Future Art Ecosystems: Focus on China

By Mi You

China and the Politics of Technological Transformation

Contrary to the common conception that China leaped into technoscientific modernisation after it opened its doors to Western automobile and electronics industries, China’s technoscientific development is in fact rooted in the ‘mass movements’. An extension of the Mass Line politics under Mao, mass scientific movements entailed universal science education and technological innovation through mass participation of the general population. During the politically turbulent days of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Chinese scientists engaged cybernetics, mathematics, and data sciences in villages and factories on the most local levels, using technology for political mobilisation. The equal emphasis on high-end rocket science and grassroot technological politics was the distinctive Chinese way of technological development until the end of the 1970s.

Swooding Architects, Speculative City, Collaborative work Sci-(no)-Fi with artist collective Zheng Mahler, 2020

After initiating the Open Reform process, which saw China open its doors to foreign businesses, Deng Xiaoping pulled the brake on heavy military industry and with it, ousted the political mobilisation part from technological development, instead prioritising consumer industries and allowing decentralised developments driven by self-motivated local agents. Deng Xiaoping’s ‘科学是第一生产力’ (‘science is the first productive force’) became the motto, supplanting the place of revolutionary subjects. At this juncture, Qian Xuesen, the father of China’s rocket program, suggested using cybernetics to study agriculture and ecology – not unlike his Western peers, as well as supernatural functions of the human body in Qigong and other practices. Even as China moved closer to the liberal economic model of the West, throughout the four decades in the last century, the adamant emphasis on the role of the human agent has always shaped the political dimension of technology as opposed to approaching technology as something universal that overrides political formations...READ MORE