Cybernetics in China, an Introduction

Instructor: Mi You & Gary Zhexi Zhang Date & Time: Saturdays, July 8th, 15, 22nd, 29th 09:00 -11:30 ET.

DESCRIPTION: Cybernetics, or “control theory” as it is known in Chinese, rose to prominence in the middle of the 20th century as the syncretic philosophical, social, and technical language of feedback systems. While the background of its founding figures in the United States, from Norbert Wiener to Gregory Bateson, are well-studied, less is known about the lineage of cybernetics in China.

This Seminar will begin by focusing on the life and work of Qian Xuesen, the key protagonist of cybernetics in China, and his trajectory from being an engineer of ballistic systems to his influence as a theorist of social, ecological, and industrial systems. Alongside his work as a mathematician and engineer, the later Qian Xuesen was also a strong advocate of Qigong and paranormal research. Through Qian, we will examine the influence of cybernetic thought and its diffusion in the 20th century China in events such as the efforts to redesign the agrarian economy during the Great Leap Forward and the discourses around population modeling and control that underpinned the One Child Policy.

We will then broaden our scope to consider China’s experience of cybernetic thought as an expression of the “organic materialism” (Needham) found in the history of Chinese science and Taoism. As in the United States and the Soviet Union, the figure of cybernetics in China faded away towards the end of the 20th century through its subsumption into other social and scientific disciplines. We will explore the presence of cybernetics in Chinese scientific discourse and science fiction of the 1980s, approaches to AI research, and international relations.

The four Sessions will explore the following:

Session 1, Intro to cybernetics overall; Qian: We will discuss the non-Western connections of cybernetics, including Norbert Wiener’s own correspondences with Chinese colleagues, Chinese cybernetician Qian Xuesen’s life and work, and the understudied project of the open complex giant system (OCGS) that he proposed in the late 1980s.

Session 2, Cybernetics and social theory: We will examine various social theories in China that were contemporary to and inspired by cybernetics, including science and mass movements in the socialist period, the debate on alienation in the 80s, as well as cybernetics-backed population control policy.

Session 3, Aesthetics of Chinese cybernetics: The popularisation of cybernetics in China has inspired art, sci-fi novels, and films since the 1980s. We will review a selection of works to decode questions such as man-machine relations.

Session 4, Scientific and political conceptual legacy: We will assess the political legacy of cybernetics in China, such as how complex system thinking manifests in theories of politics and geopolitics and its scientific legacy in science policy in China today.

IMAGE: Do Ho Suh: Staircase III, 2011

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