Acknowledgement that I have published an article: "A Brief History of Chinese Cybernetics"
▬ “A Brief History of Chinese Cybernetics” is included in Cybernetics for the 21st Century, Vol. 1: Epistemological Reconstruction, edited by Yuk Hui. The e-book is free to download. It is an expansion of “The Genealogy of Chinese Cybernetics,” which I wrote for Palladium in 2022. ▬
▬ I will say something about my interest in this topic, which perhaps seems a bit obscure. ▭ My early research into Chinese cybernetics, or systems engineering—xìtǒng gōngchéng 系统工程—came from an interest in the social phenomenon that was qìgōng 气功 in the 1980s. I became fascinated by the attempts at scientific explanations for supernatural abilities, or tèyì gōngnéng 特异功能, associated with small-town grifters, as well as masters of the discipline, like Yan Xin 严新, who was dubbed the “Chinese Superman”—huáxià chāorén 华夏超人—by state media. English-language accounts of qìgōng were usually dismissive about the scientific explanations.1 The fact that cyberneticist Qian Xuesen 钱学森 became fixated on telekinesis and extrasensory perception was usually ignored in accounts of his life.2 I came to see that the interest of the scientific establishment in qìgōng was connected directly with systems engineering as a discipline that was intended to subsume all of cybernetic, then all of science. ▭ So, I set out in many directions from qìgōng. I picked up threads that I found I could trace into other parts of intellectual life in China in the 1980s and since, some of which, like politics or literature, I was more familiar with. I traced these ideas back through the 1983 anti-crime campaign, Reform and Opening, the Great Leap Forward… And I realized also that ideas originating from Qian Xuesen and his circle in that period, like the meta-synthetic approach—zōnghé jíchéngfǎ 综合集成法—open, complex, giant systems—kāifàngde fùzá jù xìtoňg 开放的复杂巨系统—and great wisdom—dàchéng zhìhuì 大成智慧—were necessary to figure out contemporary writing on information theory, as well as more mundane material on artificial intelligence, smart cities, surveillance and policing, and management theory. ▭ The article ends in the 2020s, which I think is important, since I am trying to argue that understanding cybernetics is necessary to understand China at present and in the future—but also the wider world, of course, which is why Yuk Hui is attempting this epistemological reconstruction.3 ▬
▬ I will say something else about why this article is meaningful to me. ▭ It has been for many years a private aspiration to publish academic writing, or something that looked like it. I discovered at some point that I am capable of writing that is so completely unmarketable through popular channels that it deserves only to be locked away in an academic journal or volume. ▭ Please forgive this attempt. I was shocked upon re-reading it by its limitations. I could have done more. I will do better the next time, if there is one. ▭ I should also admit that I suspect myself of bearing a grudge against academia or academics. At the same time, I admire them. So, let me say this: I am proud of getting this work out into the world. I am proud that, apart from Dorion Sagan, I am the only author that did not list an academic affiliation. Instead, I get to wear the label of “independent researcher,” which to me has positive associations with clever cranks and weirdos. ▬
I am making it sound as if there is more material in English than there is on this topic. I am expressing disappointment at a minuscule number of works, which are mostly on the phenomenon of qìgōng in the 1980s and 1990s. I am writing this in a lazy mood, unwilling to actually look up examples. I recall David Palmer’s Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China being useful as an introduction to the idea of scientific qìgōng, but still limited compared to more recent scholarship by, for example, Xiao Liu, whose Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China appeared in 2019, or some of Angela Xiao Wu’s writing on the topic. (Here, I should list more recent work that makes the connection between cybernetics and information theory and qìgōng, but I will instead suggest you read the article, which notes it more carefully than I can here!)
This is true in Chinese, as well as English-language writing, to some extent. The former tends to be critical; the latter tends to avoid the topic. Thread of the Silkworm, Iris Chang's otherwise very useful and engaging biography of Qian Xuesen, tries, I would say, to distance Qian from what the author clearly thinks was a misstep. Chang has little to say about Qian’s later cybernetic theories, which are hard to understand without an appreciation of what he saw in qìgōng.
If you don’t read anything else, I think it’s worth getting through Yuk Hui’s introduction, which is called “Why Cybernetics Now?”