ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From Isolation to Innovation: Vaccine Development and Scientific Sovereignty in Cold War China

• In Event: Laboratories of Concealment: New Perspectives on Postwar Science, Secrecy and the State

English Abstract

China’s vaccine development during the Cold War demonstrates how the restriction of scientific exchange paradoxically catalysed the pursuit of scientific sovereignty, offering historical insights relevant to contemporary technological competitions. Following the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, exclusion from Western scientific networks compelled China to forge alternative pathways for biomedical advancement. Soviet technical assistance in the early 1950s initially provided training and methodologies for vaccine production. However, the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s abruptly halted scientific exchange, severing this dependency and transforming what might have been debilitating isolation into an imperative for autonomous scientific capacity. The withdrawal of Soviet advisors and the cessation of technical cooperation forced Chinese vaccine scientists to operate without sustained international collaboration. Despite these ruptures and the subsequent disruptions of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese scientists independently developed vaccines against polio and measles. This paper examines how restrictions on scientific exchange, rather than preventing development, compel nations with existing scientific capacity toward self-reliant innovation. By tracing Cold War vaccine science, it argues that technological concealment and restricted knowledge transfer may temporarily delay but ultimately cannot prevent nations with independent scientific research capacity from achieving scientific advancement. This historical pattern resonates today amid escalating China-US technological competition, particularly in semiconductor technology and artificial intelligence, where export controls and knowledge restrictions shape contemporary debates over scientific sovereignty and national security.

Author

• Lu Chen