From Antibiotics to Atomic Bomb: Scientific Capital and China's Cold War Rationality
Speaker: Yang Li, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Moderator: Victor Seow, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University
Presented online via Zoom. Register here.
About the talk: This talk examines how science functioned as a decisive form of capital in the formation of the People’s Republic of China’s political economy and Cold War strategy. Drawing on the case of antibiotic research and production, it identifies a decades-long process through which the Chinese state cultivated, nationalized, and redistributed “scientific capital”—expertise, laboratory infrastructures, industrial facilities, transnational networks, and technological know-how—to achieve industrial self-reliance and geopolitical security. While Western-trained scientists initially served as indispensable carriers of scarce scientific resources, their expertise was gradually detached from their individual bodies and absorbed into state-directed institutions. As a new generation of domestically trained, politically reliable experts emerged, elite scientists were transformed into replaceable scientific laborers, a process that can be understood as the proletarianization of scientists.
Within the global Cold War, antibiotics and atomic weapons became parallel arenas through which the state pursued what may be termed the socialist primitive accumulation of scientific capital. The successful detonation of China’s first atomic bomb in 1964 marked a perceived completion of this accumulation and created the political conditions that enabled both the Cultural Revolution’s assault on intellectual authority and the continued flourishing of strategic research and mass production. This perspective resolves a central paradox: the political persecution of scientists and the simultaneous prosperity of technologies they helped cultivate are not contradictory episodes but intertwined outcomes of the state’s evolving relationship with scientific capital. More broadly, the framework foregrounds the infrastructural logic of socialist industrialization and unsettles binary distinctions between socialist and capitalist science, illuminating the coproduction of knowledge, state power, and global order.
About our speaker: Yang Li is an Assistant Professor of History of Science in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research examines the coproduction of science and state power in modern China, integrating science, medicine, and technology into broader histories of political economy and social transformation. She also uses China as a method to interrogate the globalization of modern science. Her current book project, Biopolitical Socialism, charts the rise of China’s pharmaceutical industry and demonstrates how biotechnology reshaped the Chinese Communist Party into a modern industrial regime.