Matt Prewitt and Gary Zhexi Zhang discuss Chinese cybernetics, focusing on pioneer Qian Xuesen and how the field developed differently in China versus the West. They explore how Chinese cybernetics emerged as a practical tool for nation-building, examining its scientific foundations, political context, and broader cultural impact. Together, they discuss key concepts like information control systems while highlighting the field's interdisciplinary nature and its evolution from thermodynamic to information-based approaches.
Matt Prewitt and Gary Zhexi Zhang discuss Chinese cybernetics, focusing on pioneer Qian Xuesen and how the field developed differently in China versus the West. They explore how Chinese cybernetics emerged as a practical tool for nation-building, examining its scientific foundations, political context, and broader cultural impact. Together, they discuss key concepts like information control systems while highlighting the field's interdisciplinary nature and its evolution from thermodynamic to information-based approaches.
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Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and writer. He is the editor of Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023) and most recently exhibited at the 9th Asian Art Biennial, Taichung.
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Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is the President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
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Hi yeah, my name is Gary Zhexi Zhang. I'm an artist and writer on the art side of things. I'm mostly a make films, installations, various kind of more like site specific conceptual works and, also work quite a lot with technologists and context of institution building and this kind of thing.
and as a writer, I guess I've covered a lot of things, but my own interests and my own research are mostly within. Aspects of history of plants and technology and including and kind of conceptual histories of post 20th century kind of ideas systems ideas predominantly such as ecology such as cybernetics These kinds of spirits of what adam smith called.
I think the spirit of system this idea. That's like a certain ontological key could unlock a whole set of currencies and a whole universe Like a law of, like a scientific law or something would open up. I'm both interested in how those systems come about and how they work. And also just the desire and the historical context and the personal psychotrical kind of context that, bring those about in certain individuals.
Super. you have written a great piece, for the first issue of Combinations. it's about The history of Chinese cybernetics, and how that has dovetailed with the history of, Western cybernetics, a la Norbert Wiener and, and sort of other factors in the history of the 20th century.
but I wonder if we could start off by you just saying a little bit about what got you interested in, cybernetics. Is it something that, plays into your work or something that you've just Come to, by other intellectual, avenues. yeah, I think the short version of story is at some point, barely maybe a decade ago now, I came into contact with, information theory as an idea and its own history.
And, that kind of. I spent quite a long time, quite obsessed with this, conceptual shifts from, the thermodynamic to the informatic as these different, almost like epistemic eras for thinking about, scientific reality in some ways. and then that very quickly led to if I could pause you, could you say a little bit more about that?
So what's the. Yeah, what's informatic? I think from a cultural point of view, like outside of the actual nature of like Boltzmann and Shannon and these various figures who came up with the formula that find these errors from a cultural point of view, I was more interested in how, let's say in the 19th century with the likes of Freud and others, we had a very strong metaphor of.
the human and the mind and the brain as a kind of set of heat engines like pumps and pressures and various kinds of dynamic, those kinds of dynamic systems taking place and then come into the kind of more quote unquote machinic era coming into, there's a longer history, but obviously centering on World War II in the 40s, with the likes of Cal Labs, MIT, the kind of cybernetic crew that we're probably We're about to talk about, you enter into this different kind of paradigm for as a currency for understanding various kinds of systems and to a point, I guess I'm quite interested in how those metaphors continue and linger and intermix over the period of time.
And we still think of. Psychiatry, let's say, as a sort of system of pressures to some great extent, and people like, Philip Mirowski, for example, has done really interesting work on how, economics borrowed all of its ideas at the time from, physics of the 19th century, and when physics updated itself, economics didn't bother, it just kept on its utility functions mapped to, the energy, Formula of like 19th century thermodynamics, for instance.
And yeah, I'm interested in how these things become socially operative, remain scientifically operative, and also come into how we design and build systems, that and the fact that this kind of slippage between, Thermodynamic and informational entropy is always intrigued and eluded me a little bit.
it's a directory appropriation of an entropy formula by Shannon of Boltzmann and so on. But at the same time, it's a metaphor. You're going to, I feel like you're going to write crazy headspace when you try to actually form that kind of direct, continuity between those 2 styles of entropy, but it's.
That's fascinating to me. Yeah. that's interesting to me, too. The what strikes me is that, when I when I try to imagine, the ideas that you just described, basically, it's just, it's a movement from one kind of a control system to another, right? so you can think of.
engines and pistons and thermodynamics in that regard as, like the basis of systems of control and then cybernetics, the, word itself was, it is based on the idea of, of a steering system or a, or a control system, but it's using information as the means of, of controlling the system instead of, let's say pressure and heat.
and, what do you think about that? Is there, is that, is it just a shift from one medium to another, or is there some qualitative change there? I feel like I'm, going to try. I don't think I'm. Strong enough on the history here, but I feel like this hinges on how we thought about control as part of a system between these two paradigms.
I feel like in the kind of post information. So paradigm, we have an idea. Control was almost self evidenced and automatic. if there is system, there is control. Whereas in the kind of prior thermodynamic style, you had something that was like, all systems are fundamentally dissipative. And you, you're, trying to like, retain and hold onto and take, to marshal that, that kind of heat energy.
How you can, but, but I feel like you don't have this kind of idea of the feedback loop as strongly, at least I'm sure someone's gonna correct me on this, but I feel like in, when you come into, it's, when you come into cyber, like 19th, century French, it was a hydrologist or something.
so 17 18th century French, The idea of steering as how to marshal a system, yes, but I think it's only a bit later into the kind of informatic paradigm that you get this idea of control as a kind of self automating, like self correcting feedback loop, that if you have a system like a cell or a, homeostats or something, it is fundamentally already doing control by virtue of existing and not stopping to, ceasing to exist.
if that makes sense. Interesting. the original, I'm not sure what the right vocabulary was, but, the original, like engine governor technology was, this thing where like a, you've got a, traditional thermodynamic internal combustion engine, which spins and then it's got like a, it's got like a weight attached to it, on a chain.
And so the idea being that as the thing spins faster, the chain kind of starts to, go horizontal. because of centrifugal force and as it goes more horizontal, it creates more resistance on the spinning engine. So it prevents the engine from spinning too fast. that, and so that's totally thermodynamic, right?
And that does seem like. Already, the idea of a feedback loop is implicit in that, although I'm sure it's not formulated as, as precisely as the later cyberneticists did. But, does that make sense? So no, it's actually sorry. No, I actually haven't seen that. That is a really great image.
No, I think you're right. And I think once we look back, if we keep going back to the history of, water clocks and all sorts of other mechanisms, we see, written. Maybe very different paradigms of, control that are happening. I'm trying to think what the difference is. I feel like it's the difference between, like, when it's an information theory is that you have an idea of a system that's totally contained within a set of possibilities, like binary code or something.
within the probability space, your entropy is contained within the probability space that is already, to some extent, contained, understood, or defined by, By whatever system, whatever language you're in, like all those ideas about the entropy of the English language, for example, the, Shannon has a great paper on crosswords about how, English is really good for crosswords, because it has about a 50 percent redundancy rate, which means that you can actually do a crossword to a satisfying degree, and it's not just like swimming in noise or something already obvious.
Totally, there's another, there's a slightly, slightly orthogonal point here, which is just interesting that I want to point out. And then we can look back from it, which is that that in the, just in the sort of ideological realm there, people have a very different way of thinking about information than they do about thermodynamics and engines and, explosion stuff, right? And the main difference there, I think, is that, this is, this may not always be the case, but in many cases, people have an idea of information as being somehow non coercive or bloodless. So there's therefore some kind of contradiction in the idea of some kind of apparent tension and thinking about it as a control mechanism, because, especially perhaps in the American context where we think, I don't know, words, sticks and stones can break my bones, but words cannot hurt me a thing.
yeah, it's almost like the distinction people like to make between information and knowledge or something like what is usable and not disturbed. It's something that's just there for you in a neutral way. Exactly. Exactly. So there's, something a little bit counterintuitive from a certain point of view about, about, information as a means of control, whereas I think thermodynamic control somehow feels more, I don't know, less surprising or something.
And I think that kind of apparent contradiction in the idea of informational control has actually been really important in the particular in the 2nd, half of the 20th century, as you've seen sort of ideologies presenting, Information systems as inherently liberatory, for example. Yeah, no, that's a really big one.
which is interesting, just to follow your thing, in the original paper, of, a mathematical theory of communication, the model of communication is, It's not about communication as such. The point of communication is for person A to compel person B to do the thing that they're trying to make them do, right?
It's not even about, can we pass on this message as such. The message has a purpose. If your communication does not Change behavior. I think we're on. Weaver's introduction actually maybe talks about behavioral change in like the other party. so it's neatly at the heart of all of these things as well.
Yeah. yeah, totally. the idea of control is very much there in the, mid centuries. Cybernoticists, but, but it somehow turns into something else by the time you get to a 1984 apple ad or something, right? I was thinking exactly that. I feel like the classic kind of a B is like the IBM man and the apple, 1984.
Yeah, one is like a total drone. And the other is like a whole symbol of sexual and sort of personal liberation. great. now, before we get to, The history of cybernetics in China. what are your thoughts on the sort of, contributions of the initial cyberneticists?
have you, are you a fan of Norbert Wiener, for example? how do you. How do you relate to these ideas? I don't know if anyone could, in some sense, not be a fan of Norbert Wiener. I was, I was fortunate to spend some time at MIT, and when I was there, I did spend some time in his archives.
And I have these pictures on my phone of his, his drawings of Tortoise brains when he was 12. Like he was a fastidious self archiver who I think was such a child prodigy that he realized that he was important by the time he was about 14 and started he did his first, I think, biology or something degree when he was about 14 at Tufts.
and yeah, he's a thoroughly weird, sympathetic, very moral and quite ultimately quite likable figure. I think it, and then obviously a complete genius. Every sense of that, although in a slightly smug self aware sense, but nonetheless, I guess he gets the kind of genius card. yeah, I mean, that stuff is, I think is the fact that he came from, like I think research in Brownian motion and like where the kind of we know functions and stuff come from and ended up, in cybernetics is, Kind of fascinating to me the way he went from a kind of mathematical space to this much broader Sort of post war very nuanced sort of liberal imagination through and quite he was quite anxious as well. I suppose you know in even in like the 1960 book. I think he, he's ultimately very anxious about the state of the world.
And he's very, he stopped taking funding from the DoD, I think, at some point during the Cold War. yeah, I think he's a thoroughly sympathetic figure. and, but to the extent that he is the founder of cybernetics, it's also interesting to whether they are the first cyberneticists, If that's meaningful or not, he certainly was a great figurehead who gave it the term.
I think there was like some debate also around his like, adjacency, his work's kind of parallelness with Komogorov, I think. And there was like, interesting stuff happening with control systems theory, at least in Russia, at the same time. And what's interesting about someone like Chen Xuesheng, the Chinese hypnotist that I ended up writing about, is that It's not very clear how directly inspired by Wiener he was.
He was certainly, he certainly, took Wiener's term and like really went with it, was highly inspired by him. But by that point, by the 1950s, he had also spent about, what, 20 odd years at least, maybe 30 years as a kind of a control system engineer, rocket scientist person. So he was really in a way writing, A textbook at that point for some people, the textbook on how to make ICBMs not wobble under various conditions and how to like, control, mostly projectiles in, very like turbulence and unpredictable conditions and how to like, correct various forms of physical forces and so on.
so there's a kind of. There's a kind of mishmash going, I think, in those early years, but then if you follow the kind of, Norbert Wiener cybernetics trajectory, which is by far the richest and the most interesting, there are lots of these alter cybernetics, but none is as well covered and also is as, deep as the Western one, ultimately, you do get into this fascinating area where some, it became, applicable to almost everything was, inspiring to anthropologists like Bateson and Mead was the center of these kind of moments of grand interdisciplinary dialogue that we often still look back to now, like the METI conferences, which in themselves are mostly just people not seeing eye to eye and really disagreeing with each other and are coming out.
furious, these were, I feel like we tend to, lionize these kind of past meetings where often they were just like academic stickering, but there was none of that important and was, were like significant meetings of different fields at the time. And these were mid century, like around 1950 conferences at which the discipline of cybernetics was first named and articulated.
Exactly. Yes. Sorry. the, so you have people like or McCulloch coming from neuroscience, people like, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead coming from anthropology is called anthropology. and whereas engineers, I think people like Shannon, who was very against any, all of this, to be honest, I think he wrote a book called an article called the bandwagon basically saying everyone stopped joining the bandwagon of information theory.
This is. a pure theory about, noise and information on communication lines and not a metaphor for absolutely everything else. but then of course that kind of did rapidly diffuse into hippie culture, into various kinds of, liberal ideologies, and I guess at some points, it also traded places with AI.
I think someone else might, I don't know this history well enough, but I believe there was a kind of actual moment of kind of a branding thing with the likes of Minsky, where they basically chose to go with artificial intelligence as the name for how to create, neural networks that were initially pioneered by Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch of the METI conferences to think about kind of artificial minds, rather than cybernetics, which was this much baggier term at the time.
And then by the 1990s, I think 80s and 90s, you basically don't have it anymore. there's no one is really talking about cybernetics in one department in England. That's still somehow pushing it as a real field. yeah, it's a fascinating story. Yeah, I think that continuity is really important to, to see between how cybernetics becomes, artificial intelligence.
In your piece, you focus a lot on a, on a particular, figure, from China who became an important, thinker in this, stream, you already mentioned him, briefly, but I wonder if you can say a little bit about, who this is and, what makes him important. Yeah, so this guy's called Chen Xuesen, he was, I think, born at the very end of the 19th century, if I'm not mistaken, and was, came from quite an aristocratic family in Shanghai, and in China, his name is well known, because he's pretty much Chinese.
The father of modern Chinese science in some ways, like the kind of only heroic scientific figure going for certainly of the post 1950 period in China, the one that like has like a museum dedicated to him and this kind of thing. He's not, he's less well known outside of China, perhaps, and maybe mostly known as theor of Chinese cybernetics.
Or if you are in, if you are nerdy about the history of NASA and this kind of thing, he was one of the founding, members or one of, one of the founders of, the jet propulsion map, the JPL. Which preceded NASA itself as organization as a place to do rocketry research. so I guess just to give a little bit of background on him.
He was from an elite family and born into, It, had its formative years in Shanghai, I think, after the revolution, like in, in the kind of Republican period. and after the Boxer Rebellion in the 1910s, I believe, or maybe a little earlier, the American government gave a lot of scholarships, as a kind of, cultural diplomacy deal, to China, to Chinese students to go and study in the U.
S. And this actually produced quite a number of significant figures who later came back to China, and Qian was one of the ones who went to, he initially went to MIT and ended up under the tutelage of Theodore von Kármán. who's a Hungarian, rocket scientist, like one of the sort of founding figures in that field in the 20th century.
And then as one of von Karman's top students went with him over to Caltech and, later became very much part of this kind of Californian, world. I think he was actually, he was like attending the parties of, Robert Oppenheimer's younger brother, who also briefly appears in the movie as the kind of main, Marxist Communist link.
Ironically, Chen, in this time, while not unsympathetic to Chinese communism or to the kind of whatever would be the fate of China, he was ultimately patriotic. But, he wasn't Political by any account. He's a quiet figure at the back of these parties. But then there was this, he gets loosely linked early on to these kind of more like at the time, communists agitators, in the 1930s would then get screwed over by the Red Scare was on with Chen himself.
Sidebar Oppenheimer's brother is also the founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. If anyone knows, that place. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, okay, so this is, there are lots of fun legacies here as a kind of sidebar, it's part of Chen's story. So Chen becomes, when he's in this kind of cozy, academic, scientist, Caltech crowd, He's mostly, I think, just being a kind of expat American scientist, basically, at this point, and he becomes part of the small crew under von Kármán in, of rocketry researchers that become known as the Suicide Squad.
And each of them are quite interesting. I'm trying to remember if I can remember all of them now. The most famous one is Jack Parsons, because he was, long and short, he was a sort of Satanist. He was a follower of Crowley, or another kind of school of this, and he did various little rituals. And I think no one's quite sure what happened to his wife.
he had a very kind of colorful life, and, and another one, closer to the Exploratorium side of things is, Frank Molina, who I think is actually the founder of Leonardo Journal, which is a very well known journal if you're in the kind of legacy art and tech kind of world, the kind of, electronic, kind of world.
art science and technology space. and there is another member, but I suddenly can't remember their name. but they, yeah, the suicide squads are well known for basically going into the deserts in Pasadena and like blowing stuff up as part of their experiments and becoming, yeah, becoming the kind of top rocket scientists in the country and therefore probably in the world at that time.
And so what's notable about this kind of. early, I can't remember exactly what age he was, but I guess he was in his 30s and 40s, before the war. he, became one of the top scientists of America, really, I think, in terms, of, this particular field of rocketry ballistics, which then became extremely important during the war.
and then I think just after the war in 1945, it's extraordinary to consider this given what's happened to him after and then what China American relations since, but after the war, he's given like top military clearance and is a temporary, or is made a colonel of the U. S. Army so that he can go to Germany and inspect German science.
And yeah, I think I wrote about it briefly, but there's this picture there from his European visits where, okay, 33 year old Chen, so he's actually born in about 1910 or so. 33 year old Chen is sitting with von Kármán and the teacher of von Kármán, Ludwig Prandtl, who's a Czech fluid dynamicist. And the 3 and having, being in German territory, I've worked with the Nazis and the 3 of them, this kind of Hungarian American expat, this kind of young Chinese scientist, and this, check Nazi fluid analysis, who are all basically.
Leading figures in the very narrow niche field are together on it's just appreciating each other for a moment, but on this kind of totally miles apart, geopolitical narrative that's about to unfold. And yeah, Chen's like a leading scientific figure at this time, and it's also interesting to, for me, that it's a reminder that pre 1945, at least, science was, or scientists as a community were much more, seemingly much more political, much more ideologically, forthright in various ways, than at least I tend to imagine the scientific kind of profession now, mostly.
and so after the war in, I think, around 1948, I definitely have it more accurately in my piece, he starts to be, Looked into by the FBI and shortly after that is taken as, into house arrest. this is shortly after I think writing quite an important co writing with one common, really important post war reports.
Similar to, I think this is under the era of the guy who wrote, as we may think. the post war science administrator. okay. anyway, this is, so he's taken under house arrest shortly after he publishes like quite an important report about American air supremacy with one common, which becomes like a leading kind of priority during the kind of post war period.
And this is a period where the U S is thinking about what to do with all of our. All of our science, all of our kind of, investments in, this, period of, war, and also what to do with all of this, technological supremacy that we're, we seem to have gained, and this power that we seem to be accumulating over a world order, really.
and then Chen gets taken to house arrest under the Red Scare, and he basically, is in that condition for, I think, at least For five years, he was detained in 1950 and he published engineering cybernetics, his textbook on ballistics and systems control in 1954. I think it's only shortly after that, that he actually returns to China.
So it was under house arrest for four years. Basically five years and in this time, I think he was asked whether and he was a communist And there are fbi files you can still download on him. and he basically remains neutral He never forget, he never gives up his, love, for China, nor his kind of, at home ness in America.
he isn't particularly politically, aligned in any way, but he is, a kind of patriot to his home country, and he is obviously someone who adopted America in a very, important way. so as a result, this was has sometimes been considered, maybe rightly, it's hard to judge these things for me, but one of the most major strategic crackups of the U.
S. in in the 20th century, really, to give up one of your top, scientific assets to a communist nation that you consider to be one of your top adversaries and historically will turn out to be your top adversary. so in 1955, he is allowed to return to China along with a couple of other Chinese scientists in a similar kind of condition.
and he never looks back. he goes to China and is recognized by the Chinese leadership. this is a little bit more context around this. 1955 People's Republic of China is about five years and two months old. after the revolution or the victory of the communists in 1949, it is a basically dirt poor, agrarian country that had decades of civil war and conflict with the Japanese.
They did civil war, were invaded from Japan, so they quit the civil war for a while and tried to get their shit together. And then That was over and they did the Civil War again in the Communist one. this is in quite a, febrile kind of period to say the least. and we're also shortly before these kind of like dramatic, mega projects that, Mao undertook in the 1950s, the late 1950s, and the famously in the Great Deep Forwards, which was this gigantic agricultural reform project, which did result in famines, which killed millions and millions of people.
But they recognized that Chen was an asset, and they brought him and a number of other scientists, welcomed them with open arms, really. And then, the short version of this story, in a way, is that he goes on to build the fastest nuclear program and the fastest satellite. And rocketry and, generally cold war defense, technology program, I think, in world history, as far as it's in 20th century history of the, this cold war dynamic.
Yeah. so he returns and he immediately starts building, gets put in important positions where he's immediately starts assembling different kind of ministries and centers and working groups for, amongst other things, cybernetics as well. He starts an Institute of Operations Research, which is this kind of adjacent fields, which I wonder if you might actually know more about than I do, which.
Emerges in the war as a kind of combination between, management and statistics to understand how to best, Most like basically optimize production systems and bureaucratic systems. I believe, I think operations research mostly ends up going down into the kind of business school road, but I think initially it was used to like optimize, like arms production during global.
Did, did Jen have any. So did he have a role in the great leap forward? And I asked because, it's often presented as this sort of, canonical central planning disaster. And I'm wondering if he had, a prominent role in some of the initiatives in it. yeah, he did have a role.
It's a little bit hard for me to judge exactly, because he had a role in the sense that in that period, in the late 60s, he wrote a number of articles and there was some public articles. He'd already become, I think, this kind of, like very significant scientific, a scientific figure and also a figure, part of, very much part of the state.
and he, Did publish this one diagram along with a couple of things article about basically You know, reimagining the whole production system of China, this kind of extraordinary diagram that kind of starts with like coal and energy and grain and so on and ends with the making of clothing and everyday life and in the middle is all these kind of different like units and production processes and stuff.
So he has this kind of grand vision kind of approach and by accounts the number of counselor read which are mostly second resources to be fair he's involved but it's hard to tell just how influential these ideas were And if they were influential they did seem extremely ham fisted and like extremely Abstract, really governing from the center of this huge, unwieldy, complicated country, and imagining it could just be wired up like this, a bunch of different units in a control system or something.
so it's, yeah, I really don't know how to, how much to hold them responsible for the disasters of the Great Leap Forward, and I think they are. Considered even the most ardent kind of believers in the party would accept that there were mistakes made during that period. and yeah, he was part of the imagination of it, or at least he seems to contribute to the imagination of it, but it's not clear how much actual influence he had over that kind of thing.
Gotcha. and it ultimately you present. the idea of Chinese cybernetics as, a sort of a, slightly different, branch of the tree, versus what, American aficionados of cybernetics might be familiar with, or, or, Western more generally, could you say a little bit more about what.
yeah, how does, Chinese cybernetics sort of land somewhere different or distinguish itself from the, the rest of the field? so very loosely, I guess you have the mainstream of cybernetics in the US, you have, Soviet cybernetics, which to be fair, Soviet control systems theory, which is to be heard as well, also where a number of the people in China who end up in China in the 50s and 60s.
Who they're trained by because, Qian was fortunate to be one of the kind of like more privileged elite in China in the early 20th century who received a Boxer scholarship and stayed in America, but most sort of people who went out to study would have gone to the USSR until the kind of Sino Soviet split in the late 50s.
The Chinese line, I guess the way I think about it, I have to say this part of this is an interpretive, is that The U. S. cybernetics emerges with a, alongside a superpower in a kind of relatively, bourgeois kind of condition. Like it's a, it's already a highly developed nation about to reach its real swing into the kind of post war baby boom era.
And so going into the kind of height of American hegemony. And. It takes a lot of very, philosophical kind of terms, at least the parts of it I've been, I've looked more into, perhaps the kind of, there's also a lot to say about its influence on engineering, but certainly people like Bina, Bateson, they were They, understood cybernetics as part of a kind of a worldview and that was taken much further with there was a cybernetics magazine, which, they're all what showed up by machines of love and grace, this kind of 70s, which people like Fred Turner have covered really well.
that was part of this kind of whole picture, which did also influence, let's say American computer culture and cyber culture and all of that stuff. In China, you've got a very different picture, because while they might come from some similar roots in terms of engineering and control system design and this kind of thing, in China, you're talking about, really just nation building, as that's the only game in town for, People working with the state for elites and so on.
So you're not, my sense of it is that at least in the beginning in the 50s and 60s, you're really not interested in, this kind of more. Moral philosophical imagination that, people like, interested in, you're really much more interested in building a defense program, understanding how to maximize production systems, how to, there's organized foods, bringing people out of poverty, like reconstruct a nation that is breaking up with the Soviets that is seeing threats from all over that's just been invaded by Japan and is facing, American Red Scare era threats as well. You're on, red alert.
All the time, and so the technological side of that is really about a development, of course, like growth, economic growth and, actually, that's not quite right. It's economic growth really takes the back seats to the kind of. production as such, until the 80s. and yeah, so I think the distinction, the strong distinction I make, at least I came to in writing this piece, is that on one side you have this somewhat more kind of philosophical approach, and on the other side you have this deeply pragmatic approach, which is how do we construct a modern nation from a kind of The ravages of, civil war from a recently feudal imperial kind of, country into the kind of, mid 20th century.
And, if the kind of, historical anomaly of modern China is anything to go by, then, that project, in some ways continues and, was I was going to say a remarkable success. That's probably should qualify that it was a remarkable achievement of nation building that people like Chen made a huge contribution to in the form of basically Building up the entire defense program, building up, the ballistics and communications program and building up the kind of state scientific infrastructure, in the form of various institutes and so on.
Yeah, there's something really interesting. 1 of the threads that, that, jumps out at me in that line of thought is, That there's something very interesting between, on the one hand, imagining, cybernetics as, developing systems that are subordinated to a nation state, and then on the other hand, developing systems that may not be subordinate to the nation state that may extend beyond it.
So there's something, potentially something a little bit more, more unbounded or, internationalist in the way of thinking about, The economy, for example, in, in the West and, and, that has that has a couple valences to it, right? so for, so on the one hand, you can think about that as being somehow more.
More philosophical or more idealistic or less pragmatic, on the other hand, you may think of it as being more naive, right? or, or more like ideological in the negative sense of that word, right? So there's something, there's just some, there's a lot of interesting, questions that come up when you think about whether the control systems of cybernetics builds are, subordinated to the nation state or not.
Yeah, that's really interesting and feels quite naughty to me because I, think on 1 hand, yeah, we can think about. as infrastructures that we live in and amongst and maybe subordinated to and maybe identified more or less with the state and so on, this kind of cybernetic technologies, if you like. On the other hand, the, on the other hand, there's a kind of, liberalism versus, in this case, socialism kind of split where.
Liberalism might identify the individual, against the state, against the kind of idea, the kind of, administration, organization, society, and, think about this system of different nodes in a kind of relatively free economy to, and how they interrelate, and I suppose, you can make a link from that to the way in which Western cybernetics was perhaps more psychologizing, more sculptural anthropological in the sense of, thinking about, relative ways in which, different kind of social systems might relate to each other and to the individuals, even to the point of the cybernetics of, Conversation with things like people like golden past.
it was really applied very much to, experience, whereas the flip side of that is where you identify control systems, society and the states together. Because society is part of the society is, the state is in the kind of administration of society, which is a sort of reproduction system for itself, And so that part that way, you would think of. Nation, IE the land mass of China, in the case of Stan, states, the administration of the social and people as part of society, as part of one big control system. So whether you have a picture of someone being subordinated or not is a more of a philosophical question about whether you value the individual over the social, in this kind of classic dichotomy.
and in this case, in Chin's case, I think what's what becomes interesting and is it fits as part of this idea of how to, if you like, how to design a nation, how to design, the illustration of a, a number of people who live on a geographic landmass, such as China. And those things really Nick together, like how to administer different forms of production in different parts of the nation, how to move energy from the energy rich regions to the kind of like economic productive, economically productive areas, how to defend like defense and, How to bring infrastructure into the easier to defend center versus the kind of like vulnerable to Japan outside. all of these things. Oh, and also how to, control demography, because 1 of 10 students most famously. Perhaps as, of his legacy of the Chinese cybernetics person is that his student, song Gian becomes, an important scientist and administrator who's responsible for one child policy was one, one of the early architects of that.
so how to administer, a demographic and how to like. think of society itself as a control system. And all of these things come with massive qualifications to like, whether they were, good, successful, achieve their goals, etc. But nonetheless, the way of thinking is for all of those things to be collapsed, I think, together, to, think of that whole thing as a control system, rather than a bunch of different individual people being subjected, to different kinds of control.
so just to push back on that slightly, like 1, so you're describing the whole thing as a control system here. So we've got control systems that are oriented towards particular ends. And then we have the sort of, the sort of. social or political layer, which is part of the stack.
But the way that I think about that and tell me if you think I'm missing something here is that is it actually, if you're taking the sort of discipline of cybernetics and then HTML5, And then subordinating it to particular ends in a way, those ends are defined by a political realm, which is placed outside the domain of cybernetics.
whereas there is another way of. Thinking about, about cybernetics where you really are applying that kind of thinking to the political realm and thinking that essentially cybernetic processes become the, create the feedback loops and the dynamics that also define the goals as well as, implementing the goals, which are defined outside of cybernetics.
yes. And my, perhaps, naive way of reading what you're saying, is that, and this may not be exactly what you're saying. This might just be me, my projection onto it or something, but, I'm interpreting, I interpret the kind of Silicon Valley ideology that gets layered onto cybernetics as a little bit more of a, As a kind of a way of collapsing that political realm into cybernetics, as opposed to keeping a sort of a political, a non cybernetic political decision making layer above cybernetic systems, the way you seem to be describing Chinese cybernetics.
Yeah, no, that's really interesting. I'm trying to work out if I'm, If it's, at this hour, whether I can quite formulate well enough, kind of response to that. I think it's, really interesting because I'm not quite saying that this all is Chinese cybernetics, because I don't think there is a kind of, as, as clear a discipline or a kind of, narrative of Chinese cybernetics.
It's been written about by myself and a number of other people, and there's about to be a book actually with, about China and AI, which has, will have a number of good pieces on it, but this, where you can draw a line around the kind of number of people and ideas and phenomena that could be classified on the Chinese cybernetics, I think you find a much more heterogeneous.
Set of ideas, not like heterogeneous from each other, but like a much more kind of mixed amalgamation of different ideas than you do with maybe what you're describing with a kind of Silicon Valley idea, like a kind of a totalization of cybernetics, feedback loops, free informatic feedback loops or something somehow has the kind of the, apotheosis of what is good and true of all systems.
I think this is maybe, again, it's where this kind of pragmatism comes in. for someone, at least in some, for some of his ideas, someone like Qian, had, I don't think he ever proposed that, let's say governance or governments or various of those other of these systems should be run via cybernetics.
He did come up with like expert systems and like kind of various imaginations for like new ministries or like decision making processes which would rely on like informatic processes being pulled at that speed here, like expert consultant consultation here, political governors taking all this, these kind of much more mixed methods systems.
and to the extent that, I think perhaps a kind of cartoonish way to put it would be that if the kind of caricature of the Silicon Valley relationship turns like cybernetics into a kind of morality and a kind of ontology for how to, how all complex systems work. In Chen's case, it was much, in the Chinese case more broadly, it was much more of a set of like different, Ways to apply mostly mathematical thinking to complex social issues.
in a way, it's like, how can we, rather than how can we subject cybernetics to the political, it's like, how can we make the political scientific again? How can we make like social policy scientific? And what do we mean by scientific? We mean like the application of various kind of like statistical kind of methods, and like operations research kind of optimization methods, and so on.
and it's not clear to me that in the heart of all those were like, automatic feedback loops that would take, governance out of the picture, whether as a kind of, a theological points or just simply as a, practical one. A lot of it was really about optimization, and I think Qian, maybe at one point, I think he says something like, he defines himself not as an engineer, but as a, like a applied scientist, basically, and his science being the field of cybernetics, which he wants to apply to lots of other things.
But I think if you look at one child policy and you look at Chinese, infrastructure policies and like the ways in which the kind of movement of energy and movements technological, like production centers are organized as part of a kind of overall national system, geographically and spatially, what is like a kind of, A sort of systems logic being applied at quite a macro scale in just quite practical kind of ways of like almost someone drawing a diagram of the country or something, to solve mostly quite practical problems.
Such as fear of invasion and like producing more or something. Yeah, fascinating stuff. this is a really rich conversation. I wish we had a little bit more time to continue it. But for those who are interested, they'll check out your piece and, super grateful that you contributed it to the combinations.
so Thank you for that. And thanks for this great conversation, too. Yeah, thanks, man. All right. You guys can edit that somewhat, right? Yeah, we'll edit. We'll at least edit off the ends, of course.
00:00 Introduction to Cybernetics and Its Legacy
03:05 Cultural Context of Chinese Cybernetics
05:51 The Shift from Thermodynamic to Informatic Paradigms
09:13 Control Systems: Thermodynamics vs Cybernetics
12:03 The Role of Information in Control Mechanisms
15:00 Norbert Wiener and the Founding of Cybernetics
17:56 Qian Xuesen: The Father of Chinese Cybernetics
21:11 The Interdisciplinary Nature of Cybernetics
24:02 Qian Xuesen's Journey and Contributions
29:02 The Political Landscape of Post-War Science
32:50 Chen's Return to China and Its Implications
35:11 The Role of Cybernetics in Chinese Nation-Building
38:08 Distinctions in Cybernetics: East vs. West
43:26 Cybernetics as a Control System in China
50:01 The Political Dimensions of Cybernetics
00:00 Introduction to Cybernetics and Its Legacy
This is a RadicalxChange Production. Hello and welcome to RadicalxChange(s). In this episode, Matt Prewitt is joined by Gary Zhexi Zhang to discuss his latest piece in Combinations titled, The Critical Legacy of Chinese Cybernetics. They begin by exploring the origins of cybernetics and move on to its adaptation in China and the pivotal role played by figures like Qian Xuesen.
They discuss the unique cultural and political context that shaped Chinese cybernetics and examine its far-reaching impact on various disciplines, including artificial intelligence, computer science, and the social sciences. Combinations is a new publication of RadicalxChange Foundation, exploring new ideas about economics, democracy, and the relationship between technology and power. Our aim is to illuminate new possible paths for present institutions, spotlighting the connections between ideas, technologies, and social and political organization. And now, here is Matt Prewitt and Gary Zhang.
Matt Prewitt: Gary, great to see you. wonder if you can maybe take a moment by introducing yourself and your work to the audience.
Gary Zhexi Zhang: Hi, my name is Gary Zhexi Zhang. I'm an artist and writer on the art side of things. mostly a make films, installations, various kind of more site-specific conceptual works, and also work quite a lot with technologists and in the of context of institution building and this kind of thing. And as a writer, I guess, I guess I've covered a lot of things, but my own interests and own research are mostly within aspects of history of science and technology and including, and kind of conceptual histories of post 20th century kind of ideas, systems ideas predominantly, such as ecology, such as cybernetics, these kinds of spirits of what Adam Smith called, think, the spirit of system, idea that's like a certain ontological key could unlock a whole set of currencies and a whole universe, like a scientific laurels and then would open up. I'm kind of both interested in how those systems come about and how they work and also just the desire and the historical context and the personal, psychological kind of context that bring those about in certain individuals. Super. You have written a great piece for the first issue of Combinations. It's about the history of Chinese cybernetics and how that has sort of dovetailed with the history of Western cybernetics, a la Norbert Wiener and sort of other factors in the history of the 20th century. But I wonder if we could start off by you just saying a little bit about what got you interested in cybernetics. Is it something that plays into your work or something that you've just come to by other intellectual avenues? Yeah.
Yeah, I think the short version of the story is at some point, barely, maybe a decade ago now, I kind of came into contact with information theory as an idea in its own history. that kind of, I spent quite a long time quite obsessed with this conceptual shift from, I guess, the thermodynamic to the informatic as kind of these different almost like Epistemic eras for thinking about scientific reality in some ways, and then that very quickly led to Sorry, if I could pause you could you say a little bit more about that? what's the yeah, what's the difference between the thermodynamic and the informatic? I mean, I think from a from a cultural point of view like outside of the actual nature of like, you know, like Boltzmann and
Shannon and these various figures who came up with the formula that find these errors from a cultural point of view. I was kind of more interested in how let's say in the 19th century with the likes of Freud and others, we had a very strong metaphor of the human and the mind and the brain as a kind of set of heat engines like pumps and pressures and various kinds of dynamic, those kinds of dynamic systems taking place and then come into the kind of more quote unquote machinic era coming into it.
There's a longer history, obviously centering on World War II in the 40s with the likes of our labs, MIT, the kind of cybernetic crew that we're probably about to talk about. You enter into this different kind of paradigm as a currency for understanding various kinds of systems. And to a point, I guess I'm quite interested in how those metaphors continue and linger and intermix over the period of time. And we still think of psychiatry, let's say, as a sort
system of pressures to some great extent. you know, people like, for example, some really interesting work on how economics borrowed all of its ideas at the time from physics of the 19th century. And when physics updated itself, economics didn't bother. It just kept on its utility functions mapped to like the energy like formulae of like 19th century thermodynamics, for instance.
And so, yeah, I'm kind of interested in how these things become socially operative, remain scientifically operative, and also come into how we design and build systems. That and the fact that this kind of slippage between thermodynamic and informational entropy has always kind of intrigued and eluded me a little bit. I mean, it's kind of a directory appropriation of an entropy formula by Shannon of like,
Boltzmann and so on, but at the same time, it's kind of a metaphor. I feel like you get into a very crazy headspace when you try to actually form that kind of continuity between those two styles of entropy. it's kind of fascinating to me. Yeah. That's interesting to me too. What strikes me is that when I try to imagine the ideas that you just described, like
Basically, it's a movement from one kind of a control system to another, right? I mean, so you can think of sort of engines and pistons and thermodynamics in that regard as, you know, like the basis of systems of control. And then cybernetics, you know, the word itself was, you know, is based on the idea of...
of a steering system or a control system, but it's using information as the means of controlling the system instead of, let's say, pressure and heat. And what do you think about that? Is it just sort of a shift from one medium to another, or is there some qualitative change there? I feel like I'm going to try.
strong enough on the history here, but I feel like this hinges on how we thought about control as part of a system between these two paradigms. I feel like in the kind of host information paradigm, have an idea of control, which is almost self-evidence and automatic. If there is system, there is control. Whereas in the kind of prior thermodynamic style, you had something that was like all systems are fundamentally dissipative.
And you're trying to retain, hold onto, and to kind of marshal that kind of heat energy how you can. But I feel like you don't have this kind of idea of the feedback loop as strongly at least. I'm sure someone's going to correct me on this. I feel like it's when you come into cyberneticity, like 19th century French. It was a hydrologist, wasn't it? Sorry, 18th century French.
The idea of steering as how to martial a system, yes, but I think it's only a bit later into the kind of mathematic paradigm. And you get this idea of control as a kind of self-automating, like self-correcting feedback loop that if you have a system like a cell or a homeostats or something, it is fundamentally already doing control by virtue of existing and not stopping to existing to exist. If that makes sense. Interesting. So the original like,
I'm not sure what the right vocabulary was, but the original engine governor technology was this thing where you've got a traditional thermodynamic internal combustion engine which spins, and then it's got a weight attached to it on a chain. And so the idea being that as the thing spins faster, the chain starts to go horizontal because of centrifugal force.
And as it goes more horizontal, it creates more resistance on the spinning engine. So it prevents the engine from spinning too fast. That's totally thermodynamic, right? And that does seem like already the idea of a feedback loop is implicit in that, although I'm sure it's not formulated as precisely as the later cyberneticists did. does that make sense?
No, totally. Sorry, no, no, I actually haven't seen that. That is a really great image. No, I think you're right. And I think once we look back, like if we keep going back to the history of like water clocks and all sorts of other mechanisms, we see like kind of maybe very different paradigms of like control that are happening. I'm trying to think what the difference is. I feel like it's the difference between like went into the information theory is that you have an idea of a system that's totally contained within a set of
possibilities like binary code or something like that. With the probability space, your entropy is contained within the probability space that is kind of already to some extent contained or defined by whatever system, whatever language you're in. Like all those ideas about the entropy of English language, example. Like Shannon has a great paper on crosswords about how English is really good for crosswords because it has about a 50 % redundancy rate, which means that you can actually do a crossword.
to a satisfying degree and it's not just like swimming in noise or something already obvious. Totally. mean, there's another, there's a slightly, slightly orthogonal point here, which is just interesting that I want to point out and then we can look back from it, is that like, that in the, just in the sort of ideological realm,
There, people have a very different way of thinking about information than they do about sort of, you know, thermodynamics and engines and, you know, explosion stuff, right? And the main difference there, I think, is that, know, this may not always be the case, but in many cases, people have an idea of information as being somehow sort of non-coercive or bloodless.
Right? So there's therefore some kind of contradiction in the idea of, or some kind of apparent tension and thinking about it as a control mechanism because, know, especially, especially perhaps in the American context where we think, you know, I don't know, words, you know, sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can not hurt me sort of a thing. yeah, it's almost a distinction people like to make between information and knowledge or something like what is usable and not disturbed and something that's just there for you in neutral way.
Exactly. Exactly. there's something a little bit counterintuitive from a certain point of view about information as a means of control, whereas I think thermodynamic control somehow feels more, I don't know, less surprising or something. And I think that that kind of apparent contradiction in the idea of informational control has actually been really important in the, particularly in the second half of the 20th century, as you've seen sort of ideologies presenting
information systems as inherently liberatory, for example. Yeah, no, that's a really big one. I mean, which is interesting, like, just to follow your thing. In the original paper, of a mathematical theory of communication, the model of communication is pure control. It's not about communication as such. The point of communication is for person A to
compel person B to do the thing that they're trying to make them do, right? It's not even about like, can we pass on this message as such, the message as a purpose if your communication does not change behavior. think Warren Weaver's introduction actually maybe talks about behavioral change in the other party. So it's kind of neatly at the heart of all of these things as well. Yeah, totally. I the idea of control is very much there in the
mid-century cyberneticists, it somehow turns into something else by time you get to like a 1984 Apple ad or something. I was thinking exactly that. I feel like the classic kind of A-B is like the IBM man and the Apple, like a 1984 ad. Like one is like a total drone and the other is like a whole symbol of like sexual and sort of personal liberation. Right. Great. So,
Now, before we get to the history of cybernetics in China, what are your thoughts on the contributions of the initial cyberneticsists? Are you a fan of Norbert Wiener, for example? How do you relate to these ideas? I don't think anyone could, in some sense, not be a fan of Norbert Wiener.
I was fortunate to spend some time at MIT and when I was there, did spend some time in his archives. And I these pictures on my phone of his, his drawings of tortoise brains when he was 12. Like he was a prestigious self archiver who I think was such a prodigy that he realized that he was important by the time he was about 14. And he started like, you he did his first, I think, biology or something degree when he was about 14 at Tufts. and yeah, I mean, he's a, he's a,
thoroughly, well, weird, sympathetic, very moral and quite ultimately quite likable figure. think it and obviously a complete genius in every sense of that. Although in a slightly snug self-aware sense, but nonetheless, guess he gets, he gets the kind of genius card. Yeah. I mean, mean that stuff is, I think is the fact that he came from, except like, I think research in Brownian motion and like where the kind of weiner functions and stuff.
come from and ended up in cybernetics is kind of fascinating to me the way he went from a kind of mathematical space to this much, much broader sort of post-war, very kind of nuanced sort of liberal imagination through and quite, he was quite anxious as well, suppose, even in like the...
1960 book, think he's ultimately like very anxious about the state of the world and he stops taking funding from the DOD, I think, at some point during the Cold War. Yeah, I think he's a thoroughly sympathetic figure. But to the extent that he is the founder of cybernetics, it's also kind of interesting to like whether they are the first cyberneticsists, if that's meaningful or not, he certainly was a great
figurehead who gave it the term. think there was like some debate also around his like, adjacencies, his works kind of parallelness with Komargarov, I think. And there was like interesting stuff happening with control systems theory, and at least in Russia at the same time. And what's kind of interesting about someone like Chen Xiaosun, the Chinese cyberneticist that ends up writing about is that it's not very clear how, how directly
inspired by Wiener. He certainly took Wiener's term and really went with it and was highly inspired by him. But by that point, by the 1950s, he had also spent about 20 odd years at least, maybe 30 years as a control system engineer, rocket scientist person. So he was really, in a way, writing a textbook at that point for some people, the textbook.
on how to make ICBMs not wobble under various conditions and how to control mostly projectiles in very turbulent and unpredictable conditions and how to correct various forms of physical forces and so on. So there's a kind of mishmash going on, I think, in those early years. But then if you follow the kind of Norbert Wiener
cybernetics trajectory, which is by far the richest and the most interesting. There are lots of these alter cybernetics, but none is as, as kind of well covered and also as, as like deep as the, the Western one, ultimately, you do get into this fascinating area where it became applicable to almost everything was inspiring to anthropologists.
Fates and Unneeded was the center of these moments of grand interdisciplinary dialogue that we often still look back to now, like the Macy conferences, which in themselves were mostly just people not seeing light to eye and really disagreeing with each other and are coming out furious. I feel like we tend to lionize these past meetings where often they were just academic stickering. But there was none of that important.
And like, we're like in significant meetings of like different fields at the time. these were mid-century, like around 1950 conferences at which the discipline of cybernetics was first sort of named and articulated. Exactly. Yes. Sorry. So you have like people like Warren McCulloch coming from neuroscience, people like Gregory Bates and Margaret Mead coming from anthropology, it's called anthropology.
and various engineers, I think people like Shannon who was very against any of all of this, to be honest, I think he wrote a book called an article called the bandwagon, basically saying everyone stopped joining the bandwagon of information theory. This is a pure theory about, noise and information on communication lines and not a metaphor for absolutely everything else. but then of course that kind of
They'd rapidly diffuse into hippie culture, into various kinds of liberal ideologies. And I guess at some points it sort of also traded places with AI. someone else might, I don't know this history well enough, but I believe there was a kind of actual moments of kind of a branding thing with the likes of Minsky where...
They basically chose to go with artificial intelligence as the name for how to create such a neural network. So initially pioneered by Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch of the Macy conferences to think about kind of artificial minds rather than cybernetics, which was this much baggier term at the time. then by the 19th
I think eighties and nineties, you basically don't have it anymore. Like there's no one is really talking about cybernetics and there's like one department in England that's still somehow pushing it as a, as a real field. yeah, I mean, it's, it's a fascinating story. Yeah. think that continuity is really important to, to see between how cybernetics sort of becomes, artificial intelligence. in your
Peace, you focus a lot on a particular figure from China who became an important thinker in this stream. You already mentioned him briefly, but I wonder if you can say a little bit about who this is and what makes him important. Yeah, so this guy is called Chen Xue-Seng. He was, I think, born at the very end of the 19th century, if I'm not
mistaken and came from quite an aristocratic family in Shanghai. And in China, his name is well known because he is pretty much the father of modern Chinese science in some ways, the kind of only sort of heroic scientific figure going for certainly of the post 1950 periods in China, the one that like has like a museum dedicated to him and this kind of thing.
He's less well known outside of China, perhaps, and maybe mostly known as the progenitor of Chinese cybernetics. Or if you're kind of naughty about the history of NASA and this kind of thing, he was one of the members, well, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Lab, the JPL, which preceded NASA itself as an organization, as a place to do kind of rocket-treat research.
So I guess to give a little bit of background on him, he was from an elite family and born into, well, had his formative years in Shanghai, I think after the revolution, like in the kind of Republican period. And after the Boxer Rebellion in the 1910s, I believe, or maybe a little earlier,
The American government gave a little scholarships as a kind of, guess, cultural diplomacy deal to China, to Chinese students to go and study in the US. And this actually produced quite a number of significant figures who later came back to China. Qian was one of the ones who went to, initially went to MIT and ended up under the tutelage of Theodore von Kármán, who's an Hungarian.
rocket scientists, like one of the sort of founding figures in that field in the 20th century. And then with, as kind of one of our common stop students went with him over to Caltech and, they became very much part of this kind of Californian, world. mean, I think he was actually, he was like attending the parties of, Robert Harpenheimer's.
younger brother who also briefly appears in the movie as the kind of main Marxist communist link. Ironically, Chen in this time, while not unsympathetic to Chinese communism or to the kind of like whatever would be the fate of China, he was ultimately kind of patriotic, but he wasn't political by any account. He's kind of a quiet figure, leaning at the back of these parties. But then there was this, he gets kind of
loosely linked early on to these kind of more like other time communists agitators in the 1930s would then get like screwed over by the Red Scare with Longwichen himself. Sidebar, Oppenheimer's brother is also the founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, if anyone knows that place. Yeah, wow.
Yeah, well, okay. So this is, I mean, there are lots of fun legacies here as a kind of sidebar, kind of, it's part of Chen's story. So Chen becomes, when he's in this kind of cozy academic scientist, Caltech crowds, he's mostly, I think, just being a kind of expat American scientist, basically, at this point. And
He becomes part of the small crew under von Kahneman in of like rocketry researchers that become known as the Suicide Squad. And each of them are quite interesting. I'm trying to remember I can remember all of them now. The most famous one is Jack Parsons because he was long and short, he was a sort of Satanist. He was a follower of Crowley or another kind of school of this. And he did various little rituals. And I think
No one's quite sure what happened to his wife. He had a very kind of colorful life. And another one closer to the Exploratorium side of things is Frank Molina, who I think is actually the founder of Leonardo Journal, which is a very well-known journal if you're in the kind of like legacy art and tech kind of worlds, the kind of electronic kind of.
art, and technology kind of space. and there is another member of like somebody can't remember their name. but they, they are, they're the suicide squads are kind of well known for basically going into the deserts in Pasadena and like blowing stuff up as part of their experiments and becoming, yeah, becoming the kind of top rocket scientists in the country and therefore probably in the world at that time. And so what's notable about this kind of, you know, early
I can't remember exactly what age he was, but I he was in his 30s and 40s before the war. He became one of the top scientists of America, really, I think, in terms of this particular field of rocketry ballistics, which then became extremely important during the war. And then I think just after the war in 1945, it's kind of extraordinary to consider this, given what happened to him after and then what China-American relations since.
But after the war, he's given like top military clearance and is a temporary, or is made a Colonel of the U.S. Army so that he can go to Germany and inspect German science. And yeah, I think I wrote about it briefly, but there's this picture there from his European visits where, okay, a 33 year old chieftain, so he's actually born in about 1910 or so.
A 33 year old Chen is sitting with Von Karman and the teacher of Von Karman, Dogvid Prandtl, who's a Czech fluid dynamicist. And Prandtl, having, I guess, been in German territory, had worked with the Nazis. And the three of them, kind of Hungarian American expat, this kind of young Chinese scientist and this Czech Nazi fluid dynamicist, who are all kind of basically leading figures in their very narrow niche.
fields are together on like, it's sort of just appreciating each other for a moment, but on this kind of miles, like poles apart geopolitical narrative that's about to unfold. so yeah, Chen is like a leading scientific figure at this time. And it's also interesting to, I guess for me that like, it's a reminder that pre 1945 at least like,
science was or scientists, that's a community, were much more, seemingly much more political, much more ideologically forthright in various ways than at least I tend to imagine the scientific kind of profession now, mostly. And so after the war, in I think around 1948, I definitely have it more accurate, the MIPs, he
starts to be looked into by the FBI and shortly after that is taken as into house arrest. This is like, you shortly after I think writing quite an important co-writing with one common really important post-war reports. Similar to, I think this is under the era of like, as we may think, you know, the, the, the, post-war science administrator,
okay. Anyway, this is, so he's taken under house arrest shortly after he publishes like quite an important report about American air supremacy with, with von Karman, which becomes like a leading kind of priority during the kind of post-war period. And this is a period where the US is kind of thinking about like, what to do with all of our, all of our science, all of our kind of like investments in this.
period of war and also what to do with all of this technological supremacy that we seem to have gained and this power that we seem to be kind of like accumulating over a world order really. then Chen gets taken to house arrest under the Red Scare and he basically is in that condition for I think at least four or five years.
He was detained in 1950 and he published Engineering Cybernetics, his textbook on ballistics and systems control in 1954. I think it's only shortly after that that he actually returns to China. So he was under house arrest for basically five years. And in this time, think he was asked whether he was a communist. There are FBI files you can still download on him. And he basically remains
neutral. He never gives up his love, I suppose, for China, nor his at-home-ness in America. He isn't particularly politically aligned in any way. But he is a kind of patriot to his home country, and he is obviously someone who adopted America in a very important way.
so as a result, this was kind of, has sometimes been considered maybe, right? It's hard to judge these things for me, but like, one of the most major strategic crackups of the U S and like in the 20th century, really to kind of like give up one of your top scientific assets to a communist nation that you consider to be one of your top adversaries and historically will turn out to be your top adversary. so in 1955,
He is allowed to return to China along with a couple of other Chinese scientists in a similar kind of condition. And he never looks back. He goes to China and is recognized by the Chinese leadership. put a bit more context around this, 1955, People's Republic of China is about five years and two months old.
the after the revolution or the victory of the communist in 1949, is a basically dirt poor agrarian country that has like decades of civil war and conflict with the Japanese. kind of did civil war, were invaded from Japan. So they quit the civil war for a while and kind of try to get their shit together. And then
That was over and they didn't civil war again in the communist one. So this is in quite a febrile kind of period to say the least. And we're also shortly before these kind of like dramatic mega projects that Mao undertook in the 1950s, the late 1950s, famously in the Great Leap Forward, which was this gigantic agricultural reform project which did result in famines which killed millions and millions of people.
but they recognize that Chen was an asset and they brought him a number of other scientists, well, welcomed them with open arms really. And then, well, the short version of the story in a way is that he goes on to build the fastest nuclear program and the fastest satellite and rocketry and, generally kind of, cold war defense.
technology program, I think in world history, as far as it's in 20th century history of like this Cold War kind of dynamic. Yeah, so he returns and he immediately starts building, gets put in important positions where he immediately starts assembling different kind of ministries and centers and kind of working groups for, amongst other things, cybernetics as well.
starts an Institute of Operations Research, which is this kind of adjacent fields, I wonder if you might actually know more about than I do, which emerges in the war as a kind of combination between management and statistics to kind of like understand how to most like basically optimize production systems and bureaucratic systems, I believe.
I think operations research mostly ends up going down into the kind business school road. But I initially it was used to kind of like optimize, know, like arms production during global two. Did Chen have any sort of, did he have a role in the Great Leap Forward? And I asked because like, you know, it's often presented as this sort of, you know, canonical central planning disaster. I'm wondering if he had like a prominent
role in some of the initiatives in it? Yeah, he did have a role. It's a little bit hard for me to judge exactly because he had a role in the sense that in that period in the late 50s and early 60s, he wrote a number of articles and there was some public articles. He'd already become, I think, this kind of like very significant scientific figure and also a figure very much part of the state.
and he did like publish this one diagram along with a company article about basically, you know, re-imagining the whole production system of China, this kind of extraordinary diagram that kind of starts with like coal and energy and grain and so on. ends with like, you know, the making of clothing and everyday life. and in the middle is all these kinds of different like.
units and production processes and stuff. So he has this kind of grand vision kind of approach. by accounts, the number of counselor reds, which are mostly second resources, to be fair, he had he's involved, but it's hard to tell just how influential these ideas were. And if they were influential, they did seem extremely hamfisted and like extremely
abstract, like really governing from the center of this huge, unwieldy, complicated country and imagining it could just be kind of like wired up like this, bunch of different units in a control system or something. So it's, I guess, I really don't know how much to hold them responsible for the disasters of the Great Leap Forward. And I think they are considered, like, even the most ardent kind of believers in the party would
accept that there were mistakes made during that period. And yeah, he was part of the imagination of it, or at least he seems to contribute to the imagination of it, but it's not clear how much actual influence he had over that kind of thing. Gotcha. And ultimately you sort of present the idea of Chinese cybernomics as a sort of a slightly different
branch of the tree versus what American aficionados of cybernetics might be familiar with or Western more generally. Could you say a little bit more about sort of what, yeah, how does Chinese cybernetics sort of land somewhere different or distinguish itself from the rest of the field? So very loosely, I guess you have the mainstream of cybernetics
in the US, you have Soviet cybernetics, which to be fair, or Soviet control systems theory, which to be heard as well, also where a number of the people in China who end up in China in the 50s and 60s, who they're trained by because, know, China was fortunate to be one of the kind of like more privileged elite in China in early 20th century who received the Boxer Scholarship and stayed in America, but most sort of
people who went out to study would have gone to the USSR until the kind of Sino-Soviet in the late fifties. The Chinese line, I guess the way I think about it, I have to say this part of this is an interpretive, is that the US cybernetics emerges with a, alongside a superpower.
in a kind of relatively bourgeois kind of condition. it's already a highly developed nation about to reach its real swing into the kind of post-war baby boom era and sort of kind of like going into the kind of height of American hegemony. And it takes a lot of very philosophical kind of turns. At least the parts of it I've looked more into, there's also lots of
say about its influence on engineering. But certainly people like Bina, Bateson, they understood cybernetics as part of a kind of a worldview. And that was taken much further with like, there was a cybernetics magazine, they're kind of like all watch over by machines of love and grace, this kind of imaginary of 1960s and 70s, which people like Fred Turner have covered really well.
That was part of this kind of whole picture, which did also influence, let's say, American computer culture and cyber culture and all of that stuff. In China, you've got a very, very different picture because while they might come from some similar roots in terms of engineering and control system design, this kind of thing. In China, you're talking about like really just nation building as like that's the only game in town for people working with the states, for elites and so on.
So you're not, mean, my sense of it is that at least in the beginning in the fifties and sixties, you're really not interested in this kind of more moral philosophical imagination that people like, you know, kind of interested in. You're really much more interested in building a defense program, understanding how to maximize production systems, how to like, you know, organize foods,
bringing people out of poverty, reconstruct a nation that is breaking up with the Soviets, that is seeing threats from all over, that's just been invaded by Japan and is facing American Red Scare era threats as well. You're kind of on, I guess, red alert all the time. And so the technological side of that is really about aid development, course, like growth, economic growth.
Well, actually that's not quite right. It's economic growth really takes the back seats to the kind of production as such until the eighties. so, yeah, so I think the strong distinction I make, at least I came to in writing this piece is that on one side you have this somewhat more kind of philosophical approach and on the other side you have this deeply pragmatic
approach, is how do we construct a modern nation from a kind of the ravages of like civil war from a recently feudal imperial kind of country into the kind of mid 20th century. I mean, if the kind of, guess, historical anomaly of modern China is anything to go by, then like that project.
in some ways continues and was kind of a, I was going to say a remarkable success. That's kind of, I should qualify that. was a remarkable achievements of nation building that people like Chen made a huge contribution to in the form of basically building up the entire defense program, building up the rocketry satellites and ballistics and communications program and building up the kind of state scientific infrastructure.
in the form of various institutes and so on. Yeah, I mean there's something really interesting. I mean one of the threads that jumps out at me in that line of thought is that there's something very interesting between on the one hand imagining cybernetics as developing systems that are subordinated to a nation-state.
And then on the other hand, developing systems that may not be subordinate to the nation state that may extend beyond it. there's something, you know, potentially something a little bit more, more unbounded or, internationalist in the way of thinking about the economy, for example, in, in, in the West and, and, and that has kind of, that has sort of a couple of valences to it, right? Like, so for, so,
On the one hand, you can think about that as being somehow more philosophical or more idealistic or less pragmatic. On the other hand, you may think of it as being more naive, right? Or more ideological in the negative sense of that word, right? So there's something, there's a lot of interesting questions that come up when you think about whether
the control systems and cybernetics builds are, you know, subordinated to the nation state or not. Yeah. I, that's really interesting and feels quite naughty to me because I, I think on one hand, yeah, we can think about as infrastructures that we live in and amongst and maybe subordinate to and maybe identify more or less with the state and so on. kind of
cybernetic technologies, if you like. the other hand, there's a kind of, guess, liberalism versus, in this case, socialism kind of split, where liberalism might identify the individual against the state, against the kind of administration, organization, society.
think about this system of different nodes in a relatively free economy and how they interrelate. I suppose you can make a link from that to the way in which Western cybernetics was perhaps more psychologizing, more of anthropological in the sense of thinking about relative ways in which different social systems might relate to each other and to the individuals.
even to the point of cybernetics of conversation with things like people like golden pass. mean, it was really applied very much to, experience, guess. Whereas the flip side of that is where you identify control systems, society and the states together because society is parts of the society is, you know,
The state is in the kind of administration of society, which is a sort of reproduction system for itself, I guess. And so that part, that way you would kind of think of nation, I, the nonmassive China and the Kits of Chinchison states the administration of the social and people as part of society, as part of one big control system. So.
whether you have a picture of someone being subordinated or not is kind of a more of a philosophical question about whether you value the individual over the social, guess, in this kind of classic dichotomy. And in this case, in Qian's case, I think what becomes kind of interesting is it sort of fits as part of this idea of how to, if you like, how to design a nation, how to design
the administration of a, a number of people who live on a geographic non mass such as China. And those things really. Nick together, like how to, different forms of production in different parts of the nation, how to like move energy from the energy rich regions to the kind of like economic productive economically productive areas, how to defend like defense and,
how to kind of bring infrastructure into the easier to defend center versus the kind of like vulnerable to Japan outside. All of these things, and also how to control demography because one of Chen's students, most famously perhaps as his legacy as a Chinese hyponetics person is that his students, Song Jian, becomes an important scientist and administrator who is responsible
or one child policy was one of the other architects of that. So how to administer a demographic and how to kind of like think of society itself as a control system. And all of these things come with massive qualifications to like whether they were good, successful, achieved their goals, et cetera. But nonetheless, the way of thinking is for all of those things to be collapsed, I think together to think of that whole thing as a control system rather than
a bunch of different individual people being subjected to different kinds of control. Well, so just to push back on that slightly, one, mean, so you're sort of describing the whole thing as a control system here. So we've got control systems that are oriented towards particular ends. And then we have the of the sort of social or political layer, which is part of the stack.
But the way that I think about that and tell me if you think I'm missing something here is that actually if you're taking the sort of discipline of cybernetics and then subordinating it to particular ends, in a way those ends are defined by a political realm which is placed sort of outside the domain of cybernetics. Whereas there is another way of thinking about
about cybernetics where you really are applying that kind of thinking to the political realm and thinking that essentially cybernetic processes become the, you know, create the feedback loops and the dynamics that also define the goals as well as, you know, implementing the goals which are defined outside of cybernetics. Yes. And my perhaps
know, naive way of reading what you're saying is that, and this may not be exactly what you're saying. This might just be me, my projection onto it or something. But, you know, I'm sort of interpreting, I interpret the kind of Silicon Valley ideology that gets layered onto cybernetics as a little bit more of a, as a kind of a way of collapsing that political realm into cybernetics.
as opposed to keeping a sort of a non-cybernetic political decision-making layer above cybernetic systems, the way you seem to be describing Chinese cybernetics? Yeah, I mean, that's really interesting. I'm trying to work out if it's at its hour whether I can quite formulate well enough kind of response to that. I think it's really interesting because
cause
I'm not quite saying that this all is Chinese cybernetics because I don't think that is a kind of like as clear a discipline or a kind of like narrative of Chinese cybernetics. It's been written about by myself and a number of other people and there's about to be a book actually with them about China and AI, which will have a number of good pieces on it. this, where you can draw a line around the kind of
number of people and ideas and phenomena that could be classified under Chinese cybernetics, I think you find a much more heterogeneous set of ideas. Not heterogeneous from each other, but a much more mixed amalgamation of different ideas than you do with maybe what you're describing with Silicon Valley idea, like totalisation.
of cybernetic feedback loops, free informatics feedback loops or something, somehow as the apotheosis of what is good and true of all systems. think this is maybe again, this is this kind of pragmatism comes in. For someone, at least for some of his ideas, someone like Chen, I don't think he ever proposed that
let's say, governments or various other of these systems should be run via cybernetics. He did come up with expert systems and various imaginations for new ministries or decision-making processes which would rely on informatics processes being pulled at that speed here, like expert consultations here, political governors taking all this
these kind of much more mixed methods kind of systems. And to the extent that
I think perhaps a kind of cartoonish way to put it would be that if the kind of caricature of the Silicon Valley relationship turns cybernetics into a kind of morality and kind of ontology for how all complex systems work. In Chen's case, was much, in the Chinese case more broadly, it was much more of
a set of like different ways to apply mostly mathematical thinking to complex social issues. So in a way it was like, how can we rather than how can we subject cybernetics to the political is like, how can we make the political scientific again? How can we make kind of like social policy scientific? And what we mean by scientific, we mean like the application of various kind of like statistical kind of methods and
like operations research, kind of optimization methods and so on. and I, it's not clear to me that's in the heart of all those were like, automatic feedback loops that would like take, governance out of the picture, whether as I, as a, as a kind of, a theological points or just simply as a, as a practical one. a lot of it was really about optimization and I think Chen maybe at one point, I think he says something like,
He defines himself not as an engineer, like as a applied scientist, basically, and his science being the field of cybernetics, which he wants to apply to lots of other things. But I think if you look at one child policy and you look at Chinese infrastructure policies and the ways in which the kind of...
movement of energy and movement of technological production centers are organized as part of a kind of overall national system geographically and spatially. What you see is a kind of systems logic being applied at quite a macro scale in just quite practical ways of almost someone drawing a diagram of the country or something to solve mostly quite
practical problems such as fear of invasion and producing more coal or something. Fascinating stuff. This is a really rich conversation. I wish we had a little bit more time to continue it. But for those who are interested, hope they'll check out your piece. I'm super grateful that you contributed it to Combinations. Thank you for that and thanks for this great conversation too.
Yeah, thanks Matt.
Thanks again to Matt Prewitt and Gary Zhang. If you'd like to delve deeper into the fascinating world of Chinese cybernetics, be sure to check out Gary's insightful piece in Combinations magazine. Combinations is a new publication exploring the intersection of technology, power and society. This issue features pieces by Rana Dasgupta, Glenn Weill, Joseph Wheeler, Christina Lu and many more.
It's a must read for anyone interested in the future of technology and culture. You can find it online at combinationsmag.com. The RadicalxChange(s podcast is executive produced by G. Angela Corpus and is co-produced and audio engineered by myself, Aaron Benavides. If you want to learn more about RadicalxChange, please follow us on X at RadXChange or check out our website at radicalxchange.org. Have a great day and stay radical.