The Critical Legacy of Chinese Cybernetics

In China, the tradition of the governor-engineer runs deep. Consider Li Bing, who governed the Shu Kingdom—later Sichuan province—in the 3rd century BC. The region is downstream of the Min River, which flows from the Tibetan mountains, making it prone to flooding with meltwater and silt. The governor-engineer developed an innovative levee system to channel the mighty river flow through an artificial mountain channel into the neighboring plains, transforming the region into one of China’s most agriculturally fertile. Today, the ancient megaproject—known as Dujiangyan—remains in use, feeding over 6000 square miles of farmland.

Today, the legacy of techno-scientific governance rests largely on the shoulders of Qian Xuesen: a Shanghai-born, MIT-trained scientist who became a leading authority on rocket science at Caltech, and later, the father of Chinese cybernetics. While in the US, Qian was a founding director of the Jet Propulsion Lab—a precursor to NASA. Despite being a foreign national, he was granted security clearance and the rank of colonel in the US Air Force to work on ballistics research during the Second World War. In 1945, he joined his mentor Theodor von Karman to inspect aeronautical research facilities in Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers. In one extraordinary photograph from the European visit, the 33-year-old Qian sits with his mentor, von Karman, and the latter’s teacher, the Czech fluid dynamicist Ludwig Prandtl, who had worked for the Nazis. As von Karman recollected, “How incredible were the circumstances that divided three generations of aerodynamicists. They were meant to work together in harmony.”

Despite his contributions to the American mid-century project, Qian was detained in 1950 as a suspected communist during the “Red Scare” of the McCarthy era—one of the greatest strategic missteps of the US during its long 20th century. While under house arrest in Pasadena, Qian wrote a book on control and feedback systems called Engineering Cybernetics (1954). Contrasting with his Western contemporaries, for whom cybernetics offered a philosophical account of wild complexity, Qian’s book sought to give a systematic, mathematical theoretical treatment of various engineering practices in the field of control and guidance. Quipping that “no gadget is mentioned,” Qian framed his cybernetics as an “engineering science,” offering his book as a kind of textbook course for “those parts of the broad science of cybernetics which have direct engineering applications in designing controlled and guided systems.” 

The Cybernetic Diaspora Returns

Qian was allowed to return to China in 1955 and never looked back. He was immediately recognized by the nascent PRC as an invaluable asset for its techno-scientific development. At the helm of the “Two Bombs, One Satellite” program, he built China’s nuclear and space programs from scratch, launching its first rocket in 1964 with a nuclear warhead in tow two years later. The personal support of Premier Zhou Enlai and Qian’s centrality to the defense program placed him amongst the highest echelons of protected scientists, securing him prominent positions throughout the 1950s and sheltering him from the anti-intellectual violence of the Cultural Revolution.

Alongside Qian, China’s leading cybernetic practitioners were returnees from the US, Europe, and the USSR, where they had trained in mathematics, engineering, and military sciences. The mathematics prodigy Hua Luogeng met cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener during Wiener’s visit to Tsinghua University in 1936. Upon his recommendation, Hua went on to study at Cambridge under G.H. Hardy. After stints in the Soviet Union and Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study, Hua returned to China in 1949 to support the establishment of the People’s Republic and threw himself into applied mathematics and the qualitative analysis of social and industrial systems. Eager to apply the insights of cybernetics to a far broader range of problems than ballistics, in 1961 Qian joined Hua and the engineer Xu Guozhi (who had returned on the same ship as Qian) to establish the Operations Research Division between the Institute of Mathematics and that of Mechanics. The following year, the division of Control Theory was established by Guao Zhaozhi and Song Jian, who had returned from France and the USSR, respectively.

Chaos and Control

Whatever may be called “Chinese Cybernetics” can be characterized by a holistic, productivist spirit of social engineering and nation-building which aspired to synthesize scientific knowledge, statistical analysis, and strategic decision-making. Its theory and practice were closely aligned with operations research, a quantitative approach to military decision-making that had grown out of World War Two, and that Qian and his colleagues sought to apply to the socialist planned economy. “I am what is known as an applied scientist who helps engineers solve their problems,” he explained to the Los Angeles Times when he departed the USA. “The science of rocketry is just a small part of this field.”  

Whatever may be called “Chinese Cybernetics” can be characterized by a holistic, productivist spirit of social engineering and nation-building which aspired to synthesize scientific knowledge, statistical analysis, and strategic decision-making.

Contrasting with Qian’s pragmatism, the ambitions of systems sciences in the West were more philosophical in scope. Like Norbert Wiener, Qian understood the world to be composed of elaborate systems of informational feedback; where he diverged was where he located the significance of this insight. The cybernetics of Wiener and his peers portrayed information as the currency of an entropic, chaotic universe. Its advocates were influenced by ecological and countercultural movements of the 1960s, defining themselves against the militarism and technocracy from which cybernetic science was born. At the same time, Wiener struck a cautious tone on the “machine à gouverner” which may come to “supply–whether for good or evil—the present obvious inadequacy of the brain when the latter is concerned with the customary machinery of politics.” This duality between chaos and control typified the outlook of social scientists like Gregory Bateson and cultural visionaries like Stewart Brand, for whom cybernetics offered a framework to understand wildly complex, interactive systems—whether symbolic or ecological, animal or machine—which defied (Western) human hubris. For his part, Wiener refused to accept state funding or work on military applications after the end of World War Two. The Chinese contingent, on the other hand, was squarely aimed at applying the insights of informatic control to the project of building a modern nation. Defensive sovereignty, technoscientific innovation, and industrial capacity were all meant to develop an agrarian state emerging from the chaos of civil war and Japanese occupation. 

This technical outlook, however, does not mean that cybernetics in China was any less concerned with the science—and engineering—of society. In the opening of Engineering Cybernetics, Qian noted the irony that cybernétique was first coined by the physicist André-Marie Ampère to describe the science of civil government, while its 20th-century incarnation was born from the technologies of war. The continuity between ballistics and bureaucracy would underlie the work of Qian and his peers and successors, as they sought to treat societal management—from education to population control—as an engineering problem. As he helmed the strategic weapons program in the early 1950s—long before China had the computational capacity—Qian wrote about combining economic and social data to “make social science more accurate from the quantitative perspective.” As researchers Wang Hongzhe and Jiang Yuan note, this synthetic ambition towards social engineering preceded even the sociocybernetic ideas that emerged in the US—with its emphasis on socio-cultural systems—and the USSR—which pursued centralized economic coordination—during the Cold War. 

At the same time, inspired by Mao’s politics of mass mobilization, the cyberneticians also sought to “take the ideas to the masses” through education and evangelization. During the Great Leap Forward—a program of nationwide agrarian reform that led to disastrous famines—mathematicians led by Hua Luogeng “went down” to factories and farms in an effort to create novel operational methods like “Wheat-field Design” and “Graphic Solutions.” They discussed the practical applications of mathematics in the service of agriculture and production in popular newspapers. In an illustrated magazine article in 1958, Qian imagined China’s agrarian production system as a holistic agricultural metabolism with solar, wind, biomass, and coal as energy inputs, passing through an agrarian complex to produce clothing, culture, and industry as outputs. This utopian schematic was a far cry from the morbid realities of the Great Leap Forward, demonstrating a stark distance between the view from the Academy of Sciences and the facts on the ground. Nonetheless, its totalizing cybernetic image—of a productive society comprising exchanges of energy, matter, and information at vertiginous scales—would continue to shape his work.

From Ballistics to Social Engineering, the Technocrats Seize the Moment

With the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, along with the thawing of US-China relations, the Chinese economy shifted away from the defensive priorities of heavy industry and towards demilitarization and light industry. Science and technology were raised to the highest priority in Deng Xiaoping’s era of “opening up,” alongside a spirit of depoliticized techno-progressivism, which prevailed over Mao’s image of science in service of revolution. This experimental, scientistic mood was the technocrats’ time to shine. Chinese translations of works by Wiener and British cybernetician W. Ross Ashby had existed since the mid-1960s but had been castigated as reactionary Western science.  Now, foreign scientific and cultural publications were flooding in. “Three theories fever” (information theory, systems theory, and cybernetics) took hold in intellectual circles, while Qian’s lecture on “systems engineering and systems thinking” was broadcast nationally on CCTV.

For the Chinese cyberneticians, the political sea-change allowed them to shift their focus from discrete interventions and schematic busywork to large-scale social engineering, such as facilitating the transformation of the agrarian economy from centralized subsidies to market-based pricing. 

One of the most notorious historical legacies of that period is the One Child Policy, architected by Qian’s protogé, the Soviet-trained Song Jian. In the late 1970s, influenced by The Limits to Growth’s forecast of planetary collapse, as well as Mao’s alarm around runaway population growth, Song set about modeling population statistics in search of ways to regulate the population system. With Qian’s support, the conclusions of Song’s model—that unimpeded population growth would stifle modernization—were presented to state planners and implemented in 1980, the largest anti-natalist program in history.

Meanwhile, a new generation of experimental technocrats gathered momentum in the transitional era of the 1980s. In his study of the “Rural Development Group” of young 1980s scholars, STS researcher Tianyu Fang shows how cybernetics in the “reform and opening up” era empowered a new generation of intellectual elites both in scientific content and interdisciplinary form. Excitement around system sciences—from Wiener’s cybernetics to Prigogine’s dissipative structures—replaced Marxist metaphysics. This move was typified by the journal Dialectics of Nature, whose new editors—including the scientist and philosopher Jin Guantao—published articles on computer science and criticized Maoist bureaucracies. Jin and his wife, the scholar Liu Qingfeng, conceived of the Chinese nation in the long durée as an “ultrastable system,” in which successions of chaotic, transformative historical forces are integrated into a persistent homeostatic complex. The cybernetic “spirit of system” empowered the young technocrats with a conceptual language to bridge the gap between pure science and policy-making, treating everything from economy to population to rural production as “black boxes” to be modeled.

For his part, Qian developed in the 1980s what he called the “meta-synthetic approach,” which sought to create a dynamic hierarchy of all knowledge, as well as systems of interactive feedback between society, experts, and machines. Influenced by Jay Forrester’s systems dynamics, he conceived of society as an “Open Complex Giant System” or OCGS, an evolving whole with a dizzying array of interrelated subsystems engaged in material, energetic, and informational exchange with the outside. He believed that only a meta-synthetic approach could adequately integrate qualitative and quantitative knowledge across the OCGS and ensure a process of “confident hypothesis, rigorous validation.” His 1992 proposal for a “Hall for a Workshop on Meta-synthetic Engineering” comprised a strategic decision-making center that combined data flows, human expertise, and computer systems—echoing the famous Chilean Cybersyn control center from two decades prior—which would turn hypotheses into “validated knowledge.”

The Legacy of Chinese Cybernetics

After the bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen protests of June 4, 1989, many young intellectuals who escaped state violence were labeled as counterrevolutionaries, imprisoned, or fled China altogether. Cybernetics faded, at least in name, from intellectual discourses, but the spirit of technocratic pragmatism remained, in pursuit of economic growth without the democratizing spirit of the reform era. In so many ways, the relationship between the state, defensive sovereignty, informatic control, and social governance grew ever stronger as post-reform China entered the information age—advancing the spirit of socio-cybernetic engineering in all but name.

While Bill Clinton once compared China’s attempt to control cyberspace to “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall,” the “Chinese model” looks set to prevail, as the US Congress moves forward with banning TikTok. 

The internet first arrived in China in 1994, and in 1996, the “Golden Shield” project was conceived. Its most famous subcomponent is the “Great Firewall,” but the Golden Shield also includes an array of interconnected e-governance systems including the criminal information system, exit and entry administration system, and the traffic management information system. The implementation of the world’s largest and most sophisticated firewall and surveillance system over the world’s largest national population purports, at its core, to protect China’s society from malign foreign influence. In many ways, like China’s “Socialist Market Economy,” it has worked. Since the firewall’s implementation in 2008, China has shown no sign of stopping its regulatory efforts. Meanwhile, its e-commerce economy has grown to become the world’s largest by a great margin. While Bill Clinton once compared China’s attempt to control cyberspace to “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall,” the “Chinese model” looks set to prevail, as the US Congress moves forward with banning TikTok. 

The modeling of China as a dynamic industrial, technological, social, and informatic system to be tightly governed in the name of stability is a theme that grows ever stronger as China moves towards the center of the world stage. A 2019 speech on risk management by Secretary Chen Yixin of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission placed enormous emphasis on systemic risk management, pointing to dynamical instabilities that compound and magnify between domestic and foreign interests, online and offline influences, and the importance of fighting a “defensive campaign:” “to know the tiger is coming as soon as the wind hisses, [to] have the ability to forecast entire trends from a single variable just like knowing that autumn is coming as soon as one leaf changes color.” China’s information technology infrastructure strategy, too, is driven by a systemic approach to technological sovereignty and stability. For example, the “Eastern Data, Western Compute” project is in the process of installing a vast network of data centers across the defensive interior of the country, while a 2017 law ordained that Chinese user data had to be processed on Chinese soil.

In the mid-2020s, as China’s unprecedented economic ascent has decisively slowed, it once again looks to science and technology as a core tenet of its development. In 2022, it was widely observed that five scientists and engineers had been elevated to the 24-strong Politburo of the Communist Party, underscoring the renewed strategic emphasis on scientific technocracy. Indeed, after decades of relatively peaceful “globalization” and growth, many of the priorities that characterized Qian Xuesen’s era—geopolitical resilience, techno-scientific sovereignty, algorithmic governance—have returned, undergirded by technological capabilities that Qian could hardly have fathomed in his youth. Following the era of revolution and the prosperity of economic reform, the Chinese Communist Party seeks to renew its ideological legitimacy, in part through scientific development at home and technological exports abroad, in a world where China plays a fundamental role in the planetary climate transition. 

As the world tilts towards tentative multipolar alliances, these are based not only on the ethereal globalized flow of dollars and data, but also on the reterritorialization of productive forces and the systems that govern them. From supply chains to minerals, fossil fuels to data centers, critical infrastructures have become newly sensitized to geography and sovereignty across an anxious planet. These new geopolitical and technological priorities loop back to the two faces of cybernetics (or “control theory,” as the direct translation goes in Chinese): the engineering of governance mechanisms in both societies and machines. In China, no one speaks of cybernetics anymore. Nonetheless, Qian remains a national hero, and the techno-political trajectory he and his peers pioneered during China’s decades of nation-building continues to resonate today. Whether with industrial strategy or tech regulation, it is not the decentralized cybernetic feedback of the liberal market but sovereign state struggles over planetary technopolitics and platform-mediated societies that looks set to prevail in a world still waking up to the Chinese model.