So vast is the Three Gorges Dam, so unfathomably huge a mass of concrete and steel, that it has, according to Nasa’s calculations, added 0.06 microseconds to the length of each day. You can’t move that much matter toward the Equator, you see, without very slightly slowing the turning of the Earth. Ten years after the dam’s completion, it’s fair to say that it is China, more than any other country on Earth, that is doing the most to shift the planet on its physical axis.
The CCP is now working on an even larger dam, one that will tame the mighty Yarlung Tsangpo, Tibet’s longest river. This new edifice will generate three times the hydroelectric power of the Three Gorges Dam. Depending on the geographical provenance of its building materials, the new dam will probably add another few microseconds to each day on Earth.
Microseconds, being a millionth of a second, are imperceptible, but China’s march into the future is becoming impossible to ignore. This is a country whose forays into gigantism include the world’s biggest building, longest bridge, largest air terminal and — to its deep shame, one imagines — third-largest skyscraper. Long derided as a manufacturer merely of low-quality, imitative goods, China is threatening to lead the world in anti-aircraft drone swarms, humanoid robots, gun-toting robo-dogs, hypersonic fighter jets, and maglev hyperloops that will, sooner or later, make China’s existing network of high-speed trains look as rusty and decrepit as its antediluvian counterparts in Britain.
The comparison, though unflattering, is instructive. In cost, at least, Britain’s second-ever high-speed rail project — the first was the Eurostar — matched China’s flair for gigantism. But it was reduced in scope, piece by piece, until it became a connection merely between Birmingham and the suburbs of London. While Britain made a eunuch of its grandest infrastructure project, failing to build a late-20th century iteration of a technology we invented in the 19th, the Chinese were pioneering, in the form of the maglev hyperloop, a technology we might not emulate until the 22nd.
In many respects, China is outperforming even the United States. As the winds of change howl, look for taut windsocks. We can see one in the form of the Techno-Industrial Playbook, the product of a pan-institutional banding-together of dozens of American think-tankers. Many of these think-tankers, over the course of their careers, have been principally concerned with economic growth. But the playbook is something more muscular: a plan for reinvigorated American technological strength, a plan via which the country can reinvigorate its industrial base, attract the world’s top talent, and take control of important resources such as rare earth minerals. It is a sign of changing times and, to use a well-worn phrase, interesting times.
As for Britain, there has been talk in this publication and elsewhere of Anglofuturism: a neo-Gaullist project via which the country might be propelled into a future that, though founded on what is now frontier technology, feels like home. But if any country is currently and coherently reifying such a vision, it is China. To use the coinage of the artist Lawrence Lek, a Londoner of Malaysian-Chinese extraction, we can call this vision Sinofuturism.
Any attempt to understand Sinofuturism must begin with the pit out of which China has bootstrapped itself. China’s “Century of Humiliation” began with the mass opium addiction fomented by the East India Company in the 1830s and continued with the resultant Opium Wars. China’s defeat by the British was followed by defeat by Japan and the attempted carving-up of the country by a greedy host of foreign powers. This wretched period finally ended, according to the Chinese telling, with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, following a 22-year civil war, in 1949. Much misery lay yet in store: Mao alone is believed to have been responsible for 65 million deaths, through both mass murder and the famine that resulted from the “Great Leap Forward”.
Britain and America, in living memory and beyond, have been spared the agonies of famine and state-sanctioned mass murder. Those of us native to the postwar West are probably incapable of fully understanding the effect on the Chinese psyche of those traumas and humiliations. But we do know that China yearns to be the best, to be the biggest, to command respect, and to be invulnerable both to rival powers and to nature itself.
It is in this respect, in that domineering attitude to nature, that we can see one of the most significant differences between China and the Anglosphere. China, says Thomas White, a sinologist at King’s College London, sees nature as a resource, as something to be exploited and engineered. “There is a faith in the ability of humans to intervene in ecological processes in order to improve them, rather than a sense that human impact is inevitably detrimental.”
We can see traces of this attitude in China’s ecology-wrecking dams, its weather-altering geoengineering and its desert-defying Great Green Wall. In these endeavours there is an inheritance from the millennia-old Chinese dream of taming floods. It was a dream realised by the legendary engineer, Da Yu, whose labours secured him emperorship of the Xia Dynasty. Five-thousand years after Yu’s supposed existence, the Chinese press paid Jiang Zemin, the engineer-turned-president who oversaw the building of the Three Gorges Dam, the profound compliment of calling him “the new Da Yu”. (If you continue to doubt the significance of this kind of engineering to Chinese governing, note that the Chinese word for politics — 政治 — contains an ideogrammatic element denoting “water management”.)
Most of China’s great nature-defying projects would be out of place in the West. To return to the debacle of HS2, one imagines that the Chinese were mystified to learn that Brits spent £100 million to build a shed for the benefit of rare bats. Perhaps they are also mystified by our willingness to waylay large infrastructure projects on account of individuals who might be bothered by noise or are unwilling to be moved. In contrast, the building of the Three Gorges Dam entailed the displacement of at least 1.4 million people.
This disregard for the human is another foundational difference. Whether you ascribe it to collectivism, Confucianism or a post-traumatic invulnerability to complacency, Sinofuturism is, by and large, disinclined to make way for the individual. It is this illiberal tendency, to a Western eye, that fosters some of the most appalling examples of the CCP’s inhumanity: the political imprisonments, the constant surveillance, the abuse of animals, the fearful neighbours, the indentured Uyghurs. China’s dominance of global manufacturing, even on behalf of companies headquartered in the West, is at least partly dependent on forced labour. Sinofuturism has involved the pulling of levers that Westerners would be unwilling to touch.
“Sinofuturism is, by and large, disinclined to make way for the individual.”
Cheap labour, too, has been a tremendous asset to Chinese manufacturing — as has rampant IP theft and the cornering, via dealmaking in the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere, of the entire industrial supply chain. Thanks to these factors and others, China has clawed itself back to the technological frontier. In the ninth century, Chinese monks discovered gunpowder; in the 21st, we learnt this April, Chinese engineers have successfully tested a non-nuclear hydrogen bomb, unleashing an intense fireball without needing to use radioactive material. But more important than any particular new technology, says William Matthews, of Chatham House, is China’s mastery of the production of technology. “The real potential China has technologically is that, because it’s got such enormous manufacturing capacity, it has the potential to implement AI systems that are designed for logistics optimisation and supply chain optimisation.” Faster and more efficient manufacturing allows China to spam out electric vehicles and other technologies that the CCP has judged in advance to be worth dominating.
Doing all this automatically — replacing all that cheap labour with robot arms and so on — is a project currently underway, for China, like the West, faces the civilisational challenge of a tumbling birth rate. The West has tried to cheaply address the problem by importing millions of migrants, thus storing up further problems while impeding (and in some cases retarding) the development of automation. China’s programme of automation looks the better bet.
And the CCP’s goal, says Matthews, is to lead the way not only in robotics, but in other emerging technologies, such as AI and quantum computing. “It aims to use these as a basis for effecting what amounts to a qualitative shift in economic power, similar to the original Industrial Revolution, that will lead China to a position where actually economically, at the national level, it outcompetes the United States.”
America remains the wealthier country, and the home, as Elon Musk has pointed out with regard to Sinofuturism, of the hyper-futurist project that is Starship. But China is growing in civilisational confidence, the effects of which are visible not only in its space programme, which is aiming to build the first moon base, but in its architecture. It is telling, in this respect, that Xi Jinping has banned “oversized and xenocentric” buildings, of which the “big pants” skyscraper, which resembles a pair of trousers, is a notorious example. The result of the edict is that China’s multiplying cityscapes will no longer be the plaything of experimental Western modernists. Sinofuturism’s larger infrastructure, writ in monumental concrete, will retain its herculean Maoist drabness. But pre-revolutionary design tropes, such as courtyards and the use of feng shui principles, are becoming more visible in the country’s newer building projects.
What, though, is the end-state of Sinofuturism? To the extent that China remains a communist state rather than an autocracy sui generis, it is not of the proselytising variety. The USSR wanted to spread Communism around the world; the leading members of the CCP, according to Matthews, have little interest in such evangelism. “Their ideological position is one that’s based on the idea of distinctive civilisations with their own value histories. There’s a desire to displace the United States, but that, I think, is with a view to minimising external interference.” There is little evidence that Xi wants the Chinese flag to flutter over Western capitals, though an annexation of Taiwan might make us reconsider that assumption. As does the Chinese march through our industry, property and universities.
And as America might discover in a war over Taiwan, hegemons tend not to come in pairs. The Thucydides trap is well-documented, and one emerging technology in particular might be the key to domination. It is not an uncommon view among AI researchers that the first country to develop artificial superintelligence will secure for themselves an indefinite global hegemony. This country’s sovereign AI, according to certain prognostications, will outthink its opponents at lightning speed, rendering those opponents harmless. Matthews envisages a slower takeoff of AI capability, and a more enduring bifurcation between American and Chinese systems. But the prospect of Chinese domination of AI, and of a world shaped by the CCP’s values above all others, ought to focus the mind.
There is much to deplore about modern China. But the West might, at the same time, examine its confidence and ambition. If it is to be the values of the Anglosphere, rather than those of the CCP, that define the next centuries, then we ought, pragmatically, to consider how it is that China has revitalised itself so effectively. We should not wish for a government that would displace 1.4 million people to build a dam, but nor should we wish for a government that allows individual Nimbys to block infrastructure that would benefit tens of millions. The Victorians had more centralised planning power than we do, and the result is that we still skulk around in the structures they left us. More fundamentally, they wanted to build things that would last. We need to rediscover those long-dormant muscle fibres.
Democracies are very good at industrial innovation, but less good at long-term industrial planning. China’s recent progress in AI is the fruit of a plan set down in 2017. I’m told that, a little later, the British government was warned by experts that it had a brief window in which to corner a new technology called a large language model. The government acknowledged the opportunity but did not act on it. Training runs multiplied in cost and Britain no longer has the option of getting ahead. A reinvigorated West, along the lines of the one envisaged in the Playbook, will need to relearn how to design, and stick to, far-sighted industrial plans.
That applies in particular to trade. As America’s allies are currently discovering, erraticism is not an attractive feature in a customer. And much of the developing world sees China, instead, as a more worthwhile partner, with the result that China has secured reliable supplies of every important mineral. But there are many downsides to the handing of economic dominance to China, which is, at best, indifferent to the liberal internationalism that has brought such prosperity the world. To this effect, the economist Noah Smith writes that, in comparison to postwar America, a dominant China “will be less interested in creating freedom of the seas for other nations, and more narrowly concerned with protecting its own trade… [And] for all the sneers directed at America’s self-appointed role of ‘world police’, it was more willing to stand up to regional conquerors than China has proven so far.” Embrace the Belt and Road Initiative in haste; repent at leisure.
The irony is that China is, in certain intellectual respects, a child of the West. In a glib sense, that is to be expected of such a prolific thief of IP, but the phenomenon goes much deeper. As White observes, the Chinese faith in human reason and progress, and in humanity’s ability to triumph over nature, have a “direct lineage to the Enlightenment”. And Marxism, of course, with all its ideas about the progression of history through certain stages, is itself a Western invention.
In every Chinese reach for greatness, then, one can discern at least a vestige of what we can think of as civilisational anxiety of influence. It is an anxiety that is borne not only of that uneasy intellectual inheritance, but of the long and torturous Century of Humiliation. And it is an anxiety that, should things continue in the present vein, will persist for much longer than the primacy of the West. As if suffering from sleep paralysis, we are becoming aware of our sclerosis, but are not yet able to arrest it. Our political classes are responding to this dangerous new world with a combination of clumsiness and naïvety. What the moment requires of the West, though, is a project of revival — one that is pragmatic enough to analyse what is effective about Sinofuturism, but bold and self-confident enough to surpass it.
