Five Moments in the History of Chinese Cybernetics

China converts its converters.
—Norbert Wiener

I

In September 1935, the Electrical Engineering Department at Tsinghua University welcomed a visiting research professor from the United States. His name was Norbert Wiener, and he had come to spend a year in China at the invitation of Hiong King-lai and Lee Yuk-wing, with the support of the university president, Mei Yi-chi. Wiener lectured in the departments of Mathematics and Electrical Engineering on Fourier integrals and series, and he worked with Lee on an initial attempt to build an “analogy-computing machine.” He also developed a keen interest in the culture, society, and living conditions of this — to him — mysterious country.

Wiener enrolled his two young daughters in the American school at Yenching University, where they began learning Chinese. Outside of class, as he recalled in his memoir “I Am a Mathematician,” he played chess, go, and five-in-a-row with his colleagues. He and his wife took rickshaws into the city and felt “ashamed at being pulled along by the strength of another man.” He found Peiping (as Beijing was then known) to be “a mixture of glamor and squalor,” noting the Japanese presence and observing how students “marched into the city to protest the coming of the Japanese and the supineness of the Chinese.” Wiener was struck by something nearly all his Chinese friends shared: “that love of the whole world rather than any specific humanity, which is so characteristic of Buddhism.” And despite the “broad and durable companionship between many of the Westerners and many of the Chinese,” he observed that “the Chinese all felt strongly that they should be masters in their own house.”

Looking back, Wiener saw the year he spent traveling with his family in China and around the world as a watershed moment in his life. “If I were to take any specific boundary point in my career as a journeyman in science and as in some degree an independent master of the craft,” he wrote in his memoir, “I should pick out 1935, the year of my China trip, as that point.” That year gave his children “the enormous moral advantage of seeing the world as a whole and not merely as an interplay of master races and servant races.” Later on, after he returned home, Wiener actively took part in fundraising efforts to support the Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japan.

II

In 1955, missile expert Qian Xuesen (also known as Hsueh-shen Tsien) left the United States on a steamship bound for China, where he would found the new Chinese government’s missile and rocket industry.

In the late 1940s, Qian had been a member of the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Group, led by Theodore von Kármán, and had taken part in confidential intelligence and technology planning. This introduction to the field of military operations research led him to begin thinking about cybernetics’ potential expansion, after the war, into the social sciences more broadly. No doubt this may have been part of the reason that the McCarthyists accusing him of communist sympathies sought to keep him in the U.S.: not only did they worry that Qian would take his missile expertise to the Chinese or the Soviets, they also feared losing a strategic thinker for the Cold War.

In the four years he spent under partial house arrest, Qian wrote “Engineering Cybernetics,” which he published in 1954. Building off Wiener’s earlier “Cybernetics,” Qian’s book was quickly translated into several languages and became one of the most frequently cited foundational theoretical texts on automation. In 1955, after negotiations with China, the U.S. agreed to let Qian return home in exchange for 11 pilots captured by the Korean People’s Army.

On the steamship home, Qian discussed the idea of combining operations research and the socialist planned economy with Xu Guozhi, another returning Chinese mathematician. Qian believed the war had allowed the U.S. to make rapid advances in military logistics through the extensive application of mathematics and operations knowledge. China, as a socialist country with a highly planned society, could make ample use of operations research and cybernetics, which he believed could be more fully developed under the conditions of socialism.

One of Qian’s initial tasks upon his return was to set up China’s first operations research group. He did this with Xu in 1956, as part of the Mechanics Institute (which Qian also set up) at the China Academy of Sciences. Control theory became one of the group’s four major research areas. In 1958, Hua Luogeng, a mathematician who had attended Wiener’s lectures at Tsinghua, set up an operations research laboratory at the Mathematics Institute at the CAS, which absorbed Qian’s group in 1960. That same year, Qian founded China’s first military operations research centre — the Combat Research Department at the Fifth Academy of the Ministry of National Defence.

The Chinese edition of “Engineering Cybernetics” appeared in 1958. Four years later, to respond to national defense needs, Qian recruited Guan Zhaozhi, and also Song Jian, who had just returned from studying cybernetics in the Soviet Union, to set up China’s first cybernetics laboratory in 1962, in conjunction with various industrial departments.

The work of Qian Xuesen and other returning scientists can be called the origin of Chinese cybernetics. In keeping with Qian’s principles of pragmatism, the cybernetics laboratory instituted a “3-3 system,” with a third of its scholars drawn from the sciences, a third from engineering, and a third from the social sciences. It was the first institution to have scientists and engineers working side by side with social scientists. With his experience in military strategy offices in the U.S. Air Force, Qian was well aware that collaboration of social scientists and mathematicians was the methodological underpinning for this integrated strategic science. As early as the mid-1950s, when he had just returned, Qian proposed applying quantitative methods to the analysis of China’s economy and society. His ideas about quantification and master plan simulations were as advanced as Cold War thinking on the social sciences and social cybernetics in the U.S. and the USSR, if not more so.

III

In his 1956 speech “On the Ten Major Relationships,” Mao Zedong wrote: “We must not follow the example of the Soviet Union in concentrating everything in the hands of the central authorities, shackling the local authorities and denying them the right to independent action […]. In short, if we are to promote socialist construction, we must bring the initiative of the local authorities into play.”

Even more than national independence, Mao’s vision of revolutionary development sought autonomy at every level of society. One key precondition for achieving autonomy was the widespread use of electronic technology — an electronic revolution to develop the initiative and creativity of the masses. Hence, in the 1960s, Mao’s right-hand man, Chen Boda, proposed the notion of “electrocentrism,” which meant that the electronic industry should be a development priority not only in the field of cutting-edge technology, but throughout the country’s economy. The belief that only large enterprises could produce electronics had to be eradicated: the country needed to “smash electronic mysticism” and burst into the electronic age with the methods of a people’s war.

Although this fact is often overlooked in contemporary histories, the Cultural Revolution went hand in hand with a “Cyber Great Leap Forward.” As early as 1968, the output of local electronic industries had already surpassed that of central enterprises (¥825 million against ¥494 million, respectively). It extended not only to provinces with a good industrial infrastructure but even to marginal regions with no experience in electronics production, such as Qinghai, Ningxia, and Tibet. To guard against a full-scale invasion from the north by the Soviet Union, Beijing’s electronics manufacturers helped set up a number of “third-tier enterprises” in the center and west of the country. Provinces such as Shaanxi, Shanxi, Gansu, and Guizhou acquired complete industrial capabilities in military electronics and their supporting services. In 1970, China had two and a half times as many electronics factories as in the previous year, and 20 times more than in 1965 before the start of the Cultural Revolution.

In Mao’s thinking, even if China were to lose most of its territory in the north, including the capital, it would still be able to rally forces from the hinterland and wage an all-out “electronic” guerrilla war. The Great Leap Forward in local electronics industries makes it clear that China’s development goal was to advance toward a society wide “cyberneticisation” at every level. What the people needed was not a colossal electronic city capable of satisfying production needs, but “electronic Paris communes” spread out over the entire territory.

Along with the “Cyber Great Leap Forward” came “cyber mass movements” based on “three-in-one” groups. Across the country, the neighbourhood factories and textile mills run by women began to produce electronic components and even computers. For a time during the 1970s, textile workers in these small collective factories became the primary force in computer manufacturing. This little-known history has its parallels in California’s “garage culture” and counterculture.

After China and the U.S. reestablished relations in 1972, the two countries exchanged science and technology delegations. One factory that the Chinese arranged for American computer experts to visit, the Yangtze River Radio Factory, had been converted from producing door handles to producing electronic computers. As the 1973 delegation report noted:

The new factories we visited were varied both in size and in manufacturing technology. At one extreme is the factory associated with the Shanghai Computing Research Institute. One of China’s numerous neighborhood factories, it is staffed by people in the neighborhood and is therefore small […]. The American visitor is struck by its good order; generous spacing of work tables; extreme simplicity of facilities; the quiet movement of engineers and other workers in the course of their hand work, study, and discussion; sunshine; and incense.

In the winter of 1974, this same factory organized a symposium entitled “Learning the Dialectics of Nature by Doing: Independence, Self-Reliance—Toward the Development of Electronic Computers.” Some years later, a round table on “people’s computers” was translated into English and included in a reader edited by communications scholar Armand Mattelart, who cited it as the world’s first instance of a democratic political practice in the field of information technology. In the 1970s, the red cyber revolution had reached its crescendo, even as it began drawing to a close.

IV

In 1979, at the fifth National People’s Congress, Qian put forward a proposal for “Establishing an Archive System and Electronic Computer Retrieval Network for People’s Ideas and Suggestions,” which contained his embryonic thinking on cybernetics and big data. Throughout the 1980s, Qian devoted himself to expanding the mathematical methods and management experience he had used in missile development to the fields of social cybernetics and systems theory. Legal cybernetics was an important part of this — and here we discover a thread linking Qian and cybernetics to the poet Hai Zi (Zha Haisheng).

Known today as one of China’s major modern poets, Hai Zi had another significant identity as a founding member of the legal systems theory group at China University of Political Science and Law. He began working as an editor at the university newspaper in 1984, and in September of that year he joined the Philosophy Department, where he taught courses in cybernetics, systems theory, and aesthetics.

Inspired by Qian’s thought on legal systems engineering, Hai Zi and his friends founded the Legal Systems Research Association in April 1985. Hai Zi served as deputy secretary general and had a hand in organising the First National Scientific Symposium on Legal Systems. Qian was invited to attend and gave a keynote address on “Modern Science and Technology and the Construction of a Legal System.” He advocated a role for systems theory in building a legal system and proposed replacing forensic investigations with new methods in information and biotechnology.

On the Foucauldian question of a “surveillance society,” Qian made his techno-optimism clear in 1984, in an article he co-authored with Wu Shihuan:

The tools and principles used by the bourgeoisie can also be used by the proletariat. We must persist in class analysis, but on a dialectical basis. We must no longer make the mistake of indiscriminately assigning class labels. […] We must stand on the side of Marxism, using [technology] as a tool to serve the construction of modern socialism. Far from shackling the hands of the proletariat and the broad masses of people, it will extend the proletariat’s reach, making it more flexible, more agile, more effective.

It was at this conference that Hai Zi met Chang Yuan, a mysterious figure researching legal systems theory and so-called “special capacities of the human body” or renti teyi gongneng (人体特意功能), i.e., paranormal abilities. (During the same period, Qian was one of the primary promoters of the Special Capacities of the Human Body research group.) Chang was a devoted follower of Qian’s systems theory, and he had previously published Hai Zi’s article “On State Formation and the Function of the Law Viewed from the Perspective of Catastrophe Theory” in his journal Tantao [Inquiries]. In July 1985, he took up a teaching post at the Central Leadership Institute of Politics and Law and moved into the same faculty housing compound as the poet. Chang’s wife, Sun Ge, as a “gifted” person with paranormal abilities, was specially recruited by the Ministry of Geology and Mineral Resources to attend China Geosciences University in Wuhan in 1988. In Changping, Hai Zi, Chang, and others formed a lively group discussing systems theory, sciences of the body, and qigong. As Chang later recalled, they would often drink and debate weighty issues such as national development. Around the same time, Hai Zi followed Chang and Sun in taking up qigong.

On March 26, 1989, at the age of 25, Hai Zi lay down on the train tracks near Shanhaiguan and took his own life. The circumstances surrounding his death have always been murky, and in one of his last writings, he pointed an accusing finger at Chang and Sun:

March 24, 1989: Tonight I’m acutely aware that it’s Chang Yuan and Sun Ge, with their Daoist witchcraft, who are making me hear voices. Most of the voices come from them. If I’m struck down by sudden death, schizophrenia, or suicide, the blame lies with them. They must be held criminally responsible.

In an interview more than 20 years later, Chang admitted that the young poet glowed with energy and could see things that ordinary people could not. Hai Zi’s death is inextricably bound up with the rise of systems theory, paranormal research, and qigong — forgotten chapters in the shifting social thought and culture of 1980s China that are now footnotes in the history of Chinese cybernetics.

V

The China moment in the history of cybernetics is shot through with a dialectic of labor and machines. In the revolutionary mindset of 20th-century China, workers were always a more important strategic resource than technological wares. In the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, there is a discourse about the “socialist line on technology” in many texts about computing, both popular science and science fiction. In this discourse, the goal of technical innovation was not to replace human labor with machine production, but to forge “new people,” xinren (新人), who could build and operate machines to serve the new society. Here the possibilities of technology were not disputed or downplayed but rather amplified. A new cybernetic loop took shape: machines would create “new people,” who would in turn recreate and modify the new society and its new adaptive technologies. On the one hand, this answered the Chinese revolution’s modernizing call to “combat feudal superstition,” while on the other, by pushing to “democratize” participation in technology, it answered the revolutionary call to destroy the monopoly of knowledge.

On a final note, this historical context casts a new light on Liu Cixin’s early short story “Sun of China” (2002). Perhaps even more than “The Wandering Earth” or “The Three-Body Problem,” this story reflects certain “Chinese characteristics” distinct from the West in technology-related issues of politics and labor. Shuiwa, a boy from the countryside with only an elementary school education, is recruited for a mission to space and lifted out of his lowly status in the market society. Here techno-politics and techno-poetics are briefly united in an echo of Wiener’s concern for “the human uses of human beings.”

We nevertheless see difficulties in this attempt to bridge past and present. In the world’s largest factory cluster, on the Pearl River delta, automation is gradually replacing human labor. Workers eliminated from manufacturing jobs can only join the gig economy and find work in food delivery, ride sharing, or gaming apps. They are no longer “new people” but have sunk to an abject “bare life” in the cybernetic loop of capitalism.

Against the backdrop of China’s rise as the world’s second largest economy and the trade and technology war with the United States, our ability to return to forgotten moments in the history of Chinese cybernetics and reactivate its circuits of labour may hold a key to the future of this ancient civilization.

Wang Hongzhe is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University. He has long been involved in advanced studies in media-centred humanities and social sciences. His research interests include media history, Cold War history, information society, and labor studies.

This article is excerpted from the volume “Machine Decision Is Not Final” (Urbanomic Press).