Traditional forms of biotechnology have existed in China since its earliest history. According to legend, Shen Nong, a mythical king, introduced China to grain cultivation and crop rotation, and invented a transparent stomach covering in order to observe the effects of herbal medicines on the digestive tract. During the late Neolithic period, the Chinese were already adept at alcohol fermentation, as evidenced by the discovery of wine cups and containers from the Longshan culture and of winery ruins in Henan Province. Records from the eleventh century B.C. show that the importance of temperature and water quality to grain fermentation was understood. By the end of the Zhou Dynasty in 221 B.C., the Chinese were producing bean curd, soy sauce, and vinegar by methods still used today. The process of flax maceration by anaerobic bacteria is alluded to in a verse from the Book of Songs, China's earliest collection of poetry (200 B.C.), while the rotation of bean crops is described in writings from A.D. 500. As early as the sixth century, the Chinese understood that rabies could be spread by mad dogs. During the Sui Dynasty (581-618), a vaccine against smallpox was developed, and by the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), it was widely available to the masses.

Despite this early inventiveness, China's science and technology, including biotechnology and medicine, failed to go through the explosive changes that altered Western science in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. As noted by Joseph Needham in his epic Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), China never underwent a scientific revolution; there are no Chinese equivalents of Locke, Newton, or Darwin. Consequently, the fundamental concept of testing hypotheses by experimentation was still unknown in China when the door to the West was reluctantly opened to traders and missionaries during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

China's defeat by the gunboats of European imperialism in the Opium War (1840-1842) ushered in the ''half feudal, half colonial'' period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when China flirted with Western technology. One legacy of the period was the establishment of European-style alcohol- and yeast-based industries, including the famous German brewery at Qingdao. Many students, including Sun Yatsen, went to Japan, Europe, and the United States for training. However, except for the brief Hundred Days Reform of 1898, efforts to modernize China's science and education systems were suppressed by the government.

In 1911, the fall of the last emperor and establishment of the Republic marked a turning point in China's science policy. Under the influence of Sun Yatsen, a physician and firm believer in science, learned societies were formed, scientific journals began publication, science departments were established at several universities, and students were once again sent abroad. An important development was the founding of the Central Academy of Sciences and the Beijing Academy of Sciences, which were later combined to form CAS. China's efforts to build a scientific establishment were stymied, however, by political unrest, and were completely halted by the war with Japan (1937-1945) and by the subsequent civil war between the Nationalists and Communists.

After the Communist Party's victory in 1949, China began restructuring its scientific research and educational institutions. Following the example of the Soviet Union, basic research was assigned to CAS, applied research to various state ministries such as agriculture and public health, and education to the universities. An unfortunate consequence of this dependence on the Soviet model was the abandonment of classical genetics in favor of the more socialist, but scientifically incorrect, theories of Lysenkoism.

The government also made a major effort to attract scientists who had left the country during the war, particularly nuclear physicists and doctors, by promising them the opportunity to help build a new Chinese society. These promises were soon broken as China embarked on a series of vicious antirightist campaigns in which scientists, as members of the intellectual class, were castigated as "evil cow snakes" and "foreign devil lovers." The situation was exacerbated by the split with the Soviet Union, China's main provider of technological and scientific training in the 1950s.

This anti-intellectualism culminated in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), during which most scientists were sent to the countryside or factories for reeducation, and most research institutes were either closed or converted to production facilities. A rare exception was the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry, which carried out work on the synthesis of insulin and transfer ribonucleic acid (tRNA) during this period. A direct result of the complete collapse of the education system during the Cultural Revolution is a major generational gap in trained scientists.

Following Mao Zedong's death in 1976, the Chinese leadership was embroiled in internal power struggles and debate about the country's direction, which culminated in 1978 in the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping and the declaration of the Four Modernizations as China's state policy. In that year, biotechnology was first mentioned as a focal point of the country's science and technology development program. During the Sixth 5-Year Plan (1981-1985), funds were allocated to support biotechnology research in the fields of agriculture, food processing, and pharmaceutical production; and in 1983, the China National Center for Biotechnology Development (CNCBD) was established to coordinate these activities. During the Seventh 5-Year Plan (1986-1990), the level and scope of biotechnology funding have been greatly increased. In March 1986, the State Council Leading Group on Science and Technology published a pivotal document, often referred to as the "8 6 3 Plan," describing China's high technology development program and making biotechnology its top priority. That same year, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) was founded to support basic research. In 1988, the State Science and Technology Commission (SSTC) published its second white paper on science and technology, which reinforced biotechnology as China's number one priority for high technology development. These events set the stage for the current mechanisms for determining biotechnology research priorities, administration, and funding.