How China’s smart cities, social credit system and mass surveillance were sparked by rocket scientist

It’s rare that a scientist becomes a folk hero. But in China, Qian Xuesen draws crowds almost a decade after his death. On a Saturday morning in a three-storey museum in Shanghai, tourists admire Qian’s faded green sofa set, the worn leather briefcase he carried for four decades and a picture of him shaking hands with opera star Luciano Pavarotti.

They file past a relic from a turning point in Qian’s life – and in China’s rise as a superpower: a framed ticket from his 1955 voyage from San Francisco, in the United States, to Hong Kong aboard the SS President Cleveland. Once a professor at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) research and develop­ment centre in Pasadena, California, which was later controlled by Nasa, he had been accused of having communist sympathies in the heat of the cold war’s “red scare” in the US, and placed under virtual house arrest.

Upon his release, Qian and his family set sail for his motherland.

After arriving in China, Qian went on to spearhead the rapid ascent of the country’s nuclear weapons programme, an achievement that explains some of the adulation. But his legacy is still unfolding in a second area that could have great consequences for China – and for the world. Qian, who died in 2009 at the age of 97, helped lay the groundwork for China’s modern surveillance state.

Early in his career, the scientist embraced systems engineering – an interdisciplinary field focused on under­standing the general properties common to all physical and societal systems, and using that knowledge to exert control. By mapping a system’s dynamics and constraints, including any feedback loops, systems theorists learn how to intervene in it and shape outcomes. Since the field’s founding in the 1950s, systems approaches have been applied to areas as varied as biology and transport infrastructure.