How China’s smart cities, social credit system and mass surveillance were sparked by rocket scientist
Having worked on classified weapons research for the United States, and played a role in developing China’s first atomic bomb, Qian Xuesen sparked the social credit system that will track – and possibly control – Chinese citizens’ behaviour
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.
[Systems theory] doesn’t just solve natural sciences problems, social science problems and engineering technology problems, it also solves governance problems
In the West, systems engineering’s heyday has long passed. But in China, the discipline is deeply integrated into national planning. The city of Wuhan is preparing to host this month the International Conference on Control Science and Systems Engineering, which focuses on topics such as autonomous transport and the “control analysis of social and human systems”. Systems engineers have had a hand in projects as diverse as hydropower dam construction and China’s social credit system, a vast effort aimed at using big data to track citizens’ behaviour.
