In this blog post we hear from Dr Sijie Ren about their prize-winning thesis!
I’m delighted to share some good news: my PhD thesis, “Science and Politics in Maoist China: The Synthetic Insulin Project and its Legacy,” has been awarded the 2025 Best Doctoral Thesis Prize by the British Association for Chinese Studies (BACS). The announcement at the annual conference of the BACS in Leicester on 5 September was a generous honour, and I’m deeply grateful to my supervisors, Professor Robert Bickers and Dr Adrian Howkins, and to colleagues in Bristol’s Department of History for their steady encouragement.
My research grows from a simple question that has big consequences: what political conditions help, or hinder, basic science? We often talk about breakthroughs as if they happen in a sealed laboratory, but the day-to-day reality of science is entangled with funding rules, personnel decisions, procurement, and shifting priorities. I wanted to see, at close range, how those forces shaped one landmark achievement in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and how the meaning of that achievement was built up over time.
I follow what is arguably the most important basic-science achievement in the history of the PRC, the synthetic insulin project, completed in the mid-1960s. Rather than retelling a heroic lab story, I reconstruct the project from start to finish and then trace how its meaning was shaped afterwards. That means asking not only how the chemistry worked, but also how decisions were made, how time and resources were protected, and how the result was presented to the public.
What emerges is a picture that’s both hopeful and realistic. Campaign-style drives—more people, faster deadlines, louder slogans—did not speed complex experiments. Progress came when mid-level administrators and senior scientists did quieter work: buffering core teams from political noise, smoothing supply chains, and giving specialists room to solve stubborn problems. In other words, the success of basic science depended less on grand declarations and more on creating small islands of continuity inside a turbulent system. That balance—between political ambition and laboratory reality—turned out to be decisive.
Once the result was in hand, another process began. Conferences, media coverage, museum displays and textbooks helped fix how the achievement would be read. The way a result is framed—what counts as definitive, who gets credit, what lesson is drawn—shapes its authority and afterlife. Synthetic insulin became a durable symbol of national capability and modernity, not simply because the chemistry worked, but because institutions told a clear story about what it meant.
To reconstruct this, I used a wide range of sources: internal publications from research institutes, journals and conference records, newspapers and newsreels, institutional gazetteers, memoirs, interviews, and site visits in Shanghai and Beijing.
What I find is a picture in which technical excellence is necessary but not sufficient. Whether a result becomes credible, exemplary, and nationally meaningful depends on the political architecture around it: who can shield long experiments from political turbulence, how merit is recognised, how resources are rationed, and how the story is told afterwards. That observation is hardly unique to Mao-era China. States everywhere try to turn basic research into public value, and in doing so they influence what counts as convincing evidence, how risk is judged, and who is believed when disagreements arise. The insulin case gives these dynamics historical texture.
Winning the BACS prize is an honour, but the real reward has been the chance to look closely at how science gains authority—and how fragile that authority can be without thoughtful stewardship. I’m thankful to the Universities’ China Committee in London and to the University of Bristol’s Department of History for supporting the work, and to the archivists, interviewees and colleagues who helped along the way. If any of this sparks questions or curiosity, I’d be glad to continue the conversation.
If you’d like to get in touch about this research, you can contact Sijie on: ch20082@bristol.ac.uk