first parks opened under it, in June 2020, and the two are routinely spoken of as one thing. They are not, and the difference matters if you are reading about Hainan before a medical trip.

On 18 December 2025 the island began island-wide independent customs operation — in the official phrasing, Hainan Island was formally established as a special customs supervision zone, with customs control moved out to the island’s own outer boundary rather than sitting between Hainan and the mainland. The published measures are tariff measures: duty-free import categories rose from roughly 1,900 to around 6,600, the share of tariff lines carrying zero-tariff goods rose from 21% to 74%, zero-tariff imports moved to negative-list management, and goods given at least 30% value-added processing on the island may enter the mainland tariff-free.

The model is described officially as supervision of goods, not of people, and for a guest that is the half worth knowing. The customs change governs cargo crossing the boundary. It did not alter visa-free entry, the thirty-day stay, or medical treatment as an approved purpose of a visit. Visa-free entry, in detail →

It also did not create the thing Lecheng is known for, and this is where summaries of Hainan tend to overreach. The zone’s access to medicines and devices that are not registered in China does not run on free-trade-port tariff rules. It runs on the nine special policies the State Council granted the zone in 2013, on the licensed-drugs-and-devices mechanism those policies created, and on the zone’s own bonded warehouse and full-chain tracing platform. The customs-closure measures published for the island do not address medicines or medical devices at all. A device reaches a ward in Lecheng because Lecheng is a medical special zone, not because Hainan is a free trade port — two regimes stacked on the same island, doing different work.

What the port does contribute is everything around the medicine: the air links, the logistics, the reason a dedicated medical-products regulator and a real-world data institute are resourced on an island of ten million people, and the political weight that keeps the nine policies renewed rather than quietly retired.

The hospitals

The zone’s cell and gene programs run in tertiary hospitals, most of them campuses of institutions with long mainland reputations. Among the names a guest is likely to meet:

These are governed and staffed as tertiary institutions, with their own GMP cell-manufacturing suites, ethics committees and specialist panels. That last item is the one that surprises visitors: a panel decides candidacy from your results, and some guests are declined. The licensed programs, and what they cost →

What a visit looks like

Most international guests do not arrive for a therapy; they arrive for a look. The retreat’s four-day precision assessment — a hundred-plus-marker panel, imaging, cardiac and vascular studies, a second read of every scan by a multi-disciplinary team, and a written plan in English — is the doorway to everything else the zone offers, because candidacy for any licensed program is decided from exactly those results. If something is found, the treating hospital’s panel reviews it; if nothing is found, you leave with a baseline, a plan and a year of follow-up. What happens on a longevity retreat, day by day →

The zone is also, simply, a pleasant place to spend a week: low-rise, green, quiet, built on the Wanquan river as it meets the sea, thirty minutes from the airport and an hour and a half from Haikou. The wellness houses — energy rooms, hydrotherapy, Ayurvedic suites, the hyperbaric oxygen island — are the other half of the stay, and the half that the six-axis system organises. Planning your trip →

Against the Alps

The Swiss longevity tradition — a week of deep diagnostics, quiet luxury and a written plan at a lakeside clinic — lists at roughly $36,000 to $58,000 (2026 rates). The island offers the same shape of week from about $2,700, in villas rather than a clinic wing, and adds a category the Alpine houses legally cannot: licensed clinical-stage cell and gene programs for disease, delivered in tertiary hospitals with mandatory outcome reporting. What it does not add is a promise. The lake is Swiss; the frontier is here; and the frontier, honestly described, is still being mapped.

Who the zone is for — and not for

It is for a person who wants a rigorous baseline of their own health, delivered fast and explained plainly. It is for a patient with a diagnosed condition that appears on a licensed indication list — cirrhosis, knee osteoarthritis, type-2 diabetes, a resected solid tumour — whose own specialists are open to an adjunct. It is for anyone who needs a medicine approved abroad but not yet in China. It is not for someone seeking a stem cell “youth injection”; that product does not lawfully exist on the mainland, and a hospital in the zone will say so. Safety and regulation, answered plainly →

Frequently asked

Or download the Retreat Dossier (PDF) → — itinerary, inclusions, programs, practicalities.