Electrocentrism in China

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Wang Hongzhe:

In his 1956 speech “On the Ten Major Relationships,” Mao Zedong wrote: “We must not follow the example of the Soviet Union in concentrating everything in the hands of the central authorities, shackling the local authorities and denying them the right to independent action […]. In short, if we are to promote socialist construction, we must bring the initiative of the local authorities into play.”

Even more than national independence, Mao’s vision of revolutionary development sought autonomy at every level of society. One key precondition for achieving autonomy was the widespread use of electronic technology — an electronic revolution to develop the initiative and creativity of the masses. Hence, in the 1960s, Mao’s right-hand man, Chen Boda, proposed the notion of “electrocentrism,” which meant that the electronic industry should be a development priority not only in the field of cutting-edge technology, but throughout the country’s economy. The belief that only large enterprises could produce electronics had to be eradicated: the country needed to “smash electronic mysticism” and burst into the electronic age with the methods of a people’s war.

Although this fact is often overlooked in contemporary histories, the Cultural Revolution went hand in hand with a “Cyber Great Leap Forward.” As early as 1968, the output of local electronic industries had already surpassed that of central enterprises (¥825 million against ¥494 million, respectively). It extended not only to provinces with a good industrial infrastructure but even to marginal regions with no experience in electronics production, such as Qinghai, Ningxia, and Tibet. To guard against a full-scale invasion from the north by the Soviet Union, Beijing’s electronics manufacturers helped set up a number of “third-tier enterprises” in the center and west of the country. Provinces such as Shaanxi, Shanxi, Gansu, and Guizhou acquired complete industrial capabilities in military electronics and their supporting services. In 1970, China had two and a half times as many electronics factories as in the previous year, and 20 times more than in 1965 before the start of the Cultural Revolution.

In Mao’s thinking, even if China were to lose most of its territory in the north, including the capital, it would still be able to rally forces from the hinterland and wage an all-out “electronic” guerrilla war. The Great Leap Forward in local electronics industries makes it clear that China’s development goal was to advance toward a society wide “cyberneticisation” at every level. What the people needed was not a colossal electronic city capable of satisfying production needs, but “electronic Paris communes” spread out over the entire territory.

Along with the “Cyber Great Leap Forward” came “cyber mass movements” based on “three-in-one” groups. Across the country, the neighbourhood factories and textile mills run by women began to produce electronic components and even computers. For a time during the 1970s, textile workers in these small collective factories became the primary force in computer manufacturing. This little-known history has its parallels in California’s “garage culture” and counterculture.

After China and the U.S. reestablished relations in 1972, the two countries exchanged science and technology delegations. One factory that the Chinese arranged for American computer experts to visit, the Yangtze River Radio Factory, had been converted from producing door handles to producing electronic computers. As the 1973 delegation report noted:

The new factories we visited were varied both in size and in manufacturing technology. At one extreme is the factory associated with the Shanghai Computing Research Institute. One of China’s numerous neighborhood factories, it is staffed by people in the neighborhood and is therefore small […]. The American visitor is struck by its good order; generous spacing of work tables; extreme simplicity of facilities; the quiet movement of engineers and other workers in the course of their hand work, study, and discussion; sunshine; and incense.

In the winter of 1974, this same factory organized a symposium entitled “Learning the Dialectics of Nature by Doing: Independence, Self-Reliance—Toward the Development of Electronic Computers.” Some years later, a round table on “people’s computers” was translated into English and included in a reader edited by communications scholar Armand Mattelart, who cited it as the world’s first instance of a democratic political practice in the field of information technology. In the 1970s, the red cyber revolution had reached its crescendo, even as it began drawing to a close."

(https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/five-moments-in-the-history-of-chinese-cybernetics/?)