ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that analyses of alcohol in relationship to the histories of science and industrialisation are equally vital to an understanding of the material, political and social roles of alcohol at both the local and global level. Informed by scholarship on colonial bioprospecting and biopiracy, it examines the role Chinese alcohol production techniques played in the efforts of Western microbiologists and biochemists to harness microorganisms to industrial methods for the production of both potable and non-potable alcohol. The chapter highlights tensions and contradictions in different actors’ narratives of origin and discovery. It traces the recirculation of industrial versions of these techniques back to China by the late 1920s. According to the representations of government-associated scientists, the ethanol programme during this period was the result of a grand alliance between modern science and state-supported industry.
