Chinese Cybernetics
Discussion
The China moment in the history of cybernetics is shot through with a dialectic of labor and machines
Wang Hongzhe:
"In the revolutionary mindset of 20th-century China, workers were always a more important strategic resource than technological wares. In the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, there is a discourse about the “socialist line on technology” in many texts about computing, both popular science and science fiction. In this discourse, the goal of technical innovation was not to replace human labor with machine production, but to forge “new people,” xinren (新人), who could build and operate machines to serve the new society. Here the possibilities of technology were not disputed or downplayed but rather amplified. A new cybernetic loop took shape: machines would create “new people,” who would in turn recreate and modify the new society and its new adaptive technologies. On the one hand, this answered the Chinese revolution’s modernizing call to “combat feudal superstition,” while on the other, by pushing to “democratize” participation in technology, it answered the revolutionary call to destroy the monopoly of knowledge."
(https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/five-moments-in-the-history-of-chinese-cybernetics/)
History
The Origin of Chinese Cybernetics
"The work of Qian Xuesen and other returning scientists can be called the origin of Chinese cybernetics."
(on the role of Qian Xuesen and his Engineering Cybernetics book)
Wang Hongzhe:
"In the four years he spent under partial house arrest, Qian wrote “Engineering Cybernetics,” which he published in 1954. Building off Wiener’s earlier “Cybernetics,” Qian’s book was quickly translated into several languages and became one of the most frequently cited foundational theoretical texts on automation. In 1955, after negotiations with China, the U.S. agreed to let Qian return home in exchange for 11 pilots captured by the Korean People’s Army.
On the steamship home, Qian discussed the idea of combining operations research and the socialist planned economy with Xu Guozhi, another returning Chinese mathematician. Qian believed the war had allowed the U.S. to make rapid advances in military logistics through the extensive application of mathematics and operations knowledge. China, as a socialist country with a highly planned society, could make ample use of operations research and cybernetics, which he believed could be more fully developed under the conditions of socialism.
One of Qian’s initial tasks upon his return was to set up China’s first operations research group. He did this with Xu in 1956, as part of the Mechanics Institute (which Qian also set up) at the China Academy of Sciences. Control theory became one of the group’s four major research areas. In 1958, Hua Luogeng, a mathematician who had attended Wiener’s lectures at Tsinghua, set up an operations research laboratory at the Mathematics Institute at the CAS, which absorbed Qian’s group in 1960. That same year, Qian founded China’s first military operations research centre — the Combat Research Department at the Fifth Academy of the Ministry of National Defence.
The Chinese edition of “Engineering Cybernetics” appeared in 1958. Four years later, to respond to national defense needs, Qian recruited Guan Zhaozhi, and also Song Jian, who had just returned from studying cybernetics in the Soviet Union, to set up China’s first cybernetics laboratory in 1962, in conjunction with various industrial departments.
The work of Qian Xuesen and other returning scientists can be called the origin of Chinese cybernetics. In keeping with Qian’s principles of pragmatism, the cybernetics laboratory instituted a “3-3 system,” with a third of its scholars drawn from the sciences, a third from engineering, and a third from the social sciences. It was the first institution to have scientists and engineers working side by side with social scientists. With his experience in military strategy offices in the U.S. Air Force, Qian was well aware that collaboration of social scientists and mathematicians was the methodological underpinning for this integrated strategic science. As early as the mid-1950s, when he had just returned, Qian proposed applying quantitative methods to the analysis of China’s economy and society. His ideas about quantification and master plan simulations were as advanced as Cold War thinking on the social sciences and social cybernetics in the U.S. and the USSR, if not more so."
(https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/five-moments-in-the-history-of-chinese-cybernetics/?)