Yang Li

Biography

As a scientist-turned-historian, I specialize in the history of science, medicine, and technology in modern China.

My first book project, tentatively titled Biopolitical Socialism: Antibiosis, Scientific Capital, and China’s Cold War Rationality, 1949–90, demonstrates how biotechnology played a central role in transforming the peasant-based Chinese Communist Party into a thriving modern industrial regime. The book provides fresh insights into China’s political and social transformations through the lens of science, medicine, and technology. Drawing upon a broad range of primary sources—including provincial and municipal archives, gazetteers, newspapers, magazines, scientific publications, industrial documents, barefoot doctor journals, memoirs, and oral histories—it charts the rise of the pharmaceutical industry in China and its profound domestic and global impacts.

This book is also part of an ongoing effort to use China as the method to reflect on the globalization of modern science. I propose a new theory of “Scientific Capital,” which serves as a useful framework for situating socialist science vis-à-vis capitalist science. This concept merges Bourdieu’s extended notion of capital with a Marxist analytical approach, arguing that the key difference between socialist and capitalist science lies in the state’s management of scientific capital, akin to its management of monetary capital. This theory challenges essentialized views of scientific development in socialist states and provides a starting point for bridging the history of science with broader political and economic discussions of socialism and capitalism across various disciplines, including history, sociology, economics, and political science.

In addition to the book, I am developing a digital archive of Chinese pharmaceutical factories and mapping the dynamics of biotech development during and after the Cold War.

My second project, tentatively titled Anxious Waves, Intimate Resonance, continues to explore biopolitics and socialist governmentality, this time through ultrasound technology. The Chinese state’s One Child Policy (1979–2015) intersected with the global proliferation of medical ultrasonic devices, giving rise to new forms of surveillance and a unique moral economy surrounding ultrasound. This research will highlight how ordinary people, particularly women, navigated, resisted, and leveraged this intimate medical technology under new forms of biopolitical governance. This project also provides a global perspective on pressing issues such as abortion and reproductive rights.

Currently, I hold the Anna Julia Cooper Postdoctoral Fellowship (2024–25) and will begin as an assistant professor jointly appointed in the Department of History and the Integrated Liberal Studies Program starting in Fall 2025. I will teach courses on the histories of modern science and medicine from a global perspective, as well as on science, medicine, and technology in East Asia.

Education

Ph.D., M.A., Princeton University
M.S., University of California, Riverside
B.S., Peking University