The paper is an interdisciplinary history of cybernetics in the People's Republic of China. Following the career of the founding cyberneticist and scientist Qian Xuesen (1911-2009), it presents a broad picture of the reception and legacy of cybernetics across social and human sciences in the second half of the 20th century and beyond in China.
The history is divided into three periods by which the presentation proceeds in chronological order. Cybernetics emerged in China in the 1950s--the first period--as an interdisciplinary science deeply tied to applied mathematics and large-scale project management. Influenced by Qian Xuesen, the development of Chinese cybernetics was connected to but ultimately different from both those of the Soviet Union and the United States. Its approach to cybernetics became more distinctive during the second historical period marked by the Sino-Soviet split of 1958 and the Cultural Revolution which ended in 1976. Its revival after the 1970s constituted the third period, when cybernetics, along with information theory and systems theory, attained the status of universal sciences and was applied not only in engineering, but in social sciences and humanities such as economics, environmental science, education, and world history as well. Here, I consider renti kexue (somatic science) of the 1980s, by situating it in the larger historical context outlined above, as a special case where cybernetics, traditional Chinese science and medicine, pseudoscience, socialist science policy, and Post-Mao culture and politics intersect. By way of conclusion, I will briefly discuss the contemporary legacy of cybernetics in China.
