#chinesecharacteristics

If you’re someone who enjoys Crusader Kings, or Hearts of Iron, you’ll know the joy of Grand strategy games. Executing economic, political and military prowess, you can rule the world... well, just a model of it. But compared to the masters, you’re trash tier. The real Grand Strategy masters didn’t play Paradox games - they played the game of life. Imagine not just having to play the game, but building the computer from scratch and the software necessary to play the games. It’s time to introduce the real Epic tier gamers:

Everyone agrees living in the West is like living life on easy mode. Norbert Wiener and Stafford Beer were two of the best known cyberneticists in the US and UK respectively during the later 20th century, but what about those in the non-Anglo speaking world? We’re looking for the most hardcore players after all.

China is the perfect example. The country was a mess after the civil war - perfect conditions for a hard-mode run. Search for articles on China in the West and you will find plenty with titles such as “The country is perfecting a vast network of digital espionage as a means of social control” and “China’s increased surveillance capacity could be dangerous”. So who, was behind the rise of these surveillance style systems in China.

The answer, in fact, is the FBI.

Note: This is a less serious version of Dylan Levi King’s article. Link at end!

Enter Qian Xuesen ( 钱学森 )

Enter Qian Xuesen. Qian was described, by most contemporaries, as a genius and a quiet but serious man who asked very precise questions. Qian had been born during the fall of the Qing dynasty in China and had been a strongly academic child. He went on to study at M.I.T on a Boxer indemnity scholarship and found himself a position in the newly founded Jet Propulsion Laboratory during World War 2.

His contemporaries, included colourful characters such as:

Frank Malina – Stellar engineer, and later the director of the Division of Scientific Research at UNESCO and creator of kinetic artworks.

Jack Parsons – A talented engineer, and later an acolyte of Aleister Crowley’s Thelemite Occultism alongside L. Ron Hubbard. Yes, the Scientology one.

Together, with others such as Sidney Weinbaum, Qian was able to assist the US achieve it’s first rocket program.

Enter FBI

After the end of World War II, it became apparent to the United States that the Soviet Union would be its greatest threat in world politics. The rise of communism in Eastern Europe led to those such as Senator John McCarthy pushing to remove “communist influence” within the United States. Working with the FBI, the entire team of the nationally sensitive Jet Propulsion Laboratory were investigated.

Many members, such as Parsons and Weinbaum had discussed communist ideals in the past which were quickly unearthed and used to push them out of their positions in the organisation. Qian, on the other hand, was someone who didn’t particularly seem to care about politics. He mostly spent his free time at home with his wife and children, and one colleague described him as having a “typical aloof oriental attitude.”. Despite this, the FBI were able to find a connection with Malina and himself.

Sensing the changing public mood, Qian decided it would be best to leave the country and set off to return to China in 1950.

This was generally considered a bad move by the FBI.

Qian had been personally involved in:

Helping to create America’s first missile program

The creation of the Toward New Horizons report for the Army Air Forces Scientific Advisory Group detailing future advances in aviation

A seat on the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board

A consultancy role on the Manhattan Project (ie. Nuclear Weapons Research)

After realising the consequences of their actions, the Immigration and Naturalization Service forced Qian into a legal purgatory for five years in fear that he would leak important matters of classified national security to the Chinese. It was in this period, however, that Qian began a deep dive into the world of cybernetics.

He wrote a book, Engineering Cybernetics, published in 1954. In it, he technically outlined a field of feedback control systems for engineering purposes, inspired by the use of automatic missile control guidance systems. In his own words:

“The celebrated physicist and mathematician A. M. Ampere coined the word cyberne~tique to mean the science of civil government (Part II of " Essai sur la philosophic des sciences/' 1845, Paris) . Ampere's grandiose scheme of political sciences has not, and perhaps never will, come to fruition. In the meantime, conflict between governments with the use of force greatly accelerated the development of another branch of science, the science of control and guidance of mechanical and electrical systems.”

Importantly, he was able to build on previous work. He made the crucial step of moving away from fully assumed knowledge to systems

“...where no exact knowledge of the properties of the controlled system is necessary for the design.”

Finally released from detention, he moved overseas to China in 1955 to begin his career.

Enter China

Qian immediately set to work. The Science Planning Commission of the State Council had just begun drafting a 12-year plan for future progress in China, and Qian was quick to give his input.

From computing, to semiconductor technology, automation to wireless control systems and more he was key to the scientific advancement of the country. He was also keen to put his ideas into action, advocating for cybernetics and systems theory to be front-and-centre in agriculture and manufacturing. We can only speculate on what kind of Farmville player Qian would have been, but he definitely would have used a custom macro spreadsheet like some kind of freak.

It was in this time period that China began to import foreign based computing technologies which they sought to reverse engineer and replicate for themselves. Political instability, however, led to his ideas for cybernetics shelved for another decade, only to re-emerge in the 1970s. With the rise of Deng Xiaoping in the late 70s, Qian was able to take advantage of Deng’s opposition to the Gang of Four’s Maoist principles.

But what computing power would the cyberneticists use? Indigenous computers were, unfortunately, still pretty bad and the Chinese government had to use Soviet design machines and illegally acquired IBM machines which belonged to the Bank of China.

Not only were the Chinese cyberneticists eventually able to build their own rigs they stole their opponent's technology as well, like some kind of Dengist mainframe hackers.

In 1974, Qian and his team of researchers attended the Helsinki Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control and were astounded by the uses that Western, and Soviet, cyberneticists had been putting their computers to – namely economic planning. Inspired by Neo-Malthusian scholars at The Club of Rome, and their MIT led population overload models, Qian was instrumental in putting forward the One Child Policy.

Qian’s was also a pioneer of “legal systems engineering” – the use of cybernetics in law enforcement. The Public Security Bureau (PSB) set up Golden shield, a system which allowed law enforcement to access information on citizens tax records, personal details, criminal record and more. This is the system which has led to the current Chinese surveillance state in the 21st century.

Cybernetics vs Reality

Theory and reality don’t always mix. Qian was responsible for many policy successes, but some of his policies are responsible for a number of issues that China is experiencing today.

Take China’s One Child Policy. This is the ultimate example of theoretical idea combined with real world culture and consequences. The idea behind the policy is sound – keeping population within set limits to prevent over-burdening the country and its resources. The reality is more difficult:

The state apparatus needed the tools to enforce this policy. This wasn’t always possible, and in many rural communities many children were sent to orphanages and weren’t observable in the system of control.

Culture led to more women being aborted than men - a male child being more valued in society. This resulted in gender imbalances that still plague the country to this day.

This underlies the failings of many cybernetic systems: They cannot measure that which they can’t observe. In data-science terms, crap goes in, crap comes out. The Chinese cyberneticists were most successful where they were able to use reality to update their systems, and take into account how the bureaucratic systems functioned.

Qian, in his later years, was remote and distant. He refused to interact with anyone outside the country and eventually died in 2009.

Lessons to be learned?

So what can we learn from this?:

Persecuting people for no reason can backfire, and lead to the Chinese Nuclear Program. You would have thought people would have realised this after The Treaty of Versailles, but there we go...

Cybernetic systems are only good if they adapt to fit reality, otherwise they can make things worse. You may think that your economic strategy in HoI II is working, but if you don’t invest in your military in response to foreign force build-up then you’re fucked when they knock on the door with a blitzkrieg.

Grand Strategy Games are a great analogue for control systems - a simplified abstraction of reality. They often don’t model the difference between assumed input and what the input actually means in reality. Practical cybernetics need to take into account real world use of systems and societal/cultural/social implications.

The main fable behind this story is to do your research, and consider the real world implcations of your actions. You may be tempted to put your feet up and stick with a simplified understanding of the world - this is bad. The blind ideology of the McCarthy & his FBI investigators, and the lack of effective monitoring system for Chinese families by Qian, both led to bad outcomes.

One bad choice by the FBI led to not only Qian helping China advance technologically, but also it’s mass surveillance system and the One Child Policy and it’s now serious effects on China’s society.

Sources (I’ve missed some out, but can provide links on request):

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/china-surveillance/552203/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2023/01/10/china-surveillance-covid/

https://archive.org/details/fbi-file-tsien-hsue-shen/FBIFile_Tsien_Part1/page/n25/mode/2up

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0895717788904438