Reading list for Chinese cybernetics
I just organized references for an article on Chinese cybernetics, most of which were used in writing an earlier version (“The Genealogy of Chinese Cybernetics”). So, I would like to offer a brief reading guide on the subject.
Many of the sources I used are in Chinese. I am not including them here.
The English-language sources fall into two categories, as I see it: writing on topics in which cybernetic thinking plays a major role, writing on a distinctly Chinese cybernetic thought. The former usually refers to “cybernetics” more generally, and the latter frequently speaks of “systems engineering” (xìtǒng gōngchéng 系统工程), after the terminology most often used in Chinese. That’s only a general rule. Susan Greenhalgh’s work ventures “Sinified cybernetics,” not falling into either category. In Angela Xiao Wu’s look at communication theory in China, she suggests “systems cybernetics” as a way to communicate “systems engineering,” avoiding the mistaken identification of the Chinese term with the synonymous engineering management field of systems engineering, and making clear that it includes not only cybernetics but also information, communication, and systems theory.
The entries I have included are those that suggest that Chinese cybernetics is a distinct technical practice, rather than a department of Western cybernetic thought. Attempting to understand Chinese cybernetics through an understanding of the Western tradition is to make it completely illegible and invite misinterpretations.
This will be a short list. It’s not complete. It’s a beginning.
▣ Wei Hongsen’s “Norbert Wiener at Qinghua University” tells an important part of cybernetic history that is somewhat unknown. This is a chapter in Chinese Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Very little of Wei Hongsen’s work is available in English, but he’s an invaluable source for the rise of cybernetic thought and systems science in China.
▣ General but necessary history is provided by Donald G. Audette’s 1966 “Computer Technology in Communist China, 1956-1965” and John H. Maier’s 1988 “Computer Science and Information Technology in the People’s Republic of China: The Emergence of Connectivity.”
▣ The English-language writing of Chinese cyberneticists comes third. Song Jian 1985 paper, "Systems Science and China's Economic Reforms,” is a good place to begin. He describes quite clearly what role cybernetic thinking played in planning concerns, including the one-child policy and price controls. Published almost a decade later, Qian Xuesen, Yu Jingyuan, and Dai Ruwei’s paper, “A New Discipline of Science—the Study of Open Complex Giant System and its Methodology,” is a snapshot of Chinese cybernetics as it departed from Western conceptions. Here, you can read directly the ideas that pushed Qian Xuesen toward inquiry into the supernatural. The terminology that he explains in the paper is necessary to read any Chinese-language text on management science and systems engineering.
▣ Another general work is Gao Dasheng and Zou Tsing’s “Philosophy of Technology in China,” written in 1989, and included in Philosophy of Technology: Practical, Historical and Other Dimensions. This is a key work to understand the rise of scientism and the role of cybernetic thought in that trend. They draw from contemporary writing produced by the influential Dialectics of Nature Research Association. A supplement to this is Science and Dissent in Post-Mao China: The Politics of Knowledge by H. Lyman Miller covers the relationship between Qian Xuesen and the Dialectics of Nature Research Association and various journals publishing work on the philosophy of technology. And all of this is shaded in by Edward X. Gu’s massive 1999 paper, “Cultural Intellectuals and the Politics of the Cultural Public Space in Communist China (1979–1989): A Case Study of Three Intellectual Groups,” which, although not about cybernetics or the philosophy of technology, cannot help but cover the influence of systems engineering in popular and elite thought.
▣ Wang Hongzhe and Jiang Yuan’s "Seeking for a Cybernetic Socialism: Qian Xuesen and the Transformation of Information Politics in Socialist China" in CAC Editorial 1 stands as the most focused and ambitious account of Chinese cybernetics in English. It begins with Qian Xuesen working under Theodore von Kármán on defense projects and moves through his return to China and technological utopianism in the 1960s, the supremacy of defense scientists in the 1970s and 1980s, and then the various strains of cybernetic thought that arose in the 1990s. Helpfully, it compares Chinese cybernetics to both American and Soviet strains. This is the best introduction to the topic.
▣ Susan Greenhalgh is the best source on the role of cyberneticists in state planning. Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China introduces Song Jian and details his rise in the bureaucracy. Her description of the debates that led to the one-child policy being decided by defense scientists is controversial, but, based on my other reading, I find it convincing.
▣ Xiao Liu’s Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China is the first work I've read that takes seriously Qian Xuesen's detour into parapsychology, then incorporates it into Chinese interpretations of information theory and reception of futurist texts of the 1980s. Along the way, she makes detours into contemporary theory and film criticism. Jin Guantao’s cybernetic contemplation of Chinese social history is highlighted, as well, alongside 1980s film history.
▣ I recommend anyone interested in not only cybernetic thought but technology in general to dig into the scholarship of Angela Xiao Wu. Most relevant to the discussion of Chinese cybernetics is her most recent publication, “Journalism via Systems Cybernetics: The Birth of the Chinese Communication Discipline and Post-Mao Press Reforms,” which can be found in History of Media Studies.