Years before, Jiang had been on the other side of the camera as a young starlet in Shanghai. But no longer. She had aged since then and her cheeks had hollowed. The fine wrinkles around her eyes had been well-earned on the mule train to the Communist Party base in Yan’an. No longer an actress, she now wore the uniform of a cadre and the horn-rimmed spectacles of an intellectual.

But in her ballerinas, Jiang was reborn. Xue Jinghua, the ballerina before her, said years later that she was chosen for her resemblance to Madame Mao. Whether or not that was true, her physical perfection—a strong body, considered too physically imposing by the standards of the pre-Cultural Revolution period, and a solemn, beautiful face that floated like a specter over the shorter dancers—embodied Jiang’s ideal hero. Jiang agreed with the Greek attempts to mirror the Olympians: a strong will produces strength and beauty.

Dressed in the hero’s uniform from Red Detachment of Women, fatigues tightened and trimmed to show the perfection of her body and its movements, Xue kicked back into an arabesque, holding a saber above her head. This was the moment in the ballet when the ammunition had run out and she would begin to cut down foes with her blade. Completing the movement, Xue then stared into the distance—pausing only a split-second before returning to the task of destroying the old world.

The lights glared. Jiang snapped the picture. It captured the ballerina, suffused with an otherworldly glow, shot from below to exaggerate her height, showing off a physical perfection gained through blood and sacrifice. It appeared on the cover of China Pictorial a short time later. The photograph reeks of blood and gunpowder. The hero, saber ready, rises above the battlefield and off the pages of the magazine. She has cast off slavery, abjection, and all traditional morality to become a symbol of physical and spiritual strength. This was the ideal, representing the victory of physical power and force of will over all limitations, toward which Jiang Qing’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution would march. Jiang wanted her viewers to be awed.

It was only unbending will that had brought Jiang herself this far. Born to a poor concubine, she had become a great performer in Shanghai. When forced to flee by the Japanese invasion, she reached Yan’an to become the lover and then wife of Mao Zedong. For more than two decades, her official role as China’s first lady had come at the price of staying out of politics. But as Jiang worked away on her craft, all that was ending. The Cultural Revolution was about to begin.

Within a year of the picture being disseminated around the country, Jiang had seized power. For ten years, she led the most radical factions of the Chinese communists from her offices in the Central Cultural Revolution Group and the Politburo. She became a member of the radical Gang of Four faction, which also included propagandist Zhang Chunqiao, literary theorist Yao Wenyuan, and labor activist Wang Hongwen. She incited young Red Guards against the party officials she believed had corrupted the revolutionary spirit.

It all lasted until 1976 when Chairman Mao died and Hua Guofeng put the Gang of Four under arrest. Charged with persecuting party members and workers, plotting to overthrow the party and assassinate Mao, and leading an insurrection in Shanghai, she received a death sentence. When it was commuted to life imprisonment, she was left to see the era of Reform and Opening Up bury her dreams for China.

When Jiang took her own life in 1991, she cursed Deng and his “revisionist clique” in her last letter, promising to seek out Mao in the hereafter. Even in her suicide, she wanted to be remembered as unbowed and unbroken.

China’s Nietzschean Revolutionaries

Jiang’s philosophy of heroism seems unusual for the wife of China’s most famous communist. Marxist analysis doesn’t obviously lend itself to individual valorization. But Marx was not Madame Mao’s teacher in these matters. That role fell to Friedrich Nietzsche.

Jiang was hardly the only Nietzschean in the red camp. Mao Zedong himself had been exposed to Nietzsche before Marx. Late Qing reformers had picked up Nietzsche’s ideas as they visited Japan and Germany; the young Mao devoured their work. The archives preserve Mao’s first writing on Nietzsche, scribbled in the margins of Cai Yuanpei’s translation of Friedrich Paulsen’s A System of Ethics. Mao admired the neo-Kantian Paulsen but had an instinctual sympathy with Nietzsche’s view that traditional morality needed to be upended. Only by harnessing powerful, buried forces did Mao see a path toward a new world.

The artists and thinkers of the early Republican period were likewise enthralled by Nietzsche, the rebel philosopher who believed in the power of culture. For those focused on sweeping away the dust of feudal China, his nihilistic attack on tradition and call to overcome slave morality translated well into the post-imperial context. It is no wonder that Nietzsche was idolized by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, who would go on to found the Communist Party.

Even once figures like Chen, Li, and Mao turned left, they continued to absorb Nietzschean ideas. His thinking permeated many of the Bolsheviks, as well as radical Russian intellectuals and artists. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Aleksandr Bogdanov, and Nikolai Bukharin all refer to Nietzsche explicitly or implicitly. Bukharin and Bogdanov, in particular, drew on him enough to be dubbed “Nietzschean Marxists” by scholars. In the words of historian Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Nietzsche was “a vital element of Bolshevism,” animating an “activist, heroic, voluntaristic, mercilessly cruel, and future-oriented interpretation of Marxism.” This line of Soviet cultural revolution intensified under the leadership of Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s: monumental art glorified the proletarian hero. There was even room for the Dionysian excess of the Russian avant-garde, though Stalin eventually turned against it.

Jiang, moving in radical circles in the 1930s, absorbed these ideas. Her study of Nietzsche came through the scholar Lu Xun. Before becoming the patron saint of socialist literature in the People’s Republic of China, Lu was its foremost interpreter, translator, and popularizer of Nietzsche. Jiang idolized him, later declaring that while Mao was her political north star, Lu Xun provided her cultural guidance. While his books had been bowdlerized to remove more provocative texts, Jiang kept an unexpurgated 1938 edition of his collected work on her bookshelf deep into the Cultural Revolution, handbound in twenty volumes.

Lu Xun was a Nietzschean through and through. His reading of ​​Thus Spake Zarathustra in Japan in 1902 changed his worldview completely. In “On Cultural Extremism,” an essay published in 1908, he pointed to the ideals of Nietzsche as the solution to China’s ills—only the will to power of supreme individuals was capable of leading the benighted masses. Jiang would certainly have read “On Satanic Poetry,” which Lu wrote under the stated influences of Nietzsche and Lord Byron. In it, he called for spiritual fighters and savage rebels to destroy the ultrastable system of Chinese ethics. Like Maxim Gorky in Russia, Lu’s political allies downplayed his Nietzschean sympathies after he moved to the left, but they continued to energize his writing, theory, and criticism until his death in 1936.

When the communists took control of China in 1949, Nietzsche was in the bloodstream of the party. His thinking would inform the psychopolitical project of creating the New Socialist Man in the ashes of the old society. When Jiang led her Dionysian artistic assault on the Apollonian state, Nietzsche was with her.

Later, when Jiang sat in Qincheng Prison, her enemies used this lineage against her. In 1977, Cao Boyan and Ji Weilong sought to protect the party’s ideological continuity by condemning the Gang of Four as Nietzscheans who contradicted Maoism. Through 1978 and 1979, articles like Zhang Wen’s “The New Disciples of Nietzschean Philosophy” and Zhang Zhuomin’s “The Will to Power and Social Fascism” attacked the Cultural Revolution as an expression of the will to power. An essay by Dai Wenlin charged Jiang with trying to create a new social fascist model of the Übermensch.

The commentary against Jiang revealed for a moment what most historiography of socialist China has worked to conceal: Nietzsche haunts all of the revolutions that China experienced in the twentieth century.

A Heroic Revolutionary Art

Jiang’s entry into the practice of cultural struggle began in the early 1960s when Mao found himself sidelined by his own party. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were rising in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward and the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, with pragmatic policies that Jiang saw as unacceptably revisionist. She turned to culture to defend the cause. This was not merely a means to propagate political messages or attack enemies; following Nietzsche, Jiang believed that the world’s existence was justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Following Lu Xun, she also believed that culture could overcome the hegemony of conventional ethics.

She did not command from afar but traveled around the country, giving direct guidance to culture workers and drawing theorists and artists around herself. Revolutionary operas and ballets were her canvas. Apart from Red Detachment of Women, there was Shajiabang, an opera first staged in 1958, which told the story of a village hiding wounded soldiers of the New Fourth Army from Japanese and Nationalist scouts. In Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, Jiang dramatized the anti-bandit struggle in Northeast China.

This focus on heroic cadres laboring in the provinces was politically useful, since highlighting prominent leaders could backfire in the event of a later purge. But it was also part of the Maoist endeavor to create a new revolutionary culture among Chinese peasants and workers. In his “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” Mao had previously promoted the use of folk forms and the magnification of heroic traits. Jiang’s application went even further and demanded their complete transformation:

Out of the worker, peasant, and soldier, we must enthusiastically and by any means create heroic images. As Chairman Mao told us, the world represented in art can and should surpass reality. It should be stronger, purer, more perfect, and more idealized. Don’t be limited by real people and events. Stop writing about dead heroes when we are surrounded by living heroes.

Echoing Nietzsche’s division of art from truth, Jiang called for a break from the rules of realism, revolutionary or otherwise. Other Chinese thinkers had critiqued realist ideas with the concept of revolutionary romanticism as the Sino-Soviet split took effect. Jiang outstripped them, calling for heroes that defied reality itself.

China’s consciousness had been defined by generations of conflict against more powerful actors. Internally, the communists had led a revolt against landlords and aristocrats. Geopolitically, China had valorized the West for generations even while being colonized by it. From a Nietzschean perspective, China’s position of servility could not help but corrupt its spirit. China was now independent, but its consciousness had been shaped by domination. Jiang was determined that her heroes should not reflect this consciousness, but rather the heroic and agentic will to power that the Chinese people now had to cultivate. While the party had acted as the spearhead of this will during the war for liberation, the masses had barely begun to participate in it. The use of folk forms was helpful in teaching China to look within, but they had to be transformed before they could properly convey the consciousness of the new society.

While Jiang personally directed the productions created in this process of aesthetic reorganization, her fellow Gang of Four member Yao Wenyuan later systematized these ideas. He outlined the “Three Prominences” which Jiang and Yao believed all cultural productions should highlight: the prominence of positive characters in a work, the prominence of heroes among the positive characters, and the prominence of the major heroic protagonist among the supporting heroes. Nothing was left to interpretive chance: the protagonist would always be “Red, Bright, and Clear”—accompanied by a literal red glow, projecting an aura of willful positivity, and with an unobscured role and set of virtues. A third principle, “Tall, Mighty, Complete,” set forth that the main hero must physically dominate and appear to tower over surrounding characters with an overpowering presence, free of negative characteristics.

Anti-heroes and navel-gazing introspection about the cause had no place in the revolutionary operas. While these tropes later gained popularity in China and had already become more prominent in Western literature, the apparent “moral complexity” they allowed for only served to diminish the heroic consciousness. They cultivated a suspicion toward the heroic impulse, which became seen as a mask for morally compromised souls as lowly and unworthy as everyone else.

By contrast, Jiang’s insistence on the aesthetic and physical valorization of the hero made them more real than the world they struggled against. They did not fall into the trap of slave morality by letting their enemies define them. Vividly more worthy than those they fought against, they overcame them by sheer force of will. Their noble character also served to accuse those supposed allies with compromised commitments—they were without excuse for failing to live up to the heroic ideal. Again and again in the revolutionary operas, those who join the hero’s battle end up reflecting their beauty and vitality.

In the late 1960s, these theories of cultural struggle would become potent political weapons. The Cultural Revolution itself was unleashed with a piece of literary criticism: Yao Wenyuan’s 1966 article attacking a 1961 Ming dynasty period piece called Hai Rui Dismissed From Office on the grounds that it was against collectivization and the cult of personality.

The Transvaluation of the Cultural Revolution

Despite Jiang’s appearance of being in control of conventional politics, she continued to devote much of her time to running the cultural bureaucracy from the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing. Marshal Lin Biao, the Cultural Revolution Group head Chen Boda, the spy chief Kang Sheng, and other members of the Gang of Four ran day-to-day operations.

Jiang did not lack collaborators. The left-wing artists that had driven Chinese culture in the 1930s were given a long leash by a party leadership made up mostly of urban intellectuals. Dance, in particular, had become a refuge for artists and composers. Jiang was uninterested in the numerous modern dance dramas, which included topical productions about the Vietnam War and Patrice Lumumba, and in experiments in adapting folk dance. It was the revolutionary modern ballets that held the most appeal for Jiang. They exemplified high-art elitism. She loved her hardened, beautiful ballerinas and the heroic themes present in ballets like Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl.

As the Cultural Revolution progressed, her guidance saw revolutionary ballets become extensively modified. New pieces were composed or sections removed to push them toward pure heroism and compliance with the “Three Prominences,” “Red, Bright, Clear,” and “Tall, Mighty, Complete.” In her selection of artistic forms, Jiang maintained the standard that what was beautiful should not be debased at the hands of popular instincts. The ballet, opera, and cinema that defined the Cultural Revolution were not vulgar kitsch, unlike much of the literature of the time. Jiang was interested in high art and her speeches and writing gave no consideration as to whether or not these forms would be appropriate for the masses. Yet, they proved popular enough that they are still performed today.

The filmed version of Ode to Yimeng, released in 1975, is the pinnacle of Jiang’s vision for ballet. While it retains a scene from older renditions of the protagonist feeding a wounded partisan from her breast, in the hands of Jiang it is less a fable of feminine sacrifice than of individual ungendered heroism. With Cheng Bojia dancing as the lead, the tall, powerful beauty seems just as prepared to toss the wounded soldier over her shoulder as she is to suckle him. Her knife fight against local goons, charged in earlier versions with fear of the woman being overpowered, becomes slightly surreal as she seems to tower over her opponents while cast in a red glow and moving effortlessly en pointe. The reels were quickly transported around the country. Urban audiences sat in theaters and villagers gathered around projectors under the stars to watch Cheng Bojia as the national embodiment of Jiang’s Nietzschean heroine.

Meeting the technical, artistic, and ideological perfection that Jiang demanded was no easy task. The heroic art Jiang envisioned required her to mobilize the best and brightest. Yu Huiyong, a composer and theorist, became Jiang’s constant companion as she oversaw this program of cultural engineering. He had originally won the right to work on revolutionary opera in a contest held by Jiang in Shanghai in 1965. The contest reflected Jiang’s demand for raw aesthetic ability: twenty composers were charged with creating an original aria inspired by a lyric from Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.

After Yu fell afoul of Jiang’s own atmosphere of persecution—he was attacked both for slavish devotion to Western forms and for failing to support Jiang’s call to add Western instruments to Chinese orchestras—she rehabilitated him. Jiang wasn’t going to be politically pedantic. Working with the right kind of visionaries came first. Those with ability could be forgiven for political transgressions that condemned the less-than-worthy. Drafted into service alongside many of the best artists and musicians, he worked with Jiang to fine-tune her favorite works in a production process similar to the Hollywood studio system.

The revolutionary opera On the Docks became a shared masterpiece between Yu and Jiang. Yu had worked earlier on experiments in combining Chinese and Western instruments and tuning, as in the incorporation of “The Internationale” as a leitmotif in The Red Lantern, and On the Docks would be the perfection of these attempts. This arrangement of Chinese and Western orchestras would eventually become common, but Yu was the first to pull it off. Yu’s compositions, like the choreography for the revolutionary modern ballet, forged something new from the deconstruction of indigenous folk forms and Western high art. The result is considered a triumph of Cultural Revolution art.

Perfection was the rule. When a film version of On the Docks was shot in 1972, it only circulated for a brief time before Jiang’s careful review found deficiencies: the color grading was too pale, robbing her heroes of their red glow, and the cinematography failed to live up to the demands of “Red, Bright, Clear.” A reshoot appeared the following year, using the same performers and crew.

But while her art was reaching its zenith, Jiang’s hold on power was beginning to weaken. When Lin Biao died in 1971 on a flight to the Soviet Union, Zhou Enlai and his State Council took command of most of the government. Old adversaries, like Deng Xiaoping, were rehabilitated. But she kept making movies and producing operas and ballets as if nothing had changed—and, for her, nothing had. The Cultural Revolution, for Jiang Qing, was about culture.

When her political luck ran out, she refused submission. As one biographer wrote: “She held fast to her moral sovereignty as an individual.” Charged under Article 103 of the Chinese criminal code for committing counter-revolutionary acts that caused grave harm to the state and the people, death was a likely outcome. On the stand, she gave her final performance as the hero in chains, persecuted by the rabble. “I fear nobody,” she thundered. “I am above the law of men and of Heaven!”

Uphold Jiang Qing Thought

In the end, Jiang lived long enough to see what Deng Xiaoping’s cultural bureaucracy did to the program she had created. Reform and Opening Up became an age of individualist ressentiment, rather than cultural affirmation. Envy, persecution, and petty hatreds became the obsessions of new waves of art and film. Writers turned to “scar literature,” detailing their suffering under the Cultural Revolution.

Popular films showed the persecution of intellectuals by the Gang of Four. The victims, unlike the peasant girl in Red Detachment of Women, did not rescue themselves. Instead, they were made pure by their suffering. Artists were encouraged to turn inwards, to find their deepest pain. In Nietzschean terms, it was a full re-embrace of the slave morality that finds moral worth in the negation of health, power, and vitality—traits now associated with the art of the Cultural Revolution. Mobilization for economic development was acceptable to the leadership, but grand visions now risked political conflict. Politically, it was more expedient for artists to brood on the troubles and resentments of daily life.

The theories of Jiang’s reformation, including both the Nietzschean impulse and the orthodox Maoist call for artistic engagement with the masses, were reversed with market-driven mass media. Cinema in this period degenerated into violent pornography; many films made in this period, like the 1988 productions Silver Snake Murders and Obsession, could not be released to overseas markets without extensive cuts by local censorship boards and cannot be screened in China today. Experiments in stream-of-consciousness work, abstract impressionism, and performance art became popular.

Compared with Jiang’s mobilization of the best artists and musicians into large-scale productions with heroic ideological goals, the new era was a managed descent into cultural chaos. The ideal artist was now an entrepreneur that could keep themselves afloat on the seas of the market economy. Locked into private competition, shock and vulgarity were the best ways to inch ahead of one’s rivals. It was not conducive to heroic impulses or high-minded political action.

The “Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution Debates” and “Campaign Against Bourgeois Liberalization” were launched in 1983 and 1986 as attempts to rein in the excesses by restoring guard rails on expression, but reformers allied with Deng ultimately cut these campaigns short. The intellectuals and artists that the party gave space to repudiate the Cultural Revolution kept going right up until the summer of 1989 when China was rocked by nationwide protests.

The years since 1989 have seen an attempt to contain what was unleashed by this cultural free-for-all. This has sometimes involved marketization, banking on the fact that existentialism is not profitable, but also an abortive revival of the Jiang Qing line. The Central Ballet staged Red Detachment of Women for the first time since the Cultural Revolution in 1992. China Central Television still broadcasts new productions of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, and the films made under Jiang Qing’s leadership in the 1970s were never actively suppressed.

But it is hard to find the heroic aesthetic of the Cultural Revolution in the official art promoted since 1989. Jiang Qing commanded high art for the masses, without any competition from the market. The newer works merely ape some of the principles.

The worthwhile lesson of Jiang Qing is in her refusal to impose powerlessness and victimhood on her subjects. She refused to sanction what Pierre Bourdieu, invoking Nietzsche, once called a “sociologically mutilated being” as a model of human excellence. Instead, she invited the masses at gunpoint to contemplate beauty and strength. The power of her project can be seen in the transformative chaos of its age. As she learned from Lu Xun, also invoking Nietzsche, the artist must be capable of driving men mad.

The popular audience for Jiang’s elite high art was large and enduring enough that these works were performed long after the appreciation mandated by the Cultural Revolution had ended. Folk culture was not, in practice, displaced; instead, it existed alongside a popular audience for the revolutionary ballets. The goal of Jiang’s art was not to push aside all that came before; it was to absorb and transform it. In her vision, the dominant must not impose ressentiment on the dominated—to do so would be aesthetically disgusting. Jiang’s heroes were personalities to aspire to, not moral battering rams. This vision was accomplished by nurturing individual and collective creativity, pursuing technical perfection, and tolerating the transgression of traditional ethics.

These were Jiang’s lessons for China and artists. The tyranny of irony can be cast off by heroic sincerity. Mythology can become a true ethos. By giving up on victimhood, one gives up on misery. Without the narcissistic compulsion for representation of one’s petty flaws, it is possible to imagine true heroes.

The pinnacles of such art require the same kind of mass mobilization as any other achievement of modern society. As far back as the 1920s, directors like Fritz Lang commanded masses of people and machines with a firm hand to create masterworks of cultural production. But this apparent stiffness shelters the artist’s disruptive impulse. Jiang tolerated the transgressions of once-in-a-lifetime geniuses like Xue Jinghua or Yu Huiyong for a reason. The real crime she did not allow was the aestheticization of petty transgressions into ideals.

Jiang was under no illusions that the average viewer would be directly transformed into a great hero by their aesthetic experience. Her own “Three Prominences” assume that such heroes are few. But by refusing to valorize the sociologically mutilated individual, Jiang swept away the conditioning of powerlessness and victimhood. Her struggle was to inculcate a new heroic consciousness. In her works, the enemy became an adversary against which the heroes test their courage, nobility, and commitment to the cause. Jiang does not allow her villains to produce envy and deforming hatred in her protagonists or her audience. Instead, the fate of the enemy is that they will be forgotten entirely in the glorious finale, swept aside by the unstoppable, superior personalities of the protagonists.

Jiang’s core message, and her alternative to the celebration of victimhood by contemporary cultural orthodoxy, was the power of heroic ideals to make even overwhelming opposition irrelevant. Armed with her culture of self-justifying strength and beauty, her noble-souled heroes cast off any thought of victimhood to pursue their own glorious visions for their own sake.

Abe Shinzo had not been his first choice. The leadership of the Unification Church was higher on his list. They were the target of his rage—for bankrupting his family, for helping drive his brother to suicide, for stealing his future. But they were too well-protected and too hard to track. Abe would do just fine: he was the highest profile ally of the group, he was the grandson of the man that had welcomed them to the country, and, most importantly, he was vulnerable. It was easy enough to find out that he would be in town to campaign for a local Liberal Democratic Party councilor.

Dressed in an unassuming uniform of a slim-fit polo and ten-pocket khakis made in Vietnam, Yamagami blended into his surroundings. He circled the makeshift stage on the north side of the station, where Abe was extolling the virtues of local LDP hack Sato Kei. Even as Yamagami strode toward the former Prime Minister, Abe’s security seemed not to notice him.

The first blast from Yamagami’s gun missed Abe by inches. Neither man was shaken from their tasks. Abe went on speaking. Yamagami closed the distance and fired again. One of the improvised rounds from Tetsuya’s gun opened a subclavian artery in Abe’s neck, and Yamagami was hauled to the ground by one of Abe’s agents.

And both men lay on the pavement, awaiting their fates. Within hours, Abe’s life had slipped from his wounded body and Yamagami was in jail, now facing murder charges.

The Death of a Salaryman

The simple version of the story is that of an unhinged man taking revenge on a politician. But the events that led up to it were set in motion two generations earlier by Abe’s own family, and were bound up in the very foundations of the new Japanese political order imposed by the U.S. after the Second World War. 

Kishi Nobusuke, Abe’s maternal grandfather, was lifted out of Sugamo Prison in 1948. He had shared a cell with other ultranationalist war profiteers Kodama Yoshio and Sasakawa Ryoichi, and the two would go on to join him in leading both above-ground and underworld politics in the 1950s. Kishi went into the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), whose grip on the state was hegemonic. Sasakawa went into business, while Kodama was the go-between for the Central Intelligence Agency and the criminal underworld. What linked their activities was their mutual connection to a burgeoning movement called the Unification Church, which they had welcomed to operate in Japan. 

It might seem odd for Japanese ultranationalists to conspire with a Korean religious organization, but they were working toward the same goals, and occasionally for the same paymasters. The Unification Church was a collaboration between charismatic preacher Sun Myung Moon and South Korea’s CIA. Built on Moon’s eclectic version of Christianity in which he was a new messiah, the group became renowned for its mass weddings between couples whose matches had been arranged by Moon himself. Moon’s personal rolodex could serve as a who’s-who of the twentieth century: he had personal relationships with the Bush and Nixon families, Nation of Islam boss Louis Farrakhan, North Korean dictator Kim Il-Sung, and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

The church’s political backers intended it to serve as a domestic political tool, a manipulable reservoir for evangelical energy. By expanding membership around the world, the group became wealthy and powerful enough to provide cover for global activities under the banner of Cold War anti-communism. At this height of its anti-communist activities, the Unification Church front-group CAUSA operated as CIA proxies in Nicaragua, delivering money and supplies to Contra rebels even after Congress had barred formal collaboration following the Iran-Contra scandal. Religious devotees proved useful operatives around the world.

For Kishi, Sasakawa, and Kodama, the Unification Church served some of the same purposes. While evangelicals were less numerous in Japan than Korea, the Unification Church was unleashed on campuses to divert young radicals from becoming agents of the Soviet Union and Maoist China. Collaboration between the Unification Church, organized crime, intelligence agencies, and the LDP on international political action was carried out through a World Anti-Communist League subsidiary called the International Federation for Victory over Communism. The LDP’s relationship was lucrative too, since politicians at many levels could expect payoffs for looking the other way on donations and “spiritual sales” of religious collectibles.

These were the men that built Japan as we know it, from top to bottom. On the surface, it worked just fine. The electoral system was rigged in favor of single-party domination, and it was not in the interest of the LDP to change things. They built the developmentalist state with enough state control that liberal maverick and perennial LDP leadership contender Kono Taro referred to Japan as “the last socialist country on the planet.” Abe Shintaro inherited the business from his father-in-law when he married Kishi’s daughter. Abe Shinzo, Shintaro’s son, would be next in line.

Although much lower down than Kishi or Abe the Elder, Yamagami Tetsuya’s father was one of the patriarchs of the same order. He went from the Faculty of Engineering at the elite Kyoto University to a well-compensated position in one of the innumerable construction firms tasked by the LDP with covering the nation in concrete. Such firms were part of the wide network involved in making sure state funds disbursed in the countryside got to the right people. Yamagami’s father divided his efforts between building tunnels and moving slush funds. 

Like many men too busy with careers to socialize outside of work, he met a woman of complementary background through a matchmaking service, married, and got down to building a family. There were two boys first—an older brother, then Tetsuya—and a daughter. Work kept him away from home. That was normal. He drank too much. That was normal, too. This is the deal that the Japanese salaryman still makes: give your daylight hours to your company, the evening to after-hours boozing, and, even if you never see them, you can guarantee your family a good life. 

He opted out of the deal. In 1984, when Yamagami Tetsuya was four years old, his elder brother five, and his sister not yet born, their father killed himself. Less creative than his son, he chose to jump off a building.

Japan’s New Religious Spring

Japan’s peculiar arrangement was that of a powerful state run by an organizationally weak party that was heavily restricted by the postwar legal system. That arrangement meant that other powers had to be tapped by the LDP to get certain things done. Kishi, Sasakawa, and Kodama had needed the Unification Church for the same reason that they needed the Yakuza—to do things beyond the law. But in doing so, they began to unleash forces that would ultimately spiral beyond the control of their successors.

Layers below the corporate and political elite, the system was hollow. Careerism and middle-class industriousness had their outlets in a regimented corporate society and the culture industries. Even anti-social elements found their place in the system, managed by LDP allies in organized crime, which controlled rackets ranging from games of chance, pornography, and recreational drugs to ultranationalist societies and the quasi-legal commercial sex industry. 

But the more positive kind of social energy—the urge to organize to make the nation a better place, or to make oneself a better person—was harder to deal with. Political idealism didn’t mix well with national prosperity so firmly built on cold, bureaucratic realpolitik. The nationalist fringes that maintained loyalty to the imperial legacy also largely turned pro-U.S. and maintained ties with the establishment. Meanwhile, the radical socialist and labor movements that attracted large numbers of students began to implode by the early 1970s. The official system was stitched up tight. With no political answers for building a better world, an array of new movements began to propose spiritual revolutions instead.

The Unification Church was far from the only group offering a new form of salvation to devotees starved of idealism. In the decades after the war, tens of millions joined an array of groups categorized as “new religious movements” by the Japanese government. 

It was an era of spiritual consumerism. One seeker might be attracted by Tenrikyo, founded by a living goddess for the promise of spiritual liberation through good deeds; another might be swayed by Agonshu’s impressive rituals, conceived by a former Yokohama bootlegger. On the fringes, one could find Happy Science, founded in 1986 by Okawa Ryuho, a charismatic former securities trader and reincarnated Buddha, who began to amass a fortune through donations, real estate deals, and rallies that promised contact with the dead. Even further out were groups like Asahara Shoko’s Aum Shinrikyo. Along with psychedelic initiation rituals and an apocalyptic vision of Buddhism, it recruited followers willing to commit mass murder with sarin gas on the Tokyo subway system in 1994. Among the most successful groups was the Nichiren sect Soka Gakkai, with a message of humanistic commitment, creative reinterpretations of Buddhist doctrine, and a strong sense of community. 

During the 1970s and ‘80s, many of these movements managed to fully establish themselves as tolerated—if not entirely accepted—institutions. But the market for spiritual guidance was about to have a boom. Though he couldn’t have known it, the senior Yamagami had ended his life at the very end of Japan’s years of prosperity. Just a few years later, the country entered the first of several lost decades in the 1990s.

That collapse fueled spikes in membership and popularity for a number of the new religious movements—the same wave that Yamagami Tetsuya’s mother was caught up in. As a result, money came pouring in. Everyone got in on the action: Happy Science expanded their offerings of VIP classes, while Soka Gakkai scooped up discounted real estate to build a portfolio that is now estimated in the tens of billions. Their bond market investments became enough to shift the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Even Aum Shinrikyo found time and money to fill a safe with gold bars, buy a Soviet surplus helicopter, and build a headquarters in Aoyama in between their acts of terrorism.

Unless Unification Church records are opened to the public, nobody will ever be completely sure how or precisely when Yamagami’s mother came in contact with the group. Her brother guessed in an interview that she may have been a member since the 1980s, but she started making massive donations starting in 1991, seven years after her husband’s suicide, when she had returned to Nara with her children.

For the Unification Church, the renewed demand for spiritual guidance meant door-to-door spiritual sales tactics. Representatives, cloaking their affiliation at first, would sell Korean goods and divination services, eventually charging for advice on how to overcome ancestral trauma. For many Japanese who had the salaryman deal ripped away from them—and for a grieving widow like Yamagami’s mother—it seemed like a literal godsend. She funneled her husband’s life insurance policy into the purchase of blessed trinkets and holy books.

In 1998, when the life insurance policy was gone, she sold the house she inherited from her father to keep paying off the Unification Church. When she declared bankruptcy four years later, she disclosed donations to the organization of nearly a million U.S. dollars.

Yamagami Tetsuya’s Rabbit Hole

The wreckage of his father’s death and his mother’s religion marked Yamagami deeply. The young man muddled through life. Without money for college, he did a brief stint with Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, leaving in 2005 to begin drifting between short-term jobs. When his elder brother took his own life in 2015, the darkness seemed overwhelming.

In the midst of that abyss, he began to try and understand just how his mother’s church held such power over his life and Japanese society more broadly. He began accessing information posted online by activists among the children of Unification Church members. The search led him down a rabbit hole that unveiled just how deep the Unification Church’s ties with the Japanese state had become.

The turn had begun in 1993, when the LDP was knocked out of power for the first time in thirty-eight years. The rival coalition included Soka Gakkai’s allied political party, Komeito. (Today, the two are no longer formally linked, but that distinction is a convenient fiction, intended to avoid bumping up against legal restrictions on the separation of religion and politics). The LDP learned its lesson from the defeat—the era of keeping religion to the backrooms of anti-communist politics was over. Around the same time, the Unification Church was entering a new phase of outreach, rebranding itself the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. It was a perfect match. The LDP tapped the new religious movements to provide the support that they lacked, which was necessary to win elections under the competitive new system created by electoral reform.

The result was a deepening Unification Church presence in the campaigns and careers of rising LDP politicians. Those ranks included Abe Shinzo, who went from ordinary representative to filling various cabinet roles and then became Prime Minister in 2006. During Abe’s years of ascendency, Unification Church personnel helped staff his electoral campaigns and local office in the city of Shimonoseki, where he had inherited his father’s power base. The Unification Church’s local office stood directly across from the one occupied by Abe himself, and members came and went freely. When it came election time, Unification Church members manned phone banks.

As Abe climbed the political ladder, the Unification Church stayed by his side: the eighty-thousand votes that the group guaranteed in 2006 propelled him to the office of Prime Minister. Documents from the Unification Church seem to confirm this, recording Sun Myung Moon personally dispatching his staffers to make contact with key Abe faction members.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media in Japan was largely unwilling to run stories linking politicians to the Unification Church. When Yamagami and others wanted to find information, they were limited to informal networks gathering data online. Only after the killing would Japan’s tight-lipped leaders begin to murmur publicly about the Unification Church; one leading member of Abe’s LDP faction described the ties as “deep relations” extending back to “ancient times.”

The reality was that the Unification Church was a willing and active partner in the LDP’s overall political strategy. This support became pivotal to the LDP as the party clawed its way back into power. The Unification Church branched out beyond a handful of powerful factions in national politics to support even peripheral municipal politicians. When Yamagami’s actions finally raised questions about LDP-Unification Church relations in 2022, half of the LDP members sitting in the House of Representatives turned out to have connections to the group.

In exchange for election wins, the church received the vocal, public support of LDP lawmakers, including Abe, who addressed Unification Church gatherings and flew out to events hosted by the group. They began to wield influence or sometimes direct control over public policy, advocating a socially conservative agenda and confrontation with China. These policy suggestions were carried out in sometimes contradictory ways: although the LDP paid lip service to the traditional family, Abe also vowed to send women into the workforce; the LDP resisted proposals from the opposition to legalize same-sex marriage, but tolerated civil partnerships sealed by local governments; and despite LDP governments occasionally ratcheting up tension with China, as in the disputes over the Senkaku Islands, they also strengthened economic and cultural ties.

The LDP played the other side of the religious fence, too. The party eventually brought the Soka Gakkai party Komeito into a coalition, despite its more liberal, vocally anti-war views. This has led to some strange politics in recent years: the LDP staggers forward, jerked from both sides. The party serves as a platform for Abe’s faction and their provocative foreign policy—which included sending the Self-Defense Forces to Iraq—but cannot ever amend the U.S.-imposed constitution because Komeito will force them to back down. Conservative nationalists share power with neo-Buddhist pacifists, with the only logic being to keep everyone in government. As a result of these fragile, mixed alliances, the possibility of a strong leadership figure from within the LDP has become all but impossible. What matters is keeping the ship upright, not getting to any particular destination.

This was the rabbit hole Yamagami went down. The more he learned, the more he was determined to change things—if not for the country, then at least for himself. If he couldn’t hit a member of the Unification Church directly, he decided, the next best option would be their political proxy. All of the thwarted ingenuity and hope found some kind of direction, and he went to work building bombs and guns.

In the end, Abe got a state funeral, while Yamagami sits in a tiny detention facility in Osaka. Having been judged mentally competent to stand trial, he could face the death penalty.

Can a Cult Save Japan?

As condemnations and condolences poured in from world leaders, the assassination was celebrated in some quarters of Japan itself. A thinly-veiled heroic depiction of Yamagami’s story is at the center of left-wing radical filmmaker Adachi Masao’s latest picture, which was rushed into production to open the same week as Abe’s controversial state funeral.

Yagamami invoked no broader ideological agenda, which has made it easy for sympathizers to focus on his personal story of revenge against the Unification Church and its patrons. The basic narrative of Yagamami’s sympathizers is one of catharsis and revenge: those who have run the country into the ground have faced consequences for their actions. Petitions have come in for leniency. At the detention facility, Yamagami has received a steady stream of cash donations to fight his case.

To the extent that Yamagami’s case generates sympathy, it is largely because he embodies the slow decay of the Japanese social order: the failed son of a despairing salaryman, his inheritance siphoned away by one of the nation’s most powerful organizations. As society decays and Yamagami’s enemies tighten their grip, there are fewer and fewer ways for people like him to improve their state. The Japanese family is evaporating, along with the future generations of the Japanese population—a problem now common to Asia and much of the rest of the world. The LDP’s hold on power is a signal that this status quo is only set to continue.

In practical terms, the aftermath of the assassination is unlikely to see much change. While politicians are discussing tentative steps toward ending the predatory solicitation of donations, these will almost certainly be left with loopholes. Some LDP politicians have had links with the Unification Church exposed, but the most powerful will not face any consequences. A lone gunman rarely shifts the course of history.

But a movement with sufficient organization might. The decayed political order that exists in Japan is the same that was established by the Americans after 1945; that same order was renegotiated in the conservative revival and economic freeze that began in the early 1990s. The question, then, is whether or not any of the new religious groups and their adjacent political movements are capable of decisively turning the country in a new direction. With the LDP currently mired in factional duels and fights between special interest groups, and with no organized secular opposition to speak of, the new religious movements seem to be the only option.

If Japan is transformed, it is unlikely to be the Unification Church that does it. Like the LDP, they are the product of the post-1945 order. Without any challenger on the horizon, that leaves Soka Gakkai and their Komeito party. Unlike other challengers, headquartered in foreign capitals or indebted to outside interests, they are a born-and-bred Japanese organization. Their program of Buddhist democracy is not radical, but it represents a break from the order that ossified under the LDP. They have effective leadership and no shortage of members and cash.

The odds are against any rival. On net, it is unlikely that Soka Gakkai currently has this level of political ambition. But any actor who does will have to attain at least the same level of organization and ideological sovereignty. A more likely scenario is that as the Japanese social order decays without replacement, groups like the Unification Church and Soka Gakkai will benefit ever more from their disproportionate organization, wealth, and ability to command loyalty from their members.

The blow Yamagami struck has served as little more than personal vengeance. But if he dodges the noose, it is likely that he will grow old in a society ever more governed by the new religious movements that ruined his life. 

He was an engineer; he built what he was asked to build, without too much concern for what uses it might be put to. He worked as diligently for Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as he did—once the Americans ejected him—for Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. 

In 1945, he met Wernher von Braun in Bavaria; they spoke about wind tunnels. The only reason that the U.S. generals trusted a “resident alien” to come along on the Nazi debrief was that he was disinterested, but not disloyal. In his five years working with the highest levels of military clearance, there was never even a rumor of espionage. 

In 1949, the FBI checked up on Qian. Their job was to smear him as a communist, but they couldn’t find much. With Caltech professors, finding a cause was usually easy enough: attendance at the wrong Young Democrats function or a favorable opinion of Stalin expressed to a friend would suffice. Qian, though, spent his free time at home with his wife and young son, and was not known for sharing political remarks of any sort. Caltech chemist Gustav Albrecht admitted in an FBI interview that he tried to sell his Chinese colleague on the Soviet worker’s utopia, but recalled Qian reacting with a “typical aloof oriental attitude.”

J. Edgar Hoover, if he had chosen to do so, could have learned most of Qian’s story from the dossier that his agents compiled. He was born sometime around the fall of China’s final imperial dynasty. His father set off from Hangzhou to take up a post in the government of the Republic of China. Qian went to the capital’s top schools. His first love was locomotives; his next was airplanes. In 1935, he received a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, funded by the U.S. government, and jumped at the chance to study aeronautical engineering. After a brief stint at MIT, he left for the West Coast to join Caltech’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT) and work under theoretician Theodore von Kármán.

His work with the government was itself a twist of fate. Within a year of Qian’s arrival in late 1936, the military and their contractors arrived at Caltech, answering the call to discreetly ensure the country was at parity with the German military. When war was declared, funding poured into GALCIT from the military and his work was deemed indispensable to the American war effort. 

Qian found himself among the scientists and strategists that, in the final years of the war, had worked on crafting military-industrial policy for future conflicts. He worked with von Kármán on an ambitious classified report for the Army Air Forces Scientific Advisory Group; titled Toward New Horizons, it extrapolated a radical vision of what aerial warfare might look like decades in the future. He had access to classified defense projects, a seat on the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, and a gig consulting on the Manhattan Project. 

The agents tailing Qian as he meandered around Pasadena in his Buick could not have known much about this classified work. Their job was to rebalance the postwar political order: Hoover and McCarthy had begun rooting out suspected communists and their sympathizers. At Caltech, the investigation focused on Sidney Weinbaum, a member of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A Ukrainian Jew who had fled the Bolsheviks in the 1920s, Weinbaum was accused of having concealed Communist Party (CPUSA) membership to receive clearance for wartime defense contracts. Weinbaum and Frank Malina were comrades, and it was Malina who had introduced Qian to Weinbaum. It was the sort of connection McCarthy’s agents were trained to sniff out.

After the FBI knocked on his door in the summer of 1950, Qian tendered his resignation at Caltech and made ready to return to China. Even his FBI files detailed that he was never a fellow traveler, but he could predict the treatment he would receive regardless.

When the Immigration and Naturalization Service got wind that Qian was planning to leave, they detained him based on testimony from informants that he had joined CPUSA in 1938. Qian and his family were kept in legal limbo for five years. The Americans feared that Qian would carry his knowledge of ballistic missiles off to China or the Soviet Union, so they wanted to put him on ice until his knowledge became obsolete. 

But his knowledge of American defense technology—probably less sophisticated than that already possessed by the NKVD—was secondary to his abilities. During the years of quasi-house arrest, he began a dive into the novel field that would undergird his work in decades to come: cybernetics.

He had first been exposed to Norbert Wiener’s theories of cybernetics in his aerospace work. It was how missiles were guided: a controller receives information about velocity and pitch, sends information to servomechanisms to make changes, and then receives updated information in a feedback loop. Engineering Cybernetics, a book Qian wrote during his detention and published in 1954, theorized control of complex, interrelated systems. He conceived of his engineering cybernetics—or systems engineering, as it came to be known—as not merely an application of cybernetics to engineering but as an engineering science that subsumed control theory altogether. 

In the end, his limbo was resolved when the Americans traded Qian away in a prisoner exchange in late 1955. One of the greatest minds of the U.S. defense establishment was swapped for eleven pilots captured by the People’s Liberation Army in Korea. 

Advising a Nuclear China and the Great Leap Forward

Qian’s return to China was as unwittingly well-timed as his arrival at Caltech. The ideological reform movement that targeted previous returnees had died down. The Science Planning Commission of the State Council was putting together a twelve-year program for scientific development. 

Qian was nominally in charge of aeronautical work at the Institute of Mechanics, but his advisory work took precedence. His ideas for the plan went far beyond the modest suggestions of Chinese and Soviet experts. He had a direct hand in writing ballistic missiles, computers, semiconductor technology, wireless control systems, automation, and atomic energy into the plan. 

Qian knew that China’s priority had to be nuclear weapons and a ballistic missile to deliver them. He told the leadership that they needed two bombs—the atomic bomb and the ICBM—and one satellite.

The Soviet Union had supported the construction of a reactor in Gansu to enrich uranium and eventually gave tentative support for a weapons program. They passed along rockets, as well as plans for their first-generation RDS-1 nuclear warhead. Soviet engineers had used plans lifted by communist agents from the same Anglo-American program that Qian had consulted on. 

Soviet support soon dried up, however. The Second Taiwan Straits Crisis in 1958 rattled Nikita Khrushchev. With visions of Chairman Mao sending a Tupolev bomber equipped with a doomsday device over Taipei and triggering Armageddon, he ordered a pause on nuclear assistance.  

To take up the slack, the Chinese government sanctioned trial-and-error approaches. The efforts of Qian and his colleagues were successful: the first bomb went off in 1964. That was not yet enough. Two years later, they strapped a nuclear warhead to a Dongfeng-2 medium-range ballistic missile, launched it from a pad in Inner Mongolia, and struck a test site in Xinjiang. 

Qian’s role in getting China the bomb is still widely celebrated. But concurrent events would serve to give him a black mark in the history books. 

The Great Leap Forward was underway at the same time. Today, it is not a period typically associated with scientific progress. But in its own time, the Leap was tied to the technological Marxist utopianism of the Twelve-year Plan and faith in the potential of central industrial planning. The Great Leap Forward was based on two central projects: mass mobilization for industrial progress and optimization of agricultural production. Its industrialization efforts proceeded from the idea that bottlenecks could be busted through with mobilization. The Leap’s agricultural schemes, meanwhile, drew on scientific theories: Chinese agronomists devised “deep plowing,” while experiments in animal husbandry were underwritten by Trofim Lysenko’s genetic theories.

In a 1958 article, Qian proposed a series of advances that he believed could be made in agriculture within the next ten years. The future, he said, would see artificial weather modification, industrial processes introduced to farming, biomass fuel solving the energy shortages, a healthier diet via advances in algae farming, and a systemic understanding of solar energy boosting agricultural productivity. 

The article closed with a diagram drawing on Qian’s ideas about systems engineering. He illustrated agriculture as a holistic complex system, with solar energy connected out through agriculture and industry to food, culture, and clothing. It was clear that Qian saw the Great Leap Forward as a potential revolution in the application of technology—and that included cybernetics and systems theory—to economic, social, and cultural problems.

The realities of the Leap are now infamous. In the countryside, Lysenkoist schemes led to chronic soil infertility, and crops were occasionally left to rot on the field. Peasants starved on collective farms. It’s also obvious now that Qian, despite being occasionally pressed into catching flies and digging latrines, did not have access to a full picture of what was going on. 

In Beijing, Qian instead watched computers arriving from the Soviet Union and Chinese scientists taking their first steps toward reverse engineering their own machines. He even helped send mathematician Hua Luogeng—who had attended lectures by Norbert Wiener when he visited Tsinghua in 1936—to introduce critical path organizational techniques to factories and farms as part of a short-lived Science of Operations Research and Linear Programming Movement.

It was the start of a pattern that would play out repeatedly throughout Qian’s career in China: from his place at the center, the political structure appeared to have a level of organization and capacity that simply did not play out in the rest of the country. 

Moreover, the main force guiding how scientific proposals were interpreted and carried out was not the voice of Qian or his colleagues, nor sophisticated cybernetic feedback loops, but Maoist political discipline. To Qian, centralization of agricultural production didn’t mean cadres demanding unfeasible quotas but a rational system to facilitate early experiments in fertilizer distribution and in the use of advanced weather forecasting to direct nationwide crop planting. 

Qian found himself dragged into the propaganda effort when major newspapers printed a misleading excerpt from an article he had written about ten-year prospects for agricultural reform. They selectively clipped a line stating productivity had not yet reached its possible “ideal” peak and spun it into the ongoing campaign for cadres to be more ruthless in their enforcement of Great Leap policies. As a result, he came to be forever associated in the minds of some with the excesses of the period. 

Within a year, the policies of the Great Leap Forward began to be ignored by commune cadres and then officially reversed by central authorities. The operations research specialists went back to work in the defense industry. Officials abandoned schemes for the centralization of agricultural planning and cybernetic management. Control over agricultural policy was ceded to the pragmatists led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Their agricultural policy was one of decentralization, with farmers allowed to do what they liked once state quotas were filled—a policy not suited to central planning, cybernetic or otherwise. 

But the pragmatist program did not last much longer than the Leap. With a year of Liu and Deng returning to prominence, the Socialist Education Movement kicked into high gear. The pragmatists were tarred as “right-deviationists.” Experimentation was out of fashion. 

The importance of Qian to the defense program and the support of Zhou Enlai sheltered him from the worst of it. He managed to dodge the fates of criticism, struggle sessions, and hard labor met by many of his colleagues during the Cultural Revolution. When an armed struggle broke out between technicians and scientists at the Seventh Ministry of Machine Building, which served as the headquarters of the ballistic missile program, he had the luxury of staying home.

Publicly, he went silent in these years. Qian’s name appeared only sporadically in the newspapers, announcing political appointments or attached to advances in the space program. His collected writing shows a gap between a 1965 article on space exploration and a formulaic September 1976 memorial to Chairman Mao. 

Cybernetics and Opening Up

By the time Qian Xuesen returned to the public eye in the late 1970s, he had turned again to the promise of cybernetics. 

State cybernetics projects had never been possible before. Political instability pre-empted any attempts to overcome China’s limited computing power; antagonism toward any ideas associated with the Soviet Union, the standard-bearer for socialist cybernetics, made the idea politically dangerous. By 1978, though, Deng had tamed the chaos.

Qian went to work spreading the gospel of systems engineering. He worked with his dearest protege, the Soviet-educated missile guidance genius Song Jian, on a revised edition of Engineering Cybernetics. The new release took into account developments since 1954 in information theory, control theory, systems theory, operations research, and management science. In a 1978 article for state media, Qian described systems engineering as the “technology of organizational management.” He touted it as a holistic and comprehensive method to chart and optimize the relationship of elements within a complex system. He advocated for systems engineering to regulate nationwide industrial and agricultural production. 

His timing, once again, was impeccable. Deng Xiaoping and his loyalists were already laying the groundwork for the theoretical modifications that would be the dawn of a new age of scientism. In March of 1978, Deng proclaimed in a speech for the National Conference on Science that science and technology were among the primary productive forces and that the goal of his socialism was to develop those forces. 

This was a major repudiation of the Maoist line upheld by the Gang of Four, which held that the development of productive forces—labor, the machinery of production, and human expertise—was not desirable without changing the social structure created by production itself. If the economic relationships were undesirable, so was development itself, and any pragmatic argument in its favor made you a political enemy. The economic base of productive forces remained subordinate to the relations of production, which were themselves subordinate to the superstructure, made up of politics, law, culture, and scientific thought. 

Deng reversed this to say that the productive forces, including scientific inquiry and technological progress, were what drove society. The productive forces could be developed without concern about the relations of production, and scientific progress could be liberated from the constraints of ideology. A series of books and articles followed, with major party theorists advancing the idea that science and technology were philosophical systems independent of political theory. Deng called on “mental workers who serve socialism” to return to work and contribute to building the nation. 

Calculating the One-Child Policy

The ideological mood was right and Qian had the theoretical tools, but finding the computers to run these projects on was still a problem. In his 1978 article, Qian concluded with a note that any attempts to actually implement systems engineering would require “incredibly powerful computers.” 

Only a handful of computers in the country fit that description: several dated Soviet mainframe computers and indigenous derivatives, IBM systems illegally acquired by the People’s Bank of China, CDC systems purchased in the late 1970s through European middle-men, and—after the Sino-American détente—supercomputers purchased directly from UNIVAC and IBM.

The defense industry, and in particular the Seventh Ministry where ballistic missile guidance systems were designed, had both computers and cybernetics experts. 

The number of prominent Chinese cyberneticists had grown by this time: researchers like Song Jian, Chen Hanfu, Guan Zhaozhi, Yang Jiachi, Li Guangyuan, Han Jingqing, and Guo Lei had kept pace with their foreign peers. They had managed to come up with parallel advances in ballistic missile guidance and fire-control systems. But their research was restricted to the military and the space program, while Soviet, American, and British cyberneticists had been called on to apply their ideas to economic planning and organizational management.

What came in 1978 was not only an end to Cultural Revolution strife and Maoist political discipline, and a rehabilitation of scientific expertise, but also sharp cuts to the defense budget. This meant that defense scientists suddenly had to justify their relevance. They found their cause in the prospects of cybernetics for planning social systems. 

In late May of 1978, a delegation of Chinese cyberneticists—including Yang Jiachi, Chen Hanfu, and Song Jian—visited Helsinki for the Seventh Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control. It was the first time since 1964 that a Chinese delegation had attended, and they discovered what they had been missing out on.

It was there that Song Jian made the acquaintance of Huibert Kwakernaak, a Dutch cyberneticist that had fallen under the influence of the Club of Rome, a trans-national anti-natalist alliance founded by Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and former OECD science policy advisor Alexander King. Kwakernaak’s 1977 paper, “Application of Control Theory to Population Policy” makes reference to Edward Goldsmith’s 1972 population alarmist and anti-industrialization tract, A Blueprint for Survival, as well as Mankind at the Turning Point: The Second Report to The Club of Rome.

Three decades of communism in China had not extinguished the anti-natalist tendency that had consumed the elite since the New Culture Movement. Pro-natalist policies only held sway for a few years in the 1950s before the party answered the calls of the All-China Women’s Federation to provide contraception. It seems clear from the way that Song Jian writes about population growth that he was scientifically convinced, but also viscerally disgusted by surplus humanity:

In 1957, Mao Zedong said ironically: “In terms of child births, human beings seem to be least capable of controlling themselves and there does exist a situation of anarchism…” […] In 1964, seven years after Mao’s remarks, the second census showed an increase of another 100 million, making a total of 700 million. Soon the “Cultural Revolution” came. By 1969, even before people could extricate themselves from chaos and agony, an increase of another 100 million people was recorded. By 1974, the total reached 900 million. During that time, people lived in confinement, yet they were completely free to indulge themselves in reproductive capability.

He recalls from his 1978 visit that he was “extremely excited” and “determined to try” new cybernetic methods for population control. He did not have access to anything as sophisticated as the global simulations commissioned from MIT for The Limits to Growth, so he began by plotting population growth on Seventh Ministry computers using data pulled from state databases.

He gathered cybernetics experts from within the Seventh Ministry and the larger military-industrial ecosystem and began applying ideas from Qian’s systems engineering. Many of them came from the limited collection of cybernetic population theory papers he brought back from Helsinki.

His work involved finding “the feedback mechanism of [the] population system,” its parameters, and how to achieve optimal control. His conclusion, based on a model that took into account “studies of natural resources, the level of socioeconomic development, living standards, and ecological equilibrium” was that the target population for China should be 700 million. The only way to get there within a decade was by restricting all women to a single child. 

Once he had a sound mathematical model, Song Jian, the cyberneticists, and Qian went to state planners with a plan to apply systems engineering to the problem of population growth. 

It was easy to sell state planners on the conclusions arrived at by their model. The alternative would be runaway population numbers sandbagging modernization and economic growth. China began to implement the One-child policy in 1980. 

What happened next was a chaotic social experiment that exposed just how hard it was to build a cybernetic political apparatus, especially one functioning on the level of a great power numbering hundreds of millions. As with the Leap, there was an extreme dichotomy between the level of institutional control that scientific planners assumed, as opposed to what the institutions were actually capable of. 

On the ground, enforcement varied widely between provinces, as well as in rural areas. In some areas, women were forced into abortions or the use of contraceptives like IUDs. Some women opted to give birth to “black children”—unregistered, hidden, or adopted out, with many unable to gain the hukou registration that would allow them access to schools, medical services, or good jobs. They slipped through the cracks of a system that could not actually enforce its prerogatives, nor update effectively in response to feedback. 

The violence and coercion needed to carry out the One-child policy might be enough to conclude that it was a failure, at least from a humanitarian point of view. But perhaps things look different from the perspective of the family planning officials in the landlocked central province of Shaanxi or from that of a demographer isolated in his office in Beijing. 

Did they see the number of births go down? Yes. The total fertility rate declined. However, despite the population panic that seized Song Jian and state planners, China’s total fertility rate had already peaked somewhere between ten and fifteen years prior. It’s hard to isolate how much of the decline was wrought by increasing urbanization, rising prosperity, and an enforced end to the communal lifestyles of the work unit and commune. The contributions of the One-child policy to keeping birth rates low were just one factor in a mess of statistical noise.

Despite this, the party faithfully adhered to the One-child policy with only slight modifications for the next thirty-five years. They did so even as China’s fertility rate rapidly declined, dropped below replacement in 1990, and continued falling thereafter—on par with Asian neighbors with no equivalent policy. 

Even with the addition of the millions of children that went unregistered under the One-child policy back to the census, China was left with a massive gender disparity. Sex-selective abortions killed many in a generation of girls.

If this was systems engineering applied to governing a great power, it was a failure. Cybernetic regulation of a system requires accurate sensors. Regulating family planning required a large amount of accurate and comprehensive data. But, as the millions of unregistered births showed, the sensors were broken. 

Likewise, effectors in the system were not reliable. In the case of the “black children,” mothers knew they could escape surveillance by simply giving birth in another jurisdiction, or perhaps paying a bribe. The existence of a child might be noted in the databases of some state organs but not others. Now that the population problem has changed to a lack of births, and the system’s goal to boosting them, the ineffectiveness of the effectors is even more apparent. There are no known control signals to send into the system to coax fertility to move upward.  

Later relaxations to the One-child policy had nothing to do with the fertility rate changes that occurred but were the result of particular groups or regions demanding leniency. But all this only played out in the decades after the proposals of Song and his colleagues had been adopted. And in the meantime, the cyberneticists were expanding their reach ever further.

Systems Engineering and Reform

Soon after his political victory with the One-child policy, Song was called on to apply his systems engineering expertise to the task of reforming state price controls. Even as China’s economy opened up, the prices of over a hundred products and commodities were not allowed to float but had their price set by the state. His team, made up of some of the same cyberneticists from the population scheme, established a model for the gradual relaxation of that control. Prices for more than two hundred items of forty-five categories were fed into a model that 

…consisted of 114 equations, among them 19 equations in time series of dynamics, 43 for state description, and 52 for equilibrium. There are defined 142 structural parameters, including 43 endogenous and 20 exogenous variables and three types of policy control variables: purchasing and retailing prices, rate of wage increases, and taxation. The interdependent relationships among different variables constitute a large-scale dynamic system. Having reached stable operation, the system now is permanently resident in a large computer database and ready for running at any time.

Song Jian called for more. In a landmark 1984 article in People’s Daily, he laid out a vision for systems engineering to take the place of all decision-making processes. In the ideal scenario, the government would create a central authority to manage the entire cybernetic apparatus and train specialized technicians to staff it. The leadership was open to these ideas. Song Jian was steadily promoted. In 1985, he was put in charge of the State Science and Technology Commission and was appointed to the State Council a year later.

The reformist think tanks developed by Politburo Standing Committee members Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang promoted systems engineering, too. Even before Song Jian’s price control modeling, He Weiling, a member of the influential China Rural Development Issues Research Group, started publishing works calling for cybernetic planning as a way to revamp state planning and make it compatible with private markets. He co-authored two books on the topic with Deng Yingtao, son of the reform skeptic Deng Liqun: Economic Cybernetics and The Adjustment and Evolution of Dynamic Economic Systems. He Weiling followed these up with a 1988 work of population alarmism, Population: A Sword Hanging Over China, which advanced more extreme scenarios than those of Song Jian.

Jin Guantao, affiliated with the Journal of Dialectics of Nature and published by the Academy of Sciences, applied systems engineering and computer modeling to Chinese history and was widely read among think tankers. His methods and his conclusion, a conception of China as an “ultrastable system,” spread to the popular press and helped spark a “three theories”—information theory, systems theory, control theory—fever among the Chinese intellectual elite and consumers of middlebrow popular science magazines.

Apart from population planning and price controls, the most consequential early adoption of systems engineering turned out to be within the Public Security Bureau (PSB). Through the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were widespread concerns that urban crime in the wake of Reform and Opening had made the cities less safe. The PSB began to establish what they called “comprehensive management of public security.” This was an idea fortified with ideas from Qian’s own conception of “legal systems engineering”—essentially, applying his ideas on systems engineering to law enforcement. 

Even while the PSB did most communication over the phone, they began experimenting with systems engineering methodology in the 1983 “Strike Hard” campaign. A beat cop in Beijing’s Chaoyang District could feed information about sources of social disorder back to his station, where the chief could organize a preemptive strike. That information—names of offenders still at large, possible accomplices, intelligence on the methods used by criminal elements—could be sent further up the PSB chain of command, then distributed back again.

The mission statement of the 1983 strike hard campaign on crime lays it out like this:

The practical experience of recent years proves that only through organization on multiple fronts, a concerted policy of executing legal measures in a manner that is “hard, fast, and sweeping,” and unforgivingly striking against criminal elements can we deter crime, educate and save young people that have lost their way, and better carry out comprehensive management of public security. […] We must take a sweeping approach to rounding up criminal elements that have not yet made themselves known, as well as criminals that have already offended.

The chaotic Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 helped to spur massive investment and collaboration with multinational firms to equip the fragmented police system with network technology. By 1994, before widespread consumer access to the internet, the PSB started to be knit together through the Golden Shield project, which had access to telecommunications data, customs records, and tax information through rudimentary networked government programs.

The present-day program of advanced information technology, artificial intelligence, multiple surveillance networks, and big data integration has many sources, not all of them indigenous. But the debt owed to Qian Xuesen’s theories of legal systems engineering is acknowledged by thinkers in the field of legal systems engineering that he birthed. 

The Balance of Science and Power

The involvement of China’s cyberneticists in the Great Leap Forward and the One-child policy has tarred their image. At their best, success was unclear, and at worst, the programs were total failures with a massive human cost. The whole logic of cybernetics had been that the system should have been able to update in response to the local information that policies and officials encountered. This simply didn’t happen. For most of Qian’s career in China, circumstances cut his circles off from Western or even Soviet thinkers who might have offered criticism. Qian was already retired by 1991; he died in 2009, still holed up in Beijing and refusing most meetings with interested Westerners.

Political attempts at cybernetic planning—both in China and elsewhere—have never overcome the problem of limited sensors and weak effectors. The ubiquity of mobile internet technology and surveillance, the advances in artificial intelligence, the improvement of bureaucratic information sharing, and the mechanisms to integrate private with government data have not sharpened sensors so much as inundated them. Even with high-quality data and enormous computing power to sort through it all, there remains the problem of figuring out how to find the key signals, and how to do anything with them.

Qian and his successors had been skilled scientists, but poor political operators. They did not understand the degree to which disorder reigned in the rest of the country. Nor did they comprehend the real signals on which officials made decisions. While the researchers worked away in their labs, local officials calibrated their plans by who was winning the factional battles in the central party, which they figured out by soothsayer-like interpretation of slogans, headlines, and turns of phrase from the leadership.

Despite these failures, China’s cyberneticists have managed to retain their influence over questions of social order. Their involvement with legal systems engineering, and thereby how Chinese leaders built the security state over the following decades, has been by far their most lasting legacy on the daily operations of government. These were core functions of the state; officials knew what they had to do and who they trusted to do it. But where the state became a tool to carry out grand experiments in scientific central planning, failure always followed despite all the supposed promises of cybernetics.

The officials greeting the Emperor’s envoy might not have known much about the Viscount himself; he was a mere escort. But traveling alongside him were ceremonial objects—swords, mirrors, and tablets—borne in a palanquin of fragrant Japanese cypress, embodying the soul of the venerated Meiji emperor and the spirit of the sun goddess Amaterasu, mythical progenitor of the imperial line.

After arriving in Seoul, the Viscount transferred his passengers to the head priest of the Chōsen Shrine. Korean youth dressed in white robes bore the palanquin down the curved road from the station to the foot of Mount Nanzan—though they would have pronounced it as Namsan—and then up five flights of stone stairs. Shrine attendants carried the sacred objects into the hall of worship, an austere hut of unvarnished cedar floored with rush mats.

Once installed, Amaterasu and the spirit of the departed Emperor looked out over Keijo from the highest point in the city. Beforehand, the colonial authorities had made sure the shamanistic shrine that formerly sat further up the hill, Guksadang, had been dragged down and deposited at the base of a different mountain.

Some sympathetic or theologically adventurous Shinto scholars had advocated enshrining indigenous deities alongside Amaterasu and the Meiji Emperor, but they were missing the point. Chōsen Shrine cemented Korea into a shared cultural, religious, and political system with its colonial master. The name itself said as much: Chōsen was the Japanese name for Korea—and the one imposed on it under Japanese rule.

The gods of the conquered were no longer worthy of devotion. The colonial lands now belonged to Amaterasu and her children. It was their duty to civilize it.

The Pines of Nanzan

The Japanese found many failings in their Korean subjects. One of the most glaring was the fact that there were no trees.

Japan and Korea had both gone through periods of intense deforestation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As their populations and their cities grew, feudal lords, lumber merchants, and farmers felled more trees for land clearance, building materials, and charcoal. The hills of Japan and Korea had both been stripped bare.

When the Japanese set about trying to figure out why their civilization had fallen behind the West, they learned that this had been an error. Japanese scholars returning from Europe brought back the ideas of silviculturists and foresters like John Evelyn, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and Hans Carl von Carlowitz, who had proposed links between national strength, racial vitality, and the health of forests.

The sustainable management of forests meant resources to build mighty ships and fortresses, but they also meant spiritual sustenance and places of retreat. The preservation of forests and wild spaces, these European silviculturists had argued, was a necessity for civilization.

These modern ideas resonated with a more traditional attitude in both Japanese and Korean culture. Already in the eras of Tokugawa Japan and Joseon Korea, both countries were loath to see their ancient forests disappear. In part, this attitude stemmed from economic concerns: their loss represented a depletion of firewood, lumber, charcoal, and other forest products that spurred growth. But beyond the pain of lost resources, there was an important spiritual dimension to the forests.

The animist traditions of Japanese Shinto had not required shrines to be built at first, because the hidden kami spirits made their homes in trees. When built shrines began to appear, they were set in sacred groves. The trees for their construction had to be felled with consecrated tools. The Japanese were spiritually omnivorous in their veneration of trees, locating kami in zelkova, camphor, cedar, and cypress; the Koreans, meanwhile, were focused on the pine tree.

The poet Jeong Dongju went so far as to identify Koreans as the people of the pine. He describes the tree as a companion race, inhabiting the Korean peninsula alongside its human population. The Koreans and the pine existed symbiotically. The pine was there at each stage of life: pine boughs were hung over a child to protect them in the first days of their life, and offerings of rice cakes steamed on pine needles came on the hundredth day of life. The pine tree provided heat, shelter, and medicine; the bodies of the dead were laid in pine coffins.

As the early modern era dawned in Joseon Korea and Tokugawa Japan, deforestation seemed terminal. But the fragmented political systems of the two countries made it impossible to carry out any universal policy to correct things. Until the injection of dendrological and silvicultural knowledge from the West, there was little awareness of what those policies could even be. There were examples of sustainable forestry, like daisugi, or pollarding—a method of pruning cedars to produce multiple straight, narrow poles from the trunk—and restricting logging, but these were not solutions that could be practiced widely.

With the fall of the Tokugawa and the advent of the Meiji Restoration, the modernized Japanese state was able to act on Western scientific knowledge through the centralization of power. It propagated legal measures to protect the forest across the expanding Japanese Empire. A simple fix, like avoiding insect-prone pine for replanting, could be sent out in clear and coherent policy from the Bureau of Forestry. The state gave Western-trained silviculturists a free hand to experiment with imported forestry techniques. The Bureau of Forestry planted and protected tracts of forest as plantations from which trees were harvested in a sustainable way—thinning the forest, rather than clearcutting.

The Japanese also brought trees back to the city. They built parks on land seized from the feudal lords. At the turn of the twentieth century, middle-class Tokyo families could stroll on scrubby lawns under the trees in Hibiya Park, a short walk from the Imperial Palace. The grove around the Meiji Shrine was planted around this time, creating an island of seemingly primeval forest in the center of the metropolis where the red and black pines conceal the hazy sky above, and the cypresses shut out the sound of the city. Japan brought trees back to the countryside, replanting the hillsides with plantation forests, and enshrining sustainable silviculture in law.

Foreign visitors remarked upon the contrast between the two countries. Homer Hulbert, one of the most prominent foreign-born crusaders against Japanese imperialism, compared the “picturesque coziness of almost all Japanese scenery” with the “barren, treeless waste” of Korea. The British naturalist Isabella Bird compared the “bare and monotonous” landscapes she saw in Korea unfavorably with the wooded valleys of Japan. She noted that “except for the orchards and the spindly pines, there is no wood.”

In Japanese thinking, this state-led greening of its territories was taken as further proof of the superiority of Japanese civilization and the rightfulness of bringing modern ecological thinking to the colonies.

And so Korea got Chōsen Shrine. The project began at this central node, radiating outward from the sacred grove and across the slopes of Nanzan. Bishop, during her visit to Nanzan in 1897, noted that the hill was “mostly naked,” with only a few stands of pines. Photographs of the Chōsen Shrine from the time of Viscount Sonoike’s visit, which took place 28 years later in 1925, show that it was now surrounded by trees.

The dramatic changes around Chōsen were the work of a man named Honda Seiroku, who had received his silvicultural training in Germany. Apart from writing the foundational texts of Japanese silviculture, he had designed the grove around the Meiji Shrine and co-designed Hibiya Park, the first modern park in Tokyo. The Japanese government frequently deployed him abroad to plan projects in imperial territories like Qingdao and Taipei. After surveying the Nanzan site in 1916, he came up with a bold plan for a forest park to blanket its slopes. Like the forest around the Meiji Shrine, he intended for the groves on Nanzan to grow and change over the centuries with minimal intervention.

One of the keys to this plan was crowding out the pines. They wouldn’t be cleared out completely, but any trees that survived insect infestation would be choked out by acacia. This was perhaps as much an affront to the Koreans as the replacement of the shamanistic shrine with Chōsen Shrine itself.

The vision of Honda and the Japanese silviculturists was carried by colonial officials across the peninsula. They organized tree-planting drives on hillsides around the country, cracked down on slash-and-burn agriculture, and conserved forests for sustainable harvest.

The hillsides turned green again, but it wouldn’t last long. The financial crisis of 1927 led to a long depression. Japan threw its military into Manchuria and then deep into Northern China. Reforestation continued into the 1940s, but colonial administrators shifted from sustainability to production. The imperial war machine sucked up all the timber, charcoal, and pulp that it could take. Japanese timber firms were happy to oblige. Regular citizens went out and collected what was left over, taking anything off the land that would burn and then planting millet or sweet potatoes in its place.

It was the end of Japan’s greening project, which remained effectively suspended for the rest of the Empire’s life. The morning after the Shōwa Emperor spoke to the nation to announce the termination of the war, officials at Chōsen Shrine held a deconsecration ceremony. The sacred objects that Viscount Sonoike Saneyasu had carried to Keijo in 1925 were carried by plane back to Japan. The final act of the local Japanese officials before their repatriation was to torch the buildings.

The sacred sites that the Japanese left behind on Nanzan were torn down and replaced with nationalist monuments. One of the first acts of the newly-liberated Korea was to rip the Japanese acacia trees out of the ground, ridding itself of the last roots of the foreign empire.

Revolution From the Wilderness

Like the Japanese colonialists, Kim Il-sung built his legitimacy on the trees of the Korean landscape. But unlike those who planted alien forests, the founder of the North Korean state presented himself as the son of the last forested borderland regions.

Kim Il-sung’s familial roots are hard to track. In the version of his biography promulgated by North Korea, Kim and his descendants are associated with Mount Paektu, the highest point in the volcanic mountain ranges on the border of Korea and Manchuria. Paektu is a place of not only historic, but spiritual value for both Koreans and Manchus. Even in state propaganda, the mythology of the Kim dynasty is inseparable from the animist traditions of Korea and incorporates much of this pre-existing ethos. In Korean mythology, Paektu was also the birthplace of Dangun, the divine founder of the first kingdom in Korea, called Gojoseon. Today, North Korea claims that Dangun’s tomb lies in Pyongyang.

According to the same sources, Kim Il-sung himself was eight years old when his family took to the hills along the Manchurian border to fight a war of resistance against the Japanese Empire. Before he was out of his teens, he was spreading political awareness as part of Marxist youth groups. When Japanese troops invaded Manchuria, he joined up with the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army.

The stories told about this era always identify Kim with the land, the forests, and the pine trees. In his sylvan redoubt atop the Manchurian borderlands, Kim was protected by the trees. He called the forests of Mount Paektu his natural fortress. If the partisans rode into the forest, the Japanese and their collaborators could not strike them. North Korea claims that his son, Kim Jong-il, was born on Paektu during the war. Western sources claim he was born in Soviet territory, near the Chinese border.

Even here, Kim could see the work of the Japanese. “The Japanese imperialist villains have stretched their grim predatory hands as far as the remote mountain villages here,” Kim Il-sung warned in a speech in 1937 to the people of Pochonbo, a county hundreds of miles north of the capital, “plundering all our precious forest resources.”

Though it used utilitarian language to appeal to the pragmatism of the common man, Kim’s speech to save the trees also played on something deeper and animistic in the culture he had set out to save. Kim was determined to build a new independent Korea, and that meant embodying its ancient traditions.

In Kim’s own accounts, the pine was what kept the resistance going. His memoirs are replete with imagery invoking the symbiosis of the Korean people and the pine. In With the Century, Kim recounted falling ill at a guerrilla base in Jilin, ending up in the care of a devoted partisan fighter and seamstress named Han Song-hui. Han nursed Kim back to health with pine-nut porridge. When food ran out on a later expedition, Kim told his men to eat pine bark boiled with ​​oak ash. It was with pine boughs that the fighters camouflaged their hideouts and concealed the bodies of dead comrades that they did not have time to bury. Hideouts festooned with pine arches and needle-branch camouflage welcomed the fighters back from battles.

In the memoir, Kim recalls his comrades telling him that the Japanese were circulating tall tales about him—a man fighting from Mount Paektu, surviving on pine needles, and able to turn pine cones into bullets with a touch of his index finger. The pine trees themselves protected Kim Il-sung so that he could save them in turn—along with all of Korea.

The mythology was combined with a utilitarian outlook. As early as the 1930s, Kim Il-sung presented his own basic thinking on forestry. He advised the residents of the liberated zones of Manchuria to be cautious in taking lumber and to be good stewards of the forest. Less straightforwardly than von Carlowitz or Honda, and perhaps borrowing from Soviet ecology, he came to some of the same conclusions: a nation’s strength is found in its trees. His promised liberation of the peninsula would be rooted in saving the pines that gave Korea material bounty and spiritual strength.

Shortly after the Japanese retreated and the Soviet Union put Kim in charge of a provisional government in the north, he addressed tree planters on Munsu Hill—likely, ones who had been planting for the Japanese just years before: “The sight of these naked mountains rends my heart.”

The Korean War intervened before Kim could carry out his nascent forestry policy. Aerial bombardment flattened the country. Scorched-earth policies left new scars on the landscape. By the time Kim had won full power over his half of the divided peninsula, things were worse than they had ever been before. He was faced with ecological devastation on a massive scale.

Through the 1950s, as the country recovered from the Korean War, forestry was folded into the Stalinist mode of autarkic development that Kim called Juche. This is how he described it in 1955: “We are not engaged in any other country’s revolution, but precisely in the Korean revolution.”

Forestry, like all aspects of the economy, had to be turned to a totalizing project of self-reliance. Kim laid out his “great project for transforming nature” in a 1961 speech, “On Planting Orchards Through an All-People Movement.”

The first goal was to reduce the pressure on the limited amount of arable land. Too many people relied on subsistence agriculture for their calories. The solution was three-fold: taking people off the land through urbanization and industrialization, concentrating those who remained on collective farms, and making agriculture more efficient through irrigation, fertilization, and mechanization.

Making limited arable land more productive was a hedge against farmers reclaiming hillsides—cutting down the trees to grow grain or sweet potatoes. Even though only 20 percent of arable land was flat, Kim argued that it was better, in the long run, to protect existing farmland from erosion than attempt to terrace steep hillsides.

Central authorities formed a Forestry Administration to replace the colonial organ. Any timber taken from the national forests, Kim ordered, had to be done at the direction of the Forestry Administration and then replanted.

With the shift to fossil fuels, North Korea did not need as much wood as Joseon or colonial Korea once did, so Kim called for a shift in replanting. There was less of a need for plantation forests for lumber. Instead of attempting to green the hillsides with only oak, ash, or elm, which grew slowly, or with pine or fir, which were susceptible to caterpillars, the best solution was fast-growing poplar, or fruit and oil trees like peach and walnut. Fruit and oil trees could directly feed the growing population or produce a commodity to trade to the Soviet Union for grain. Kim suggested, too, that tending the orchards could be a task given to the many disabled veterans.

Kim Il-sung’s policies were recognizably environmentalist. But this was not the environmentalism of global consciousness and multilateral collaboration. It required sacrifices in the short term, but they were acceptable because of the country’s particular eco-theology. The country was not engaged in any other country’s environmentalism, but precisely in Korean environmentalism. North Korea’s people did not restore the forests to meet global metrics, but to complete the mission of national liberation. Juche ideology demanded environmentalism in one country.

Like the Japanese project on the peninsula, Kim Il-sung’s legitimacy came from syncretically applying concepts from both animist mythology and the new modes of scientific and economic thinking. Kim’s pine-centric mythology of his own revolutionary activities was combined with a “man-centered” philosophy that conceived of the natural world as something that could only be shaped by humanity, for their own material benefit.

“Man is the master of everything,” he wrote. “It means he is the master of nature and society and of his own destiny.” This was the basis of Juche and of Kim Il-sung’s environmentalism in one country.

This was a successful model. In the years after the war, North Korean industrial development outpaced its neighbors’ and food production increased—but this time, the hillsides turned green again.

The Arduous March

As the elder Kim was shuffled out of power by his son and heir, Kim Jong-il, the ecological project went off the rails. Tree planting had formerly met or exceeded planned goals, but from 1979 to 1987 the country met only 72 percent of its reforestation goal. Environmental degradation reached an unprecedented scale. The leadership relaxed rules on logging and land clearance. Farmers began to terrace the hillsides to grow on again.

Kim Jong-il believed that North Korean economic troubles came down to bottlenecks in the planned economy that could be blown out by aggressive mobilization and maximizing production in connected sectors of the economy. If there was a problem moving food around, there would be a campaign to send manpower to logistics operations, as well as an order to crank up agricultural production. This new production and development idea was based on abandoning long-term strategy for short-term goals. If the quota for grain production went up and a hillside could be terraced without sanction, there was no reason to preserve the pines.

The collapse of the Soviet Union made everything far worse. North Korea had achieved agricultural self-sufficiency in terms of output, but not in terms of inputs. Fertilizer and agricultural chemical imports from the Soviets were key to squeezing the most out of limited arable land. Those inputs became crucial to hitting Kim Jong-il’s production targets. The light industry that Kim Jong-il prioritized was energy-intensive, especially when it was in constant production overdrive, so Soviet energy imports had taken the strain off hydroelectric and coal-powered plants.

Timber production increased to meet energy needs and more hillsides were cleared. Deep in debt after failing to find trade deals with OECD countries, smuggling wood across the border into China became, like arms deals with Iran, a source of hard currency.

The Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) recognized the danger. The WPK introduced forest protection legislation in 1992 and ran a half-hearted publicity campaign. But there wasn’t much that could be done beyond that. The economy had been irrevocably damaged by Kim Jong-il running it to redline with no Soviet oil to grease the gears.

The situation worsened. Drought put more pressure on agriculture; the remaining hillsides were cleared. Power plants were knocked out by flash flooding, so more firewood was harvested. Official numbers for famine deaths disagree with those of outside observers, but they both paint a picture of widespread disaster.

The Arduous March—the name given to this disaster—did not discourage North Korea’s leadership from the Juche mode of environmentalism. It strengthened their resolve.

When Kim Jong-un took power in 2012, he faced an ecological disaster on a scale even larger than either that faced by Japanese colonial administrators at the turn of the previous century, or that faced by his grandfather at the close of the Korean War. Invoking the past, he chose to build his legitimacy on the forests.

He made sure that the 1992 Forest Law was amended and enforced; in response, bureaucrats formulated ten-year plans for reforestation and sloping land management. State media tagged along on Kim Jong-un’s visits to a new central nursery that now sits at the center of a national network of facilities for standardized and industrialized production of seedlings. He fostered a new generation of forestry bureaucrats and advisors that drew support from the management elite that rose after the slackening of control over the economy during the Arduous March. Central authorities established a department for forest science at Kim Il-sung University to train the next generation of silviculturists.

Kim Il-sung’s Juche-branded environmentalism was reborn for a new century. In a 2015 speech to the WPK and military leaders, Kim Jong-un directly referenced his grandfather’s nationalist ecology project and called for the country to get back on course. “Since the days of the Arduous March,” he said, trees had been felled for “obtaining cereals and firewood” without proper guidance from officials. Those same officials were rebuilding from flooding while not taking care to “eliminate the cause of the flood damage by planting large numbers of trees on the mountains.”

The chaos unleashed by myopic production targets was done, as was the rebuilding from the Arduous March. The hillsides could turn green again. These efforts have been effective. Satellite images showed forest cover slowly increasing.

Although North Korea is a signatory to a wide range of international conventions on the environment, much of the cooperation is symbolic or opportunistic, since the country has already been forced out of most international systems of finance and trade.

Its environmentalism also has very different assumptions. The Western-led approach of multilateral cooperation to achieve global environmental governance relies on the assumption that global humanity can unite to fight a planetary threat. The half-century since the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm seems to show that this is not true, or at least that unipolar liberal globalization cannot be the unifying force. The oceans are still rising.

The North Korean model has a far narrower goal: the biological survival of Korea and the continued sovereignty of its socialist state. North Korea’s borrowing of Stalinist autarky and modern Chinese technocratic thinking provides the necessary governance software to conduct its modern national ecology program. Its strategy has grown out of isolationist conditions. Its government knows that it has very little clout over international events; therefore, it refuses to be dependent on their outcomes. If the liberal, multilateral model fails more globally, it may be better prepared psychologically and politically for a world of more extreme ecological crises.

The current food price crisis is an example of this forced preparation: while the rest of the world grapples with the soaring cost of grain, petroleum, and fertilizer, prices for these things remain somewhat stable in North Korea, where the connection between the country and global commodity markets has been severed. Securing a domestic supply of food, fertilizer, and fuel is directly connected to the maintenance of an autarkic ecological program. The Kim Jong-il years are a testament to what happens when the balance is lost.

Strict adherence to a national scope for ecological governance also means having a worldview that justifies and privileges that scope. North Korea’s use of an alternative eco-theology—one grounded in indigenous Korean traditions—serves this role in its broader ideology. Environmental ideology could not be successfully projected from Mount Nanzan or forestry bureaus in Tokyo. Korea resisted State Shinto even as that system greened its forests with foreign trees. Its ecological impulse was part of a larger ideology of national liberation: only the pine would do.

State media lectures on the spirit of the pine show how North Korea’s eco-theology is meant to be understood. Many environmental ideologies that draw on indigeneity, such as adherents of India’s communalist Eco-Swaraj philosophy or Mexico’s Futuros Indígenas movement, often frame themselves in opposition to industrial modernity. North Korea, meanwhile, has achieved a relatively stable ideological synthesis drawing on both elements.

Like all mythologies, environmentalism in the service of Juche helps to explain what cannot be easily explained—why the trees have to be saved, why the hillsides can’t be clearcut, and why there will sometimes be hungry years. This is what makes people care about planting trees. This is what makes its leaders willing to promise brutal punishments to farmers who strip the hillsides.

Western institutional environmentalism has generally demanded cooperation on the basis of shared incentives for the world at large. But the effects of climate and ecological crises are localized and uneven. Brazil does not have the same incentives as Canada or India when it comes to, say, governing the Amazon. If the ideological priors behind global cooperation falter, there is little reason for these countries to implement the same policies. What makes the North Korean approach distinct is that its environmentalism is endogenous—internal to its ruling ideology.

If ecological crisis events like rising temperatures, pandemics, and resource depletion continue, states around the world will face extreme pressure to abandon the agreements of our more stable era. Without an operative ideology to coordinate their societies, this is a recipe for opportunism and short-termist exploitation. Ecological programs, conversely, are intergenerational in scope. They require ruling elites that are willing to think on these terms and bear the costs in the meantime, which means that such commitments must come from within the worldview and beliefs of a local elite culture.

Under these assumptions, a world undergoing climate change and environmental disasters is one in which vastly different ecological values—or even different understandings of just what the ecological crisis is—compete with each other for power and resources. Instead of unity in the face of crisis, such pressures will create competing ideologies, made for countries with competing goals.

North Korea’s strategy has endured several crises and dynastic changes already. It has proven its resiliency, at least so far. In a world where other powers decide to limit the scope of their ecological goals or prioritize adaptation over global collaboration, its model of environmentalism in one country may end up the first of many.

These frontiers are run on commodities that no honest man should touch. Once, it was opium. The Kuomintang and the CIA fought running battles with the Shan United Revolutionary Army and the Royal Lao Army to control the trade. Methamphetamine came next. The drugs travel down trails that no map shows, joined by gems, furs, weapons, and women and children in bondage.

These frontiers are up for grabs. Point at any spot on the map. Perhaps you end up right near the border of the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Region: that tract of jungle has belonged, nominally, to Ming loyalists led by Muslim generals, to the British, to the Federated Shan States, to defeated Kuomintang generals on the run, to the Communist Party of Burma, to the Myanmar Nationalities Democratic Alliance Army, and to the Tatmadaw.

Or maybe you run your finger down the Mekong. That port there, on the Laos side—whatever the lines on the map say, they don’t really describe it. If it is really in the control of the Lao army, then what faction within it? Which Shan State militia boss on the Myanmar side has to assent to the arrangement? Which local gangsters protect the nearby Chinese rubber plantation?

This frontier is built for men like Zhao Wei.

In the Golden Triangle, everyone knows his name. The Chinese expatriate is a man that can tolerate risk. He goes where few have gone before. Apart from retreating Kuomintang troops, disaffected Red Guards joining Chinese militias in Kokang, and Yunnan traders, not many pioneers went to the Southeast Asian highlands. Men like Zhao Wei could find frontiers within their own country. In an age of political stability, economic recalibration, and involution, the internal frontiers are disappearing. The borderland beckons Zhao Wei.

We won’t meet him in person. He was never a man that sought fame or publicity. The threats of powerful rivals and sanctions levied by the United States Department of the Treasury have made him even more elusive.

He is a wealthy man but it is hard to know how he made his fortune. He has a knack for being in places where quick money can be made without a paper trail: Special Economic Zones carved out of South China after Reform and Opening Up, the triad-controlled underground Macau underworld, and the Myanmar borderlands. His latest venture is running casinos and hotels in a concession in Laos, leased for 99 years from local authorities in 2007.

Unless you are a Lao government official with land to sell, it is hard to get an audience with Zhao Wei. But we glimpse him occasionally in promotional materials for his casinos and hotels in Laos: a tall man, wiry and trim, with a face that looks like it was carved by chainsaw from Manchurian pine.

What we know of his biography begins like this: Zhao Wei is a Han Chinese man from Jiamusi in Heilongjiang. That is not a minor detail. That is proof that the frontier is in his blood. The hint of Shandong in his accent is also proof. Like most Han Chinese from the areas north of Vladivostok, he is the descendant of those tens of millions of impoverished coastal farmers that made their way beyond the Great Wall before and after the fall of the last imperial dynasty in 1911. The Manchu rulers of the Qing ended their ban on Han settlement in the north as a way to deter the Russians, already flooding into Siberia, from grabbing more territory than they had already. In the end, the Japanese got it and they sent their own waves of settlers and soldiers to pacify the frontier.

There were shootouts there, too. Manchuria was up for grabs. The economy of Manchuria ran on commodities men were willing to die for. We could speculate that perhaps Zhao Wei’s ancestors once moved heroin for the Kwantung Army, just as we could speculate that Zhao Wei has himself moved narcotics through his casinos—the United States Treasury Department alleges exactly this. Perhaps, like Zhao Wei himself, they were also patriots. Whether that meant riding with the bandits or gouging Japanese fur merchants on plague-infected marmots, we can only guess.

Zhao Wei was the fifth of nine children. His family was not rich. There are rumors that he suffered under the Cultural Revolution, but details are hard to come by. His father died young. He dropped out of elementary school and became an itinerant hustler of traditional medicine, before throwing in with a timber speculator.

The story continues all over China, which was then in the grips of reform. Zhao appeared in Guangdong in the 1980s, then in Macau in the 1990s. This is where the rumors of links with 14K triad boss Wan Kuok-koi come from. When the Chinese state began cleaning up shop in their repatriated Special Administrative Region—locking up men like Wan Kuok-koi—Zhao went to Mong La to run gaming operations under the watchful eye of armed ethnic militias.

His patriotism guided him in those foreign lands. At least, that’s part of the legend. Drifting in the borderlands, he claims that he was guided by the example of Wen Tianxiang, the Song Dynasty official executed by Mongol invaders for his unwillingness to cooperate with their rule.

The story of the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone is less murky than the legend of Zhao Wei. Corporate registration documents, reports in Lao state media, exposés from NGOs, and Treasury Department sanctions spell out that story for anyone willing to do the research.

The Golden Triangle SEZ occupies forty square miles on the Laos side of the Mekong border with Myanmar. Zhao Wei’s Hong Kong-registered Dok Ngiew Kham Group has 85 years left on its lease from the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.

The name and location suggest a Lao experiment in marketization and attracting foreign direct investment—perhaps something like Shenzhen in the 1980s, or the Kaesong Industrial Region in North Korea. But this is not the equivalent of familiar state-backed investment zones. The Golden Triangle is only nominally under the control of local authorities. The Chinese enclave is closer in spirit to the international zones of the past: the artificial island that the Dutch traded from in the Nagasaki harbor in the Edo period, or the International Zone in Tangier.

The main economic drivers of the Golden Triangle SEZ are gambling, hospitality, and vice. Zhao Wei builds hotels and casinos and supplies the things that visitors to hotels and casinos might desire. There are prostitutes and a go-kart track.

This region is isolated from the Laotian capital of Vientiane. Nor does Laos supply its material existence. Instead, the SEZ is hooked into the Thai power grid and Chinese telecommunications. The only reliable way to get there from the capital is a flight into Ban Huay Xai Airport, forty miles south of the SEZ. This will soon be supplanted by a Dok Ngiew Kham Group-administered airport, which has been completed but is not yet operating. A port is being constructed upstream that will make it even easier to bring in workers and goods from outside. Before the border controls required by a global pandemic, most guests came south from Yunnan or more often across the Mekong from Thailand.

When the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions on Zhao Wei, its officials accused him of running a transnational criminal organization with the assistance of the United Wa State Army and other Myanmar ethnic militias. They charged Zhao Wei with using the SEZ as a base for trafficking in human beings, narcotics, and endangered species.

Whatever merit the Treasury Department sanctions have, they verify that Zhao Wei is not a pushover. Pushovers cannot do business on the frontier.

In 2011, a dispute between Zhao Wei and a Shan State militia boss named Naw Kham resulted in a bloodbath on the Mekong. On top of charging taxes on boats moving up and down the river, Naw Kham was kidnapping guests of the Golden Triangle SEZ and ransoming them. When Zhao Wei refused to pay up, 13 crew and passengers on two cargo ships bound for the Golden Triangle SEZ were executed and dumped in the river. Their cargoes of apples, garlic, and nearly a million tablets of methamphetamine were left untouched.

As Naw Kham said before getting a fatal, intravenous dose of sodium thiopental at a Ministry of Public Security facility in Kunming: “The Golden Triangle turns good men bad.”

Zhao Wei has powerful friends with considerable firepower. That doesn’t end with his alleged relations with heavily-armed Myanmar ethnic militias. It was the Chinese armed forces that closed in on Naw Kham and shot it out with his men, although they eventually served him up to Lao police to avoid accusations of violating the sovereignty of bordering countries. In the end, the Golden Triangle SEZ’s ambiguous sovereignty on the frontier is only tenable because of state protection.

Zhao Wei is not an official agent of the state. It would be a mistake to take praise for the Belt and Road Initiative and his general Chinese patriotism as a sign of some relationship to upper echelons of power. He has run afoul of the state several times, most recently in Myanmar, when Chinese authorities clamped down on traffic to cross-border casinos.

But it is in the interests of both the Chinese and Laotian states to support men like Zhao Wei. There is no neocolonial project in Southeast Asia; there are few high-level geostrategic goals being accomplished by building casinos in Laos. These states need their frontiers opened for other reasons. And they need men like Zhao Wei because he is capable of things that their agents are not.

The work being done by Zhao Wei on the Mekong has been summed up in a classical phrase: “opening up territory by cultivating the wasteland.”

In imperial China, cultivating the wasteland was the main occupation of troops at distant garrisons. Grazing animals and maintaining crops allowed the garrisons to be self-sufficient. Opening up territory and holding onto it was important to the empire; finding a place to send landless men was equally important.

In the nineteenth century, this is what the Qing dynasty hoped to accomplish by sending tens of millions of peasants to Manchuria. Geostrategic goals relating to foreign powers were secondary; this was a domestic mission. The Qing still gave up Outer Manchuria to Russia in the Treaty of Peking in 1860. Nor was Chinese presence any deterrent to Japanese invasion.

After 1949, dealing with landless men was the reason for all the many agricultural collectivization schemes of modern China, right up through the Great Leap Forward. If there was surplus manpower after collectivization, it was thrown at industrial mobilization, or monumental projects, like the Sanmenxia Dam. Some people did cultivate wastelands in a more literal sense: hundreds of thousands of workers were sent to Qinghai and Xinjiang in the 1950s and 1960s. Whether imperial, nationalist, or communist, the Chinese state relied on the efforts of millions of frontiersmen to accomplish the internal domestication that the central power could not.

After Reform and Opening Up, the wasteland to be cultivated was urban China. It was rural residents that drove reform in the 1970s and 1980s. The cities were conservative; the countryside was experimental. Since they were so closely linked to the command economy and contemporary politics, urban work units were not under any pressure to experiment with marketization.

In rural areas, as long as quotas were met, local cadres were happy to allow the contradictions of aggressive collectivization to be resolved through experimentation. Peasants secretly divided up land again, established unsanctioned markets, and local party bosses allowed thriving commune and brigade enterprises to engage in light industry. When marketization was made official policy, it was far easier for the peasant entrepreneur to make a go of it in the city. They were less likely rooted to a work unit and already had a few years of experience in the unsanctioned market economy.

As tens of millions of people had flooded Manchuria a century before, waves of internal migrants now arrived in the cities. Zhao Wei was one of them. He claims to have been in Guangdong by 1982.

Today, conditions have changed yet again. Clean-up campaigns and stratospheric housing prices dissuade potential migrants to the city. The competition is now not even necessarily to succeed but to maintain a foothold in the urban cores at all.

This is a problem because China needs frontiers. The floating population created by marketization between the 1970s and 2000s is being called back from the deltas by state policy, but some can never go home again. They need places to go and it is better if they do not disrupt the return of the party-state. The cultural and economic energy unleashed by reform has not dissipated. It needs places to be safely burned off. All the better if it can expand state wealth and power. The desire for wealth and adventure still burns in the hearts of millions and it must be satisfied before it is turned against the state.

State planners have tried to provide new frontiers. Apart from softly propagandizing a return to the countryside, they have also built places like Zhengzhou’s Zhengdong New Area and the cities of the Bohai Economic Rim. Those schemes are limited. The Chinese state has less tolerance for the type of chaotic energy that drove it since 1949. Xi Jinping’s China is not revolutionary. The reforms carried out now are to consolidate wealth and move power back to the center. The great frontier of corruption has been closed—at least, internally.

The Belt and Road Initiative and investment by policy banks is one way that the party-state can support foreign frontiers instead. The direction is important: the initiatives support the entrepreneurs.

China needs Zhao Wei because it needs frontiers, but cannot directly govern them. Zhao Wei provides leadership, and his willingness to operate in both the legal and criminal spheres is an asset for everyone involved. Although it was not planned by the state, his Golden Triangle SEZ thrives because of state support that followed it. Zhao Wei benefited from state security forces operating on the Mekong, and also from expanded rail and road links, but he took the jump without them. That is not an unusual arrangement. There is a collaborative process between the state and frontiersmen like Zhao.

Zhao Wei is capable of things that the Chinese state or state-owned enterprises are not. The underdeveloped zones of Southeast Asia are not easy places for legitimate parties to do business. There is an example of this in Cambodia, where one of the point men for development was a reformed Wan Kuok-koi. The reality in the top halves of Myanmar and Laos is that ethnic militias have immense power in places the national state and military do not. The Chinese state has sometimes put itself in the position of cutting deals with national governments and warlords fighting them, but that risks legitimate hands getting dirty. China needs Zhao Wei because it needs go-betweens.

In Myanmar, Zhao Wei worked with ethnic Chinese leaders who govern areas that have often slipped beyond the control of the military government. He was reportedly close with Pheung Kya-shin, whose Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army has in turn been at war with the Myanmar government since 2009. The leaders of these territories must be courted to ensure that Chinese borders remain secure, but it can’t always be done openly.

The power of the warlords and of legitimate but corrupt regional leaders also means that sovereignty is fuzzy. The governments of Myanmar and Laos claim to control all of the territory in which Zhao Wei has operated over the past two decades. The reality on the ground suggests otherwise. He does business at the pleasure of ethnic militias and regional officials commanding de facto fiefdoms.

The businessman and the cultural or religious entrepreneur are usually the best types to open frontiers. They are less dogmatic and more pliable. The energies of young men can be burned up expanding the frontier by force, but it is better to send peaceful pioneers. Unarmed bachelors hold frontiers.

Zhao Wei’s project is not the first of this type of special economic zone in Laos, but it seems like it might be the most permanent Chinese-led project.

It follows the Savan-Seno Special Economic Zone, located in the city of Savannakhet and dominated by Thai investment. Another predecessor was the Boten Special Economic Zone, on the border with China’s Xishuanbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture. The reasons that Laos has allowed these projects are simple: they benefit the state. Laos is poor and corrupt. In the short term, the leasing of land to projects like the Golden Triangle SEZ provides a bump to state revenue.

What makes this an attractive frontier is that local officials in Laos have more tolerance for chaos than their Chinese counterparts. They have experience managing zones of ambiguous sovereignty. They are used to dealing with men like Zhao Wei. Benefits flow to officials and their patrons. Laotian workers are cut out of the deal. The lack of market reform or economic modernization in Laos means that there is no large floating population, as there was in China in the 1980s. Rather than turning up at remote locations, like the Golden Triangle SEZ or Boten SEZ, the limited flow of migrant labor is mostly to urban centers or west to Thailand. Another way to say this is that China is in the market for frontiers and Laos has a surplus, combined with a shortage in people to cultivate them.

The Golden Triangle SEZ looks a bit like previous efforts, but its location makes it unique: it is far enough away from the border to avoid direct intervention from China, as happened in Boten, but close enough to attract cross-border migrant workers—and it sits just across the border from Myanmar’s Shan State, which has become even more lawless in the time since the Golden Triangle SEZ was founded.

If the Treasury Department and the reports of NGOs are to be believed, Zhao Wei purchased the Golden Triangle SEZ concession as a fur-trading post, processing tiger pelts and other animal products taken out of Myanmar. This makes for interesting comparisons between the SEZ and the eighteenth-century Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts in old Rupert’s Land—a vast territory that once took up about half of what is now Canada.

Like the old HBC merchants, Zhao Wei tapped state and corporate power to expand into zones of fuzzy sovereignty, put down a challenge from indigenous opponents, and then set about bringing in the Chinese equivalent of coureurs de bois. In his case, the settlers were young men from southwestern Hunan that had worked in construction and timber in Laos and Myanmar since the 1990s, as well as other workers willing to endure frontier conditions. Eventually, some of the frontiersmen settled down, usually married local women, and started running trading businesses dealing in teak and rubber, operating guest houses, or cultivating nearby land as smallholders.

Frontiers are necessary now for the same reason they were necessary both in the dying days of the Qing and at the height of the British Empire: they soak up men with nothing else to do.

Estimates of Chinese residents in Laos vary, but the number is likely over 300,000, most of them recent arrivals. As early as 2015, international reports focused on the dangers of Chinese migration to Laos. There are no available numbers for Chinese residents in Bokeo Province, Ton Pheung district, or the Golden Triangle SEZ itself. The Bokeo Provincial Statistics Center has a figure of 15,434 people living within the SEZ. If we remove Thai, Laotian, and other nationals living there from the figure, it might approach a rational increase from a 2011 estimate of ten thousand.

It is marriage to local women that frequently ties men to Bokeo. The stories of intermarriage between Laotian women and Chinese workers, like the story of Zhao Wei himself, are framed in radically different ways in the international and Chinese press: Radio Free Asia routinely reports on brides being kidnapped back to China, while Chinese state media writes about romances blooming.

The attraction of marrying Laotian women has become a major feature of popular writing on the Chinese experience in Laos. The promise of taking home a wife for the dowry price of approximately $3000 is appealing in a country with thirty million bachelors. Anecdotally, most marriages are registered with the Laotian government. The government maintains a registration of marriages to foreigners, but does not provide statistics. Notably, the legal age for women to be married in China is 20; in Laos, 32.7% of married women aged 20-24 were wed before the age of 18, 7.1% before the age of 15.

One of the men that I found through a message board for “Laos hands” told me that most long-term Chinese residents in the area around the Golden Triangle SEZ were from Hunan, as well. If they didn’t work on the casino project, they ran guest houses or shops to the south and north. He was from Hunan, too, and had come down to work for a construction company. He had worked in Foshan until 2008. After a divorce, he went back to Hunan. He had been in Laos since 2010—first in Botan, on the border, then in Vientiane, then Huay Xai, south of the SEZ. He still picked up jobs as an electrician, but most of his income came from running a company that rented mini-buses. A short video on his WeChat Moments showed him delivering a second-hand car to his second wife’s village.

In the two years since the pandemic began and border controls were introduced, workers continued entering Laos illegally. Signs point to restrictions on entry and exit being lifted soon. The workers will return. For now, the Chinese labor pool is still deep enough to send out hungry young people to sustain projects in the borderlands. When competition in city and suburb seems stacked against them, there are young people that will choose the frontier.

If it is successful, places like the Golden Triangle SEZ might become demographically self-sufficient and civilized enough to attract men and women with a lesser pioneer spirit. If the Golden Triangle SEZ continues to grow at the same rate, it will be larger and more populous than any center outside of Vientiane itself.

Zhao Wei will probably not live long enough to see any of his projects reach their full potential. True pioneers search irrationally for new frontiers. He is already searching again. His next venture is reported to be a golf course near the Plain of Jars, and he has also looked at land along the Laos-Vietnamese border, which sits on a key bend in the Sepon River, crucial to trade between the two countries.

In most cases, it is the state that closes the frontier when the power of the pioneers it has supported becomes stable. It is hard to imagine that it will be the Chinese state doing that directly, so it can only be the Laotian state that makes the official move—whatever pressure occurs behind the scenes. That is too far in the future to speculate about. It was wise of Zhao Wei to sign a 99-year lease. For a little while longer, the emperor remains far, far away.

Jiao was far from that decade’s only political martyr. Plenty of party cadres died with their boots on during the Great Leap Forward and its aftermath. But Jiao Yulu was celebrated for attributes beyond idealistic commitment to the country: he was a pragmatist and a risk-taker, and he could operate independently of party bosses. He implemented an innovative paulownia tree-planting campaign to fight desertification that he arrived at through on-the-ground experience and by tapping local expertise, not from a command on high. This made him a model party member for Xi to memorialize during the Reform and Opening Up era, when individual politicians and bureaucrats were empowered to run local authorities as they saw fit.

The most significant reform carried out in China after 1978 was one of systematic decentralization. Politics at the top could grind to a halt thanks to factional and ideological battles. But, down below, local leaders had the authority and resources to make their own decisions. Neither a clear constitutional framework, nor an unambiguous basic law governed Deng Xiaoping’s experiment. Instead, he drew on a principle first established by Mao during the early years of the People’s Republic of China:

Our territory is so vast, our population is so large and the conditions are so complex that it is far better to have the initiative come from both the central and the local authorities than from one source alone.

The Two Initiatives

When Mao and the Communists took power in 1949, the first requirement had been unification. The previous century had seen various powers struggling to do the same. The ailing Qing dynasty had struggled with projecting imperial power out to the periphery. The nationalist prophet Sun Yat-sen and his revolutionaries managed to topple the old regime but found themselves outfoxed by the warlord Yuan Shikai and his Beiyang government, China’s first republican regime. General Chiang Kai-shek, Sun’s successor, ultimately pushed aside the Beiyang government but found himself contesting territory with warlords, Communists, and Japanese invaders.

By the time that Mao and the Communists themselves defeated the Nationalists, they had seen multiple successive regimes try and fail to unify China’s expansive territories. In order to knit together a country, the Chairman and his lieutenants placed the new People’s Republic of China under six administrative regions, each closely overseen by the central government. Their aggressive centralization of power allowed them to rapidly carry out policies like land reform.

But by the middle of the 1950s, the limits of this approach were obvious. The power of the administrative regions could threaten the center. These massive regions required competent leadership. Looking at the names of their leaders—men like Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao, Peng Dehuai, Gao Gang, Rao Shushi, and Deng Xiaoping—we see all of Mao’s rivals and potential successors. Allowing those men to build a power base was risky. By 1954, both Gao Gang and Rao Shushi were purged. Gao killed himself that same year, and Rao died in prison in 1975.

The potential for these regions to become bases for opposition was not their only problem. Running policy through six administrative regions was just not efficient. A single policy from the top would need implementation by administrative heads that were overseeing sometimes vastly different territories. What worked in tropical Hainan or fertile Jiangsu could not always be applied in landlocked Qinghai and or arid Shanxi. Given their immense size, conditions between localities could differ greatly, even within a single administrative region.

Apart from climate, there were social cleavages between and within administrative regions. The Northeast of China, for example, might appear fairly demographically homogeneous, but its population included groups as different as the sizable urban proletariat and the herders living on the Soviet border, dozens of distinct ethnic groups, adherents of multiple religions, and speakers of many languages. The party might resort to violent excesses in pursuit of goals like land reform, but relying solely on sheer brute force was not feasible in the long term.

In response, Mao became increasingly critical of the centralized Soviet approach and began to move away from it. Taking policy initiatives from central and local authorities was the solution. Under what became known as the Two Initiatives approach, local governments would have the autonomy to introduce their own policy, and would have affordances in how they interpreted central policy.

This idea of Two Initiatives originates in Mao’s key philosophical works of 1936 and 1937, “On Contradiction” and “On Practice.” His interpretation of dialectics in the former work differentiates between “antagonistic contradiction”—the real, irreconcilable conflicts based on competing material forces—and “non-antagonistic contradiction,” which can be resolved in a new synthesis. The latter work emphasizes the importance of praxis over theory. A year after the speech that gave us the Two Initiatives, Mao returned to this core philosophy in “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” in 1957, stating that non-antagonistic contradictions might remain between the “between the leadership and the led,” but that they could be resolved through struggle.

Individuals might be the elementary particles of society, but in Maoist theory, they came together to produce the mass line: the collective popular will which the party had to stay close to and learn from. Mao pointed to the millions of party cadres as representative voices of the mass line. Local authorities were considered qualified to interpret the mass line. Their decisions would be fine-tuned through theoretical debate and tested ultimately by practice.

The participatory nature of Maoist horizontality embodied Mao’s own criticism of the verticality of the Soviet command economy and of what he saw as Stalin’s distrust in the mass line. “Those bureaucrats who are afraid of great democracy,” Mao warned, “must study Marxism hard and mend their ways.” Democracy in this sense had less to do with voting and more with active involvement in the construction of a new Chinese society.

But Mao’s criticisms of centralization were mostly a theoretical response. The Great Helmsman, as his cult of personality dubbed him, had a habit of steering into rough seas. The Two Initiatives came during a brief period when the party was relaxing its control. But, during the collectivization drive of the Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962, guidance on agricultural collectivization and rural industrialization again came from the top. Even if there was theoretically more autonomy for local authorities under what Mao began calling democratic centralism, the loyalty of cadres was paramount and enforced with violence. There was no formal devolution of powers to the localities, even though they remained in control of agricultural land, industrial capital, and labor.

Under a reformist line proposed by Liu Shaoqi in 1962, there was again a brief flowering of local experimentation and Maoist horizontality—and this is when Jiao Yulu went to work in Henan. But all of this was quickly repudiated in the Socialist Education Movement of 1963, which led directly into the Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966. It’s likely for the best that the risk-taker and pragmatist Jiao Yulu died two years shy of the Cultural Revolution. Veneration of him as a martyr ceased once it began, his handpicked successor was removed from office, and radicals tormented his family and desecrated his tomb.

Whatever Mao’s theoretical musings, the winning strategy was what senior official Ke Qingshi described in 1959 as “the whole nation as one coordinated chess game.” Experimentation would have to wait.

Horizontal Dengism

When the smoke cleared and Deng Xiaoping inherited the leadership from Hua Guofeng in 1978, he was in a position not unlike Mao Zedong in 1956: even before the factional leaders of the Cultural Revolution were arrested, the country had been stabilizing. But it was also starting to pull in different directions.

Deng Xiaoping had watched Mao’s successor Hua Guofeng, as well as his allies in the oil-focused Petro Clique, fail at an ambitious top-down scheme to develop heavy industry. Meanwhile, there was an increase in the speed and scale of unauthorized experimentation that had been taking place in the wake of political disorder at the top.

Deng seized on the Two Initiatives. Maoist horizontality had its advantages for Deng, even as he abandoned concepts like the mass line and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Unlike other decentralized federal systems, there was no formal constitutional or legal framework to govern the Two Initiatives approach. Party-state theoreticians like Jiang Shigong defend Mao’s introduction of the Two Initiatives in his 1956 speech as an interpretation of the 1954 Constitution. But it’s an ambiguous, possibly contradictory interpretation. “According to our Constitution,” Mao concedes, “the legislative powers are all vested in the central authorities.” However, he advises, “local authorities may work out rules, regulations, and measures in the light of their specific conditions and the needs of their work.” But the lack of a binding legal framework was functionally unimportant. In practice, it was the practices and proclamations of the party—what thinkers like Jiang today call the “unwritten constitution”—which decided the norms of government, especially those of the party leadership.

Deng wrote Mao’s Two Initiatives into the 1982 Constitution, but there is no precise statement about the division of powers. The ambiguity of the written constitution and the power of the unwritten one meant that very little was expressly forbidden.

Letting the localities take the lead was a way for Deng Xiaoping to avoid conservative opposition at the top, circumvent powerful factions linked to the state sector, and avoid committing to any singular model for reform. The fact that localities collected the bulk of taxes also meant that it was a cheap solution for the central government. Reform and Opening Up was led from below.

The Cultural Revolution even ended up having a silver lining for Deng’s reforms. Against party wishes, it had provided several years of very much undirected decentralization. Mixed messages from the top and the paralysis of local politics undermined the years of aggressive collectivization. Local cadres in Guangdong stood idly by as markets flourished in Qingyuan and Puning. A report from the provincial archives in 1975 showed that Guangzhou was receiving hundreds of thousands of packages from abroad a year, full of clothes, cooking oil, and medicine, ready to be shifted into the black market. There was no need to plan for private entrepreneurship, only to manage it.

While all land was still legally administered by the collective, farmers had begun secretly dividing it up amongst themselves. They grew what they needed to fulfill government quotas and they were free to dispose of the surplus as they saw fit. This system of contracting plots of land to individual farmers got central government support in 1979, but it took a while to spread. Contracts between households and the state gained support in 1980, and the household contract responsibility system was well-established by 1985.

In Jiangsu, Anhui, Zhejiang, and Guangdong in particular, commune and brigade enterprises—companies controlled by collectives, usually engaged in light industry—had been thriving since the Cultural Revolution. The landmark 1978 Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Party provided political justification for these local experiments. In the 1980s, their ownership passed from communes to become the property of townships and villages. This model spread quickly. Light industry rapidly developed in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta.

The eventual and gradual privatization of township and village enterprises also began as a local experiment. Ideas came from managers and cadres on the periphery, rather than from the party leadership. And instead of censure, those coming up with them were reaping rewards.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, the private sector began to grow and the power of the state began to shrink. Local experimentation was crucial to this process. Local appointees became distributed ganglia. The arm could move without the brain giving a command. They were not simply interpreting the mass line and carrying out the dictatorship of the proletariat but securing the multivalent interests of individuals, grassroots organizations, enterprises, and the party itself. Deng had adapted Maoist horizontality to a newly depoliticized age.

Deng’s incorporation of market logic into this devolution didn’t lead him to give up the party’s monopoly on cadre promotions. While enterprise managers and private entrepreneurs could now exercise some leverage over local authorities, the market mechanism was still ideally subservient to the power of the state. The party remained the backbone of the system and had the power to appoint and remove cadres, as well as promote and demote them. Economic incentives were secondary, at least in design. No matter how much money a cadre made for himself, for local enterprises, or for influential individuals in their jurisdiction, promotion was only possible through the party.

The system existed to test those within it. Posting party officials to the provinces made the best use of their creativity and intelligence. Rather than pushing paper in the capital, the future leaders of the nation were more likely to be toiling in party posts in underperforming regions. Despite being the heir to the political legacy of Xi Zhongxun, revolutionary hero and originator of the Special Economic Zones, even Xi Jinping was compelled to vacate a cushy position in the capital to prove himself in the provinces. The story of how he turned Zhengding into a “testing ground for a slew of bold initiatives” has become part of his own carefully-crafted political legend.

Policy experiments created both elite and grassroots knowledge. Experiments continued even if they did not accord exactly with central government policy. With the party looking for policy alternatives, any intelligence and practical experience were highly valued. Local elections conducted in Sichuan in the 1990s and Jiangsu in the 2000s were not widely replicated, but they provided the foundation for electoral experiments carried out by Guangdong party boss Wang Yang to disarm a lengthy dispute over land seizures in Wukan in 2011.

Even if the central government did not take on board policy innovations, those who came up with them could still be rewarded. The central government has not expressed much interest in holding elections, local or otherwise, but Wang Yang was promoted to Vice Premier a year after he oversaw a vote in Wukan. Wang pushed mid-2000s Chinese liberalism to its logical conclusion, pruning the state to make space for civil society and the private sector. Despite Xi Jinping’s statist turn, he still raised Wang Yang to the Politburo Standing Committee in 2017.

The ideal experiment is one that can be modified, scaled, and repeated. The downfall of Bo Xilai’s populist campaign in Chongqing has many roots, but one of them was that his experiments were based on personalized authority and risky bank loans. Whether or not it fits the tastes of Xi Jinping, Wang Yang’s Guangdong Model can be safely replicated, while attempting to repeat the Chongqing Model would risk political and financial instability.

Bo Xilai’s bank loans also pointed to a major vulnerability of the scheme, which is that experimentation had to be mostly self-financed. The central government was happy to turn a blind eye to practices like local governments selling state-owned land out from under residents. This helped pay for the functions of local authorities but could also lead to corruption and reaching out to organized crime for the necessary muscle.

Even though Bo Xilai was running a huge municipality directly under the administration of the central government, the issues in his leadership were only uncovered when the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection began investigating Wang Lijun, Chongqing’s second-in-command. One defect of the authoritarian meritocracy is that vertical decentralization reduces the ability of the state to supervise its workers. Bo Xilai’s gaming of the system with financing backed by risky loans occurred many times over at lower levels of government.

Factional politics also negatively impact the system. When factional politics are introduced, local cadres can cheat by making use of intra-party connections to increase growth or hit other performance goals; the right relationships can conceal poor leadership or even corruption.

The Dengist horizontal strategy had helped to make China rich. Its flaws and abuses paved the way for another vertical, centralizing reaction.

The End of the Two Initiatives

Xi Jinping’s centralization of power since 2011 has been a response to the rise of factional politics in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s death. Hu Jintao was never able to gain a firm hold of the party-state, root out powerful factions, and centralize power. Xi, in turn, made it a priority to secure a strong personal leadership position.

Dengist horizontality is giving way to a new model of verticality. The party under Xi has not explicitly repudiated Deng Xiaoping’s interpretation of the Two Initiatives, but the Great Leap Forward-era theory of “the whole nation as one coordinated chess game” has been enthusiastically revived.

Local experimentation has slowed. The party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has begun targeting local officials for “irresponsibility, lack of achievement, irresponsible conduct, and faking results,” suggesting a lack of hunger for further innovation. This inspection drive is about cleaning up the kind of corruption that flourished under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, but it is also directed at “slack governance:” risk-averse local politicians just going through the motions. Fearing censure in the new inspections, they jumped into action and subsequently had to be warned against engaging in hasty experiments.

Another key drive by Xi Jinping has been to take the ambiguity out of the legal and constitutional framework governing local experimentation. In January of this year, the Party Central Committee issued their “Plan on Building the Rule of Law in China.” It is part of a larger scheme to diminish the role of the unwritten constitution in daily life.”

This presents an immediate problem for the Dengist style of horizontal administration. The strictest interpretation of even the reformist 1982 Constitution could have seen Special Economic Zones deemed illegal. The dividing up of land among individual tenants could be ruled to be unconstitutional, too. The commentators at state newspapers decrying the 1998 Sichuan experiments in township elections as unconstitutional were likely dismayed that the central government did not step in. These experiments were allowed to continue because of the haziness of the Two Initiatives and the overall constitutional and legal framework governing China.

The move towards tightening the rule of law now looks to get China caught up in one of the more successful fads to come out of the world of Western policy wonks: digital governance. Building the capacity of so-called “fourth industrial revolution” technologies, including artificial intelligence, is one of the key tenets of Xi Jinping Thought on Rule of Law, which states that China should:

Make full use of big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other modern technological means to comprehensively build a ‘smart rule of law’, and promote the digitalisation, networkisation, and intelligentisation of the rule of law in China. Optimize and integrate various information, data, and network platforms in the field of rule of law, and promote the construction of the nationwide rule of law informatization project.

The plans for AI-assisted judges would go nowhere without a waterproof legal and constitutional framework. The Shanghai AI Assistive Program for Criminal Cases and pilot programs in other centers are test runs for turning more significant constitutional cases over to software.

The clear interest among the party leadership in the promises of big data, surveillance, and artificial intelligence is one of the reasons that they have de-emphasized local innovation.

The expertise, money, and private sector connections required for high-tech innovation mean that larger subnational governments have outshone the periphery. The Tianjin AI pilot zone and the Suzhou municipal government’s combination of pandemic tracking and social credit management in a mobile application are good examples. It’s not coincidental that Alibaba’s City Brain was rolled out in Hangzhou, where the company has its headquarters.

Smaller centers are mostly imitating the models of Internet Plus regulation and developing “social credit cities.” Yantai in Shandong was praised by the National Development and Reform Commission at the Summit for Credit System Construction of Chinese Cities, but it’s unclear what they have done that sets them apart from larger centers. A recent report from Rongcheng in Shandong reveals the details. The idea of issuing citizens with an “integrity identity” that helps administer a scheme to give them local government benefits (like waiving fees, speeding up access, or offering loans) based on healthy civic behavior is not particularly innovative but combines ideas from other localities.

The drive is to collect and centralize as much data as possible. One of the key problems that the state has faced is “unreliable and incomplete basic data, and incompatible datasets and systems.” Big data analysis requires integration; surveillance works best when it is networked. The central government will become the hub.

Algorithmic regulation will first “augment human decision making,” but the goal is for data-driven social governance technology to eventually put an end to corruption and a tighter leash on local experimentation by reducing reliance on human judgment.

Tu Zipei, the former Alibaba executive and theorist of social governance, has called the proposed Chinese model “single-particle governance.” The model integrates data from government and commercial sources into individual master files that become the “elementary particle”. This idea doesn’t come from Maoist egalitarian politics or Dengist market horizontality, but from online shopping and social media platforms. Fittingly, it will run on software developed by commercial digital technology firms, like Huawei, Tencent, and Alibaba.

Such a system would fundamentally change the political culture. Horizontality requires not just individual autonomy, but also a sense that local communities or interests can be organized and exercise some kind of collective agency, as the peasants of Henan did under Jiao’s direction and as Chinese companies did throughout the Deng era. Xi’s verticality only requires a population that can be effectively managed. The state can fulfill the interests and express the will of a broad population of abstracted social individuals without having to rely too much on the human judgments of local cadres at all.

Despite the party’s centralism, it has always operated through a huge matrix of institutions: schools, planning committees, workers’ organizations, cultural groups, trade boards, and many others. A person’s political identity was linked in part to the collective bodies in which they participated. But with an urbanizing population that is increasingly integrated into service economies instead of life-long economic or social roles, the bases for these collective expressions of political identity are disappearing.

As the population atomizes, the government seems intent on creating a stronger civic Chinese identity and wants its citizens to politically relate primarily to the national government. Their aggressive cultural assimilation policy in Xinjiang is one example of this. But so is the new rhetoric about data-driven governance: it presumes a population where the individual is a data-generating automaton whose activities are input for the state to work with, with few or no intervening social structures.

The logic of big data governance at its highest scale appears horizontal in flattening the inputs into decision making. It de-emphasizes the importance of political, economic, and intellectual elites but also of local government. It also increasingly removes the possibility of a cadre-managed collective autonomy in goals and decisions.

Xi has based his position on continuing China’s claim to follow an independent ideological path from the West. Part of his impetus for a re-centralization of party-state authority has been a desire to avoid convergence with the liberal atomization associated with Western decline.

But for all of both Chinese and Western bluster about not wanting to be like the other, the structural realities are shockingly parallel. Both have undergone extensive social atomization in this period. Since the 2010s, both have seen new crackdowns on local autonomy and independent discourse using commercially-derived surveillance and social control technologies.

Xi’s invocation of the “fourth industrial revolution” puts him in a path of explicit convergence with the surveillance individualism that has come to characterize Western liberal democracies. The causes and rhetoric differ, but the result seems remarkably similar: an increasingly powerful national state, ideologically and structurally centralized around the national elite, governing an increasingly atomized population. In this new ideal of digital governance, the individualized population is rendered into legible, data-generating citizens strictly governed by a single centralized discourse of possibility.

Western commentators have worried that the Western elite is quietly copying the Chinese surveillance model, but their Chinese counterparts could as easily worry that the party is simply copying the Western model.

What is in danger under centralization of power with these technologies is the radical heterogeneity made possible by horizontality. Save for the direct intervention of the party, a local cadre could act in the best interests of the local authority and its citizens; the decisions a local cadre made did not have to take a strict interpretation of official ideological orthodoxy.

Vertical management can only act in the interests of and by the logic of its central management; the consumer desires of its elementary particles are researched, quantified, and then minimally satisfied. The key difference is that the centralized model has much less room for handling the complexity of local collective problems. Everything is done through the lens of the center. What the party stands to lose is the collective temperament and culture of a cadre base inculcated in the pragmatic, experimental, and innovative environments of the last few decades. This was the environment that reared up a generation of Chinese leaders, including Xi himself.

This homogenization of methods by a single set of central actors is apparent from poverty reduction schemes, which are conducted usually through private-public partnerships, leveraging the expertise and equipment of big tech. In Anhui, the firm that led the AI and big data poverty reduction project was iFlytek, which has been sanctioned by American authorities over their involvement in law enforcement in Xinjiang.

The Building New Rural Communities initiative is another sign of what the future could bring. Rural residents living in fragmented communities are shepherded into central municipalities as a means of providing better governance. In one “resettlement zone,” outside of Jinan in Shandong, planning and building was assisted by China Unicom, turning it into a pilot project for radical digitalization: a “full life-cycle management system” built for “next-generation networking” with the “Internet of Things.” It’s the sort of stuff that makes tech enthusiasts and mechanism designers go wild. What’s not clear is how much it will deliver. But even in the event that the promises of these technologies go largely unrealized, the cultural change they cement might well endure.

Imagining the model cadre Jiao Yulu back in the Henan countryside, perhaps such technologies could have provided him with superior solutions. Big data integration and IoT-ready light poles would have saved him from tramping around Lankao County. And back in the 1960s, without big data, it would have been impossible for anyone to quantify how many lives were bettered by Jiao’s innovations. He was celebrated, though, because he carved autonomy for grassroots innovations from higher levels of government.

In Xi Jinping’s 1990 ode to Jiao, he wrote: “Wherever we are appointed / We must bring prosperity, / Unchanging purpose in life.” The new model of verticality informed by visions of AI-augmented decisions might take human error out of that purpose, but also human inspiration. 

Look down at your left palm. At the webbing between your middle and index fingers sits the Imperial Palace. This is the center of Tokyo. The forwardmost joint of your ring finger is Uguisudani. Aoyama sits atop the fleshy part of your thumb. This is even a topographic map, since Uguisudani is located in what is called the “low town”—the delta lowlands that run out to the Sumida River—and Aoyama is part of the “high town” tableland that remained desirable because building there was a guarantee you wouldn’t be washed out in the rainy season. Around your palm runs a commuter rail circuit called the Yamanote Line.

Uguisudani grew up as the edge of town, lying beyond the more respectable quarters of old Edo. Feudal lords and courtesans once flocked here. After the Meiji Restoration, when the nascent imperial state expropriated feudal landlords, it became a building site for inexpensive housing. After the war, Uguisudani developed, like many other East Tokyo neighborhoods, as a center for vice and leisure. This is a deriheru town, with escorts walking the streets and love hotels shaping the landscape. Embedded among them is the former home of Masaoka Shiki, the master of the modern haiku. Uguisudani is a spiritual microcosm for Japan. Life is doable if you can swim through the pessimism. Locals complain about kanko kogai, or “tourism pollution,” the negative effects of welcoming Disneyland-level visitor numbers to what are mostly residential neighborhoods.

My end destination couldn’t be more different. While Uguisudani grew meaner, Aoyama became beautiful. The area around it became a de facto American concession, anchored by the mammoth Washington Heights housing complex. The cooperative rebuilding of Japan was centered on Aoyama. This was the place that built Japan’s Americanized postwar future. It was ground zero for urban revitalization and modernization in the runup to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The neighborhood attracted a new elite, one that had gotten rich off the rebuilding and revitalization—not only the developers swapping real estate or construction magnates pouring concrete, but also the cultural entrepreneurs they patronized. Modern Japanese culture as we know it was born in Aoyama. A brief walk, or a single stop on the Ginza Line, will take you through its cradle. Well-known areas like the architectural display at Omotesando and the fashion hub of Harajuku are within Aoyama’s orbit.

But I’m not going to Aoyama for the history. Today, I’m traveling to the epicenter of a new, 21st-century Olympics. I want to see the Olympic Stadium and get my fix of the Games—or at least, of the crowds. I’ve somehow retained an enthusiasm for the whole affair since childhood. These Games have allowed no spectators, but I can join the people that I have seen on the television news standing outside of the venues, a safe distance from the protesters that have occasionally appeared.

These Olympics are not intended for a Japanese audience. They are not even intended for the global mass of Olympics fans. The 2020 Summer Olympics are the coming-out party of Aoyama—or more specifically, of the rising class of tech-and-finance Aoyama elites that lobbied for them and who won a lot of the associated contracts. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics celebrated a new Japan, redeemed from its wartime days to become a peaceful member of the international community. This was Japan under the aegis of its postwar construction state, overseen by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The belated 2020 Olympics are likewise intended to present another new Japan: a country ready to pivot to Asia and shake off its social and economic sluggishness.

The new agenda lacks the flashiness of the athletic spectacle. Decades after neoliberalism first had its advent in the U.S. and Europe, Japan’s business class seems hard-pressed to solve any of neoliberalism’s classic problems. The best positive vision on which they have been able to agree is just more financialization, more information technology companies, more immigration, and more engagement with Asia. Over a decade since the West started to lose faith in this neoliberal strategy, Japan seems ready to embrace it.

The lack of novelty or real hope hardly matters in a country where the political pessimism is thick enough that you can feel it in your bones. An entire generation grew up with post-bubble malaise punctuated by the occasional national crisis. Aoyama, at least, offers a stable vision for the future—and Abe proved that some patriotic rhetoric can carry an aging political toolkit pretty far. The stands may be empty and the population indifferent, but national honor demands that the show must go on.

The Aoyama Olympics

Even this Chinese restaurant in Uguisudani is paying homage to the Games, with judo highlights repeating on the TV above the counter. Judo has helped the local image of the Olympics. Kawamura Takeo of the LDP was probably correct when he asserted that every gold medal won by Japan would translate into votes for his party.

We should all allow ourselves to indulge in spectacle. Of course, I understand that the Olympics functions as a clearinghouse for international blood money. These Games were no exception. Despite funneling money to International Olympic Committee members and their families through a Singaporean firm called Black Tidings, the advertising giant Dentsu won important contracts for running the Games. It’s impressive that a Japanese firm can still pull off international graft. But that money went into the pockets of corrupt Senegalese businessmen, not mine, so I can attend with a clean moral slate.

I realize that holding the Olympics in the middle of a pandemic is foolish. But I buy the argument for Tokyo gritting its teeth and hosting the Games anyways. It would have been too costly and too embarrassing to try to shut it down. Even without the Games, there were dire predictions that Japan would be hitting record daily infection numbers through the summer. Now, at least, the nightly newscasts can move on to healthy patriotism and athletic bodies.

But my enthusiasm is unpopular, so I keep it to myself. I’ve seen the polls. The other day, I noticed a pair of office ladies muttering angrily to themselves when they caught sight of a man in an Olympics jersey and lanyard. They were surprised that anyone from the Games had been allowed out of their bubble. 

In the circles I move in, I’ve heard open hostility toward the Olympics for years. For left-leaning politically active young people in Japan, the opposition is not so much to the Olympics as a global corruption machine. Instead, they want to deny a source of legitimacy to the ruling LDP. The Japanese Communist Party (JCP), the only genuinely left-leaning party of consequence, has called for the cancellation of the Games. There is agreement among my friends that lean to the right, too. Representing nationalist opinion beyond lukewarm LDP patriotism, the Japan First Party held a well attended anti-Olympics rally in Shinjuku this month. Most far-right political rallies in Tokyo these days seem astroturfed by American interests, with demonstrators carrying anti-China posters that look like the work of exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. But the anti-Olympics march by Japan First seemed genuine enough. The goal for the right is not to disrupt the Olympic Movement, but to shake up domestic politics.

Of course, most people have no interest in politics, or in speaking with me about them. For them, the Olympics are simply embarrassing. Abe Shinzo dressed as Mario is slightly revolting. When I mentioned the opening ceremonies to a friend over drinks earlier in the month, he paused and picked up his phone to confirm my claim that the postponed Olympics were going ahead. He had forgotten about them. 

But the Games themselves are, like the pandemic, the setting rather than the event. They are only a small part of a larger effort to steer Japan out of its current pessimistic state, much like the 1964 Tokyo Olympics were only a sideshow in a program of national rejuvenation and the cementing of LDP power. The 1964 Olympics preparations, beginning in the 1950s, unleashed public spending on infrastructure. This money was partially circulated back into the coffers of the LDP and its politicians.

Sitting here in Uguisudani, I am surrounded by the legacy of 1964. The concrete aesthetic of 1964 is why Uguisudani looks like it does. It gave us the “brutal aesthetic order of serial reproduction of easily constructed grey buildings.” Here, at least, the neon beautifies them.

The great Japanese sociologist Osawa Masachi calls the period from 1945-70 the Era of Ideals. The 1964 Olympics were a manifestation of this era, a sign to the international community that Japan was now part of the liberal international order. But the building projects that began in the late 1950s also poured the foundation for the modern Construction State. The LDP itself effectively became the political wing of construction firms.

During the succeeding Era of Fiction (1970-1995), economic growth fueled political arrogance, only for the popping of the asset price bubble economy to snuff that arrogance out. Since then, Japanese politics has centered around various attempts to escape the Era of Impossibility (1995-present). All around me is the infrastructure of one such attempt.

There are few contemporary narratives about the country to draw on. At present, Japan is far less important than it was in 1964. It’s a steadfast, serene part of the American empire. When interim Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide made the cover of Newsweek in April, the media described him as the “ally in chief.” But this narrative molds Japan into a character crafted to explain the threat from China and to give us a moral lesson about standing up to totalitarianism. This doesn’t help us to understand Japan.

If the 1964 Olympics were about national pride, setting construction firms free to blanket the archipelago in concrete, and the LDP consensus, the 2020 Olympics are about international consciousness, re-heating the real estate market, and empowering a new elite, along with the more dynamic sectors of Japanese society that they represent. These Games are the project of that new elite to remake the city and the country in their image—wealthy, international, and egalitarian. And the home of that new elite—geographically and spiritually—is again in Aoyama.

The intended audiences for these Games are the old and new business classes of Asia, the region’s increasingly mobile labor force, and legions of investors and tourists. The goal is to show that Japan is a stable, welcoming place for foreigners and their money. It’s a message to the world that Japan no longer fits the stereotypes of arrogant 1980s financial superpower, basketcase post-bubble ethnostate, or nuclear disaster site—no, now you can play softball in Fukushima, even if the restricted zones remain uninhabitable!

This is a vision of the future in which Japan is no longer an American client state, but a Pacific economy oriented toward Asia. It can welcome the investment, tourism, and immigrants that will reinvigorate the economy and allow Japanese egalitarianism to be restored. Tokyo will become a true global city, competing with San Francisco and London as a location for the wealthy to park their money.

The Aoyama Program is a new direction and the Olympics is its spectacle of choice. This is the work of a new and rising class of business elites. We can call them the New Aoyama Clan.

The New Aoyama Clan

The Aoyama Clan’s story goes back to the period when Japan was entering the first of three consecutive “Lost Decades.” Its members include people like Masayoshi Son, the billionaire CEO of SoftBank. He made his fortune investing in international digital platforms, like Alibaba and Yahoo!, and has invested heavily in cutting-edge artificial intelligence, biotech, and Internet of Things ventures through his Vision Fund and Vision Fund II. SoftBank’s SB Northstar fund has recently dumped cash into acquiring a multibillion-dollar stake in Roche. They have also wagered heavily on cryptocurrency, putting money into projects like Mercado and Bullish Global. Masayoshi has become an occasional critic of old politics, especially on the issues of denuclearization and the slow response to developing alternative energy infrastructure.

Mikitani Hiroshi is another member of the Clan. He launched Rakuten as an e-commerce platform in 1997, growing it into a digital and fintech giant. He helped shape Abe Shinzo’s deregulation campaign through the Industrial Competitiveness Council, but broke with the leadership when they were unable to follow through on key planks. Mikitani split from the Japanese Business Federation (Keidanren) after they proved uncommitted to denuclearization and other big ideas and joined the Japan Association of New Economy (JANE), leading the charge for a more permanent immigrant labor base. He proved it could work: Most of the software engineers at Rakuten are now foreign and the official business language is English.

Mikitani and Son embody the New Aoyama Clan, a wide range of players in finance and digital technologies, who are mostly but not exclusively based in Aoyama and environs. If Chiyoda City is Japan’s old power center—the Bank of Japan, the Imperial Palace, and old-money corporate headquarters—Aoyama is its new power hub, home to more dynamic industries with a global reach. Around two million workers across Japan are employed in leading technology sectors and nearly that many in finance. Leaving aside Toyota and Honda, which could be thought of as tech companies in their own rights, the economy’s most valuable firms—NTT, Sony, KDDI, Recruit Holdings, Mitsubishi UFJ, Fast Retailing, SoftBank—are in tech and finance.

The New Aoyama Clan is powerful, but not omnipotent. It cannot sweep away the old politics of Japan, like the corruption, bribery, and patronage appointments at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT). It might fail in some of its initiatives to change Japanese professional culture, as with Kono Taro’s attempts to stop the use of fax machines and hanko stamps in business and government. But this is, in a sense, busy work. What the Aoyama Clan cannot remedy, it can circumvent. A new Digital Agency, staffed by private sector hires, might serve them better than reliance on the old bureaucracies. Fintech and e-commerce might not rule the country, but they are useful power bases from which the New Aoyama Clan can increasingly sideline the LDP and its patrons from the most dynamic sectors of Japanese society. The old politics might remain, but it will sound increasingly hollow.

Unseating the LDP, even in its decrepit modern state, is no easy task. In Nathaniel Bowman Thayer’s classic study of LDP politics, How the Conservatives Rule Japan, the most illuminating quote comes from a party worker in Hiroshima: “The Liberal Democratic Party is a ghost. It has no feet.” The JCP drew support from workers, their unions, and left-leaning intellectuals; the Komeito drew support from Soka Gakkai, one of many new religious movements in Japan; the LDP’s main source of power was the construction industry, with other factions within the party defined by their source of income in the private sector. Local power bases were more important than a nationwide organization, with candidates and their koenkai support groups taking in money through private sector donations and pork-barrel spending. The LDP has remained in power for all but brief periods since 1955, thanks to these entrenched systems, successfully rigged to ensure the party’s continued rule.  

Despite that rigged system, LDP power has continuously faded. The oil shocks of the 1970s shook the construction industry and other key private sector players that funded the LDP. A real estate boom through the 1980s helped revitalize the construction industry, even if there was less government spending, but the bursting of the asset price bubble thwarted its continued growth.

Intraparty factional struggle and the need to compromise with opposition and coalition partners provided for some dynamism and allowed for the major parties to reorient. Currently, Komeito acts as kingmaker in the Japanese coalition government. A program of privatization, monetarism, deregulation, and austerity has been the major response to three decades of suffering. After the asset price bubble burst in the 1990s, a string of lesser disasters followed suit, including the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Fukushima earthquake, and the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant meltdown of 2011. These decisions might have salvaged what was left of the Japanese economy, but they also saw the state’s power reduced. This was a permanent move away from the developmental state model that had seen the state and corporate sectors closely linked. Post-Toyotist neoliberal restructuring increased social and income equality, with close to half of all workers now in precarious “non-regular” positions. 

These reforms were also a major step in demonstrating the hollowness of the old order. They revealed that the infamous nationalism of the modern LDP was only ever performative. In reality, LDP leaders were incapable of even amending the constitution written for them by American liberators seventy-four years ago. They dumped more money into building the Japan Self-Defense Forces into a legitimate military, but only with the blessing of the U.S. Abe went to commune with the war criminals enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine, enraging Seoul and Beijing, but loosened restrictions brought in more foreign workers to address chronic labor shortages.

While Europe and the U.S. coped with their refugee crises, stories made the international news about Japan accepting forty-four refugees in 2019 and fifty-one in 2020. But this is performative too—just ask the thousands of Kurds in the housing projects of suburban Tokyo, who have not been given refugee status but “Special Permission to Stay.” The weakened yen helped increase tourism from a 2000s-era trickle of about four million inbound trips a year to a torrent of thirty-one million visits in 2019. Descriptions of the LDP as a collection of vicious ethno-nationalists or neo-imperialists are just not credible when the population is declining and the general mood of everyone under retirement age has been prolonged national malaise.

Then came the pandemic, which has unburied a whole host of things that nobody wants to talk about. Lockdown supporters blamed the Japanese constitution for not permitting a tough response. The string of half-measures had little effect, apart from immiserating “non-regular” employees. The suicide rate for men and women under thirty has begun to tick up. The country’s fragile social security system looks even less sustainable. Experts warned that the healthcare system was under severe stress—or that it had already collapsed. Vaccination was hampered by limited supply and logistical issues. Lack of trust in the LDP regime is approaching unanimity.

Both Masayoshi Son and Mikitani Hiroshi have made the most of this ideological collapse. Masayoshi Son made headlines this summer skewering the government over its inability to carry out an effective pandemic response. More concretely, SoftBank and Rakuten are both running their own alternative vaccination programs. Rakuten Group and Rakuten Medical have quite effectively sold the idea of their Kobe Model, a data and IoT-driven initiative that looks nothing like the government bureaucracy’s own troubled programs.

The pandemic has, in other words, demonstrated the real difference between the greying LDP on the one hand and the New Aoyama Clan on the other. The factions within the LDP are mostly dead players, going through the motions but incapable of changing their strategy. The New Aoyama Clan is well-coordinated and enacting a more compelling vision, leveraging power grounded in sectors of Japanese society which are actually producing economic value and employing its youngest members.

Like the LDP, the New Aoyama Clan is not a monolith. Nor are they strictly distinct from the LDP itself; the New Aoyama Clan represents a power base both within the LDP’s factions and beyond them. It extends through the mass electorate but also to the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren), and rival business groups, as well as lobbies and think tanks. The New Aoyama Clan built the digital economy in Japan and they have made themselves indispensable to the entrenched political and economic elite. Given that no credible opposition is on the horizon and that the LDP has an effective bureaucracy, the Clan is willing to work with them. But their goals of economic restructuring, increased immigration, more foreign workers, and geopolitical realignment are much larger than those of most politicians.

As I finish my chukadon in Uguisudani, I flick through the Japan Ahead 2 slide deck from the JANE. This combination of a business federation and a think tank is preparing for a “social system revolution.” Chaired by Rakuten CEO Mikitani Hiroshi, and featuring members drawn from the tech sector, including Mercari, Google Japan, CrowdWorks, and even Dentsu, the New Aoyama Clan has the expertise and the muscle to carry it out.

Into the New Japan

You can see the future from Uguisudani, whether you realize it or not. After years of underperforming, real estate might finally be a sound investment again. JANE has given its own proposals to get land and property prices up. Developers are reaching out to previously untouched areas of East Tokyo. This is a station on the Yamanote Line, after all. Tokyoites might balk at moving to Uguisudani, but the young people moving in from the hinterland couldn’t care less.

I catch the first Yamanote Line train of the morning. These days, my Tokyo is restricted to the local neighborhood, but I used to do this every day. My first job in Tokyo was working in a sleazy subterranean nightclub in Roppongi, arriving at dusk and staying until the sun came up. Seeing all the nighttime workers—the bar girls, the touts, the dancers, the bouncers—stagger on at Roppongi Station, I know there’s nothing to be envied. Some bars remain open, flouting regulations, but the crowds aren’t what they used to be.

I transfer only once, to the Oedo Line at Daimon station. Both trains are nearly empty. I’m the only one that gets off at Aoyama-Itchome Station.

More than anything, Aoyama reminds me of the Kitsilano neighborhood in Vancouver, where I once rented a garden suite in a grand old house that had been carved into apartments. In both places, there’s an uneven collection of concrete-and-glass palaces built in the 1980s and 1990s, the more avant-garde cubes that followed them, and then the older homes that in Vancouver date back to the turn of the last century and which in Aoyama date back to the 1950s and 1960s. Both places have a clear identity—warm, welcoming, and cultured, but not in an overbearing way. The cute bakeries, French restaurants, and austere boutiques of Aoyama look like they could have been airlifted from the West Coast, too.

It’s the aesthetic embodiment of the New Aoyama Clan: recognizable because it is international, distinct because it is the chosen style of every global city’s rising bourgeoisie. Unlike in Uguisudani, the future looks much nicer here.

The boutiques in Aoyama seem like slightly happier places to toil than the love hotels that employ the deriheru of Uguisudani. The staff is often made up of young people from China, Korea, or Russia. The demographic situation means that there is no longer a reliable supply of young Japanese workers. The remaining ones are rarely fluent in the languages spoken by their potential co-workers, managers, or clients. 

The remaking of Aoyama is heating up the property market, but the process is slower and less disruptive than in Uguisudani as well. The new developments and concrete spires looming over the old homes on the back streets still stand out. Land prices are going to recover pre-pandemic levels and, if everything goes according to plan, shoot up. It’s hard to find room to put in a new house, let alone a luxury apartment development. It took the Mori Building Company 14 years to piece together the hundreds of lots required to build Roppongi Hills. Even Mikitani and Son were forced to build new properties on the edges of Aoyama.

I move on to Gaiemmae Station and from there, I make my way to the Olympic Stadium. I am joined by other people making the pilgrimage. I have hazy memories of my father taking me to see the site of the Barcelona Olympics in the summer of 1992. I was in Beijing in 2008 and Vancouver in 2010. I even went to London right after their Olympics. Just like at those Games, I am here just to take in the spectacle. I sympathize with the gawkers.

I can tell that they came from outside Tokyo. There’s a certain look. Maybe it’s the suntans—the particular type of bronzing Tokyo girls get in sunbeds never looks quite natural. These gawkers are mostly young couples with kids. On Sundays in Tokyo, most kids spend the day with their dads, usually the only day off he’s got all week.

I stop when a family asks me to take a picture of them in front of the Rugby Ground. Mother and father are wearing baseball jerseys, Under Armor, and Crocs. Their daughter is in a pink sundress. I ask what they’re here to see. They have taken the train in from Kasukabe, twenty miles north of Tokyo in Saitama, the father says. I ask in Japanese but he answers in English. He says that he wants his daughter to see the Olympic Stadium, then they are going to Meiji Jingu and Yoyogi Park. It was probably my halting Japanese that made him switch languages, but I comfort myself that maybe he was just caught up in the Olympic atmosphere of internationalism.

I walk as close as I can to the Stadium. But I can tell gawkers are not too welcome. Police and volunteers glower at me.

Cruising in their flat blue-painted police vans and loitering around buses with wire mesh over the windows, the police remind me of security forces in nations less developed than Japan. I don’t want to deal with the busybody private security guards, either, all older men in mismatched uniforms, wiping sweat off their necks while they patrol. I’m sure nobody is taking note of me, apart from the arrays of surveillance cameras. But I begin to get paranoid about the prospect of having to show my papers and delete the pictures on my camera.

The mood around the Stadium makes it feel as if I’ve stumbled upon something not intended to be seen by the general public. Perhaps this is born out of holding the Olympics in a city that’s hostile or indifferent to the Games.

I am back on the train before most of the city is awake.

Society 5.0

The future is easier to roll out in Uguisudani, at least when it comes to heating up the real estate market and bringing in tourists. But a key part of the Aoyama Program—reducing social stratification—could be more difficult.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, spending on social welfare increased, but the benefits have shrunk. Opposition parties in Japan have come and gone over the years, but nearly all have had in their manifestos some stab at social welfare reform. As with support for denuclearization and for maintaining demilitarization, social welfare is a lost cause.

The JANE Japan Ahead 2 scheme is in line with what Keidanren has proposed: Make Japan wealthy again, then figure out what to do about the social divide afterward. One of the first steps is the reform of the corporate tax system. Lowering corporate taxes and would free the private sector up to restore the nation’s fiscal health. The personal tax burden would lighten. Corporate philanthropy would help fill the gaps. Like in the old days, new construction has a legitimizing role. When you walk through the neighborhoods along the Ginza Line, the real estate ads look like those in Aoyama as well.

This is one of the clearest flaws in the plan. LDP nationalism is only performative and the New Aoyama Clan are not particularly patriotic either. Additionally, neither group is ideologically preoccupied with social welfare. Rejuvenating Japan’s fiscal health by connecting it out to people and money from elsewhere in Asia is a good idea, but austerity can’t end in the near future. Those “non-regular” employees brought even lower by pandemic states of emergency, economic hard times, and the evaporation of tourism won’t see the benefits for many years.

Tokyo remains somewhat affordable, especially compared to other Pacific Rim metropolises. The postwar building boom, three decades of limited economic growth, and fear of repeating the sins of the asset price bubble have kept rents low. This is the only way that “non-regular” workers can remain within an easy commute of Central Tokyo. Low rents have also stopped Tokyo from becoming a cultural dead zone, since they still allow young people a certain freedom to screw around. But heating up of the property market threatens all that.

It’s not hard to imagine prolonged malaise metastasizing into resentment. It’s hard to say what form that would take in a country so thoroughly depoliticized, but foreign investors and immigrant workers would make easy rallying points.

Another crack in the facade of an international, wealthy, and healthy Japan appears when contemplating the neighborhood and American allies. The Aoyama Program relies on orienting Japan away from the U.S. Suga might have been the “ally in chief” during his tenure, but the business elite has long seen the need to pivot to Asia. China is already Japan’s largest trading partner. The Japan Center for Economic Research has revamped its forecasts to take into account China’s quicker recovery after the pandemic, projecting the economy of its neighbor will eclipse that of the U.S. in nominal GDP by 2028-2029.

A close relationship with the U.S. could eventually become a liability. Possibly even more than its own trade war with South Korea, Japan has felt the negative effects of the prolonged chill between China and the U.S. A recent deal between Rakuten and China’s Tencent raised American eyebrows, which encouraged the LDP to streamline a national security review process for investments. They have also bowed to pressure to relocate supply chains from China to other locations in Asia. But that’s a natural step, given the rapid development of manufacturing in Southeast Asia. If China remains Japan’s largest trade partner, the location of its factories won’t matter much.

U.S. attempts to draft Japan into fantasies like defending Taiwan will make warmer relations with China difficult. Throwing in with Quadrilateral Security Dialogue partners Australia and India is fine, as long as it doesn’t aggravate their enemies. But Japan’s American partners are getting dangerously close to asking for more. The direst scenario might see Japan losing its protected position under the Western military umbrella. Coming out from under American protection and influence would probably require a change to the pacifist constitution and more careful cultivation of neighborly relations.

From the Aoyama perspective, the ideal position would be for Japan to further link itself economically, if not politically, to rising economies and traditional partners in Asia. China and South Korea are among the largest sources of new foreign workers, tourism, and investment in Japan, followed by Southeast Asia.

It’s not all rosy. Based on economic policy, but also on unaddressed wartime grievances, the ongoing South Korean-Japanese trade war does not bode well for a pivot to Asia. The old politics might be hollow and the nationalism performative, but Japan will need to send the message that it will not imperil relations with its East Asian neighbors for domestic gain.

There are also local politics to worry about. These currently matter very little in Japan, as long as they keep producing LDP majorities that are open to new ideas or whom it is possible to sidestep, but that is not an absolute guarantee.

The criticisms leveled at the LDP over their pandemic response mishandling don’t suggest that the New Aoyama Clan will try to force them out, but that they will hound them into submission. Mikitani might call the Olympics a “suicide mission” and then run his own vaccination scheme, but he doesn’t intend these headlines to completely discredit the LDP. Rather, he wants to bend the leadership to his vision.

For the time being, there is not much danger of a political alternative. The united and invigorated opposition faces an uphill battle despite running against the least popular LDP regime in years. Partially united under the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) banner, opposition parties poll well in urban areas; the LDP might have limited grassroots support, but they have the strength of powerful local leaders, supported by pork-barrel spending, capable of turning out the vote. This system has been in place for most of the postwar period, while the opposition has seen itself fractured.

Suga announced in September that he would step down, but that’s got more to do with his pandemic record than confidence in his party. The approval ratings of the LDP might not be impressive compared to previous regimes, but they are still higher than for any other party. Young people are not a reliable voter bloc, but it’s not a positive sign for the opposition that they are broadly in support of the LDP. 

It’s still not down to a two-party race, either, as the opposition bloc lacks the support of the JCP and an anti-CDP holdout faction of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). The JCP and SDP’s opposition to austerity measures, as well as broader disgust with the LDP’s support for re-armament and a continued American military presence, has kept their bases energized. Both parties are willing to support CDP candidates in local races, but that won’t extend to forming a coalition. New players like left-leaning Reiwa Shinsengumi or the center-right Japan Innovation Party do not carry enough support to contest the government.

Japan has also not yet been swept by any of the populist winds blowing overseas. A wounded LDP might someday need to produce a populist option, but that doesn’t seem to be on the horizon. The status quo might be hollow, but nobody sees the need for it to crack. A victorious opposition seems too bound up in fears of even greater national uncertainty.

This is a fairly hopeless country. In a survey by the Tokyo University’s Institute of Social Science, half of the respondents under the age of thirty believed that their children’s future would be darker than their own. This stable pessimism is precisely where the New Aoyama Clan comes in. The Aoyama Program has some appeal in the dearth of credible visions of the future, even if it is pessimistic in its own way.

There is a Japanese tendency toward Showa nostalgia, attempting to restore the glory of the previous imperial era—not its wartime period, but the rebuilding. The period of 1926-1989 seems, in retrospect, to preserve an essential Japanese-ness. Conversely, the Aoyama Program is a progressive vision, one poised to benefit Japan’s economic elites while promising to shake the country out of its political stupor. Breaking with American defense goals to rejoin Asia, cutting corporate tax rates, heating up the property market, flooding the country with tourists and immigrants—all of these things are primarily for the benefit of elites.

Much of the promotional material for the Aoyama Program—whether from JANE, or Keidanren, or Rakuten press releases—emphasizes egalitarianism, or at least some shared prosperity. As one slide rather dryly puts it, a technologically advanced economy can “provide goods and services that granularly address manifold latent needs without disparity.” Keidanren talks about the “reform of individuals” in a “Super Smart Society.” It’s not promising. So many years on from the neoliberal turn, it’s hard to say these schemes do more than put a high-tech skin on austerity.

My skepticism about the benefits trickling down is why I’m bullish on a turn toward the Aoyama Program. It has the potential to secure the wealth and power of the elite. It’s tempting to emphasize the fact that the political system is rigged, or that it’s run by the corrupt offspring of prewar politicians—but it’s not run by fools. Having seen the crash of the 1990s and the neoliberal turn of the 2000s, they won’t be left behind this time. The LDP can’t help but notice that the New Aoyama Clan has come out ahead in the shift of the economy toward financialization, real estate, and technology. We can already see the LDP shifting: their Society 5.0 proposal is a recent example of that, with its proposals to digitize everything in sight.

Looking a bit closer at the LDP, Georgetown graduate and social media whiz Kono Taro must be a sign of what’s to come. The Minister of Administrative Reform and Regulatory Reform is also the New Aoyama Clan’s man in the LDP. Following his success in the private sector, he is interested in building links with Asian neighbors, enthusiastic about increasing immigration numbers, and the sworn enemy of old economy totems like the hanko and fax machine.

He remained popular throughout the pandemic, even with popular and media grousing about vaccine availability, and conducted fireside chats on his Youtube live streams. Even if he is shut out of the Prime Minister’s office by Suga and his allies, a resurrected Abe, or factional foes, like political legacy Kishida Fumio, or war nerd Ishiba Shigeru, Kono is likely to remain in Cabinet. Although he will be working within an LDP that has been less than enthusiastic about immanentizing the singularity, the realities of climbing out of the pandemic hole might mean taking Society 5.0 and JANE proposals seriously.

If the old politicians of the LDP begin to properly share the reins of power with the New Aoyama Clan, then the reorientation of the Japanese state will begin in earnest. What remains to be seen is who turns up for the spectacle.

It wasn’t mine, I swear. But I didn’t want to have to explain that while sitting in a tiger chair at a Public Security Bureau detention center. Fortunately, it never came to that: they glanced around and then walked out. The man across the table from me went back to work dividing lines with his Agricultural Bank of China debit card. The six-fingered Uzbek dancer got back up on the bar and undressed to a Eurobeat remix of a Mongolian folk song. Faces bent to the table.

I saw this scene replayed across China many times in the early 2000s, from provincial capitals to backwater towns. The nightlife ran on ketamine. If it wasn’t being openly displayed on club tables beside the fruit platters and bottle service jugs of Qoo and Red Label, then it was cut into neat lines and stashed in an ashtray. It appeared in Qzone photo albums, staged beside pink straws and stacks of red hundred-yuan notes.

Like the first specks of black mold on the drywall, the synthetic drug epidemic was a minor sign of deeper, more dangerous rot. It demonstrated that the Chinese party-state was losing its grip in the wake of the aggressive restructuring that had unleashed the private sector. It was unwilling or unable to fight petty vice, breaking with the policy of crushing social chaos through political campaigns.

The Communist Party, after all, had ended the century of humiliation that began with the First Opium War. The reappearance of heroin addicts in Golden Triangle border regions in the 1970s was startling enough, but that phenomenon could be blamed on the chaos across the border. And besides, there was too much lingering, powerful disgust at opiate abuse for it to spread much further. The government handled the rise in crime rates in the 1980s with the vicious Strike Hard campaign that locked up millions, but casual ketamine use in the heartland was allowed to fester.

As Deng Xiaoping completed his 1992 Southern Tour, began reforms in anticipation of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, and sidelined the conservatives inside the Communist Party, economic growth replaced the old sources of party-state legitimacy. Illicit drug eradication stopped being a matter of national liberation and came under the purview of simple law enforcement.

By the time ketamine started to trickle over the border from Hong Kong in the late 1990s, the party-state had already given up on its statist ideology and traditional sources of legitimacy, replacing them with aggressive depoliticization and the prosperity gospel of market success.

In the name of economic growth, the leadership was willing to overlook many things: melamine in baby formula, deadly factory fires, unrest as local governments seized land, and the fentanyl precursors that Chinese traffickers shipped to Mexican cartels. So long as economic growth kept accelerating, it didn’t matter much what the rising young urbanites did on their own time—provided those hobbies stayed safely apolitical.

China’s Ketamine Import Market

Ketamine’s arrival in 1970s China—as medicine, not as a vice—dovetails with the story of the ideological shift that would later lead to its widespread abuse. If not for the replacement of Maoist self-sufficiency with Dengist pragmatism, it might never have made it into the Chinese pharmacopeia.

Ketamine was an American invention. In the late 1950s, the venerable drug maker Parke, Davis & Co. tasked the Departments of Pharmacology and Anesthesiology at the University of Michigan Medical Center with developing inexpensive and reliable alternatives to narcotics derived from the opium poppy. The first product of those efforts had been phencyclidine, which was marketed under the trade names Sernyl and Sernylan but more commonly known as PCP. Ketamine was its cousin, intended to deliver analgesic effects without turning people violent, as PCP sometimes did in human tests. The drug was patented by Parke, Davis & Co. in 1966 and approved by the FDA under the trade name Ketalar in 1970.

It spread quickly through the Global South, since it was valuable emergency medicine in settings with undeveloped medical infrastructure. It was also an ideal battlefield anesthetic. It was easy to train people to administer an intramuscular injection of ketamine. Unlike with opioids, it was hard to accidentally kill a patient by suppressing their breathing. It provided the type of superficial anesthesia that worked when you needed to keep someone moving. PCP and ketamine work in similar ways: instead of numbing the body as an opiate would, they disconnect the subject from their body and environment.

In China, however, there was an ideological and pragmatic push to discover indigenous plants and techniques that could supplement the inelegant solutions provided by ether and chloroform. Research efforts focused more on acupuncture anesthesia than narcotics. Major anesthesiologists, such as the patriotic returnees Shang Deyan and Xie Rong, spent most of the Maoist era caught up in revolutionary criticism. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that key anesthesiologists returned to work.

The People’s Liberation Army eventually called for ketamine production. Up until then, if a soldier needed a slug pulled out of his gut in Korea or got horribly burned in a Soviet mortar attack in Heilongjiang, there wasn’t much to do for them, except shooting them up with whatever morphine was on hand. An unpublished internal document by Xie Rong shows that the People’s Liberation Army emphasized ketamine as a key element in “battle preparedness.” In 1979, when the PLA charged across the Vietnamese border to punish the Lê Duẩn for giving Pol Pot the boot, ketamine was finally in their arsenal. The many reports in People’s Military Surgeon on the use of ketamine for battlefield anesthesia through the 1980s prove its efficacy—and also show that there was a lot of the stuff floating around.

The fact that ketamine did not slip from the medkit to the streets is a testament to the control the party-state had over its charges—and also perhaps the limited appeal of ketamine to anyone that had access to morphine. The idea of abusing ketamine was introduced from the outside world.

Shortly after ketamine got FDA approval, recreational drug users in San Francisco and Los Angeles immediately got their hands on it and sold it as a powder variously called K, 1980 Acid, and Special LA Coke. While working-class kids used PCP to replace barbiturates and heroin, ketamine attracted the same young, white middle-class Americans that were taking LSD.

In the late 1970s, leaders in the psychedelic movement trumpeted ketamine as its future. When Western dropouts hit Goa, they discovered that Indian pharmaceutical plants were turning the stuff out in bulk. It became a staple on the Hippie Trail, eventually carried as far as Hong Kong.

By 1999, the drug had exploded in popularity in Hong Kong itself, first with expatriate partiers returning from Goa with medical-grade ketamine diverted from pharmaceutical manufacturers in the Indian state of Maharashtra, then with locals that used it as a cheap alternative or chaser for MDMA or methamphetamine. By 2006, nearly three-quarters of self-reported drug users in Hong Kong claimed to have used ketamine.

With the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen increasingly porous after the 1997 handover, it wasn’t long before ketamine made the leap, too. The Chinese government’s Annual Report on Drug Control started claiming seizures of ketamine by the ton in 2003, and it managed to beat heroin seizure numbers in 2007 and 2008.

Ketamine poured into the fresh market provided by hundreds of millions of migrant workers heading south to labor in the post-WTO factory of the world. The legal monthly minimum wage in Shenzhen circa 2000 was $547 USD, $450 USD in Guangdong, and $420 USD in Fujian. But most workers were making significantly less than that—even as low as $150 USD a month. A night at a club could cost most of a month’s salary, but a gram of ketamine was only around $6-18 USD.

Throughout the 1990s, hundreds of millions of workers were tossed out of jobs, or shuffled into the ill-defined category of xiagang: still on the employment rolls and receiving certain social security benefits from their former work unit, but with no work assigned and no wages. The workers in the xiagang category in the 1990s were generally women. Employer preferences in the hiring of migrant workers led to a workforce dominated by unmarried young women. As a result, one factor that gave ketamine a boost was that it gave these women a break from the strict gender codes around drinking booze.

A drug like ketamine might have felt taboo, but migrant workers in China lived lives that their parents couldn’t have dreamed of: they were more mobile, of course, but they also drank more and had more premarital sex. There’s a reason that syphilis—declared extinct in the People’s Republic—saw a rapid resurgence.

It wasn’t long before ketamine was carried out of the coastal manufacturing centers as workers moved around.

The best way to track the progress of the drug is through public security sector journals. In 2003, two workers attached to a Public Security Bureau compulsory drug rehabilitation lock-up in the city of Wenzhou suggested that ketamine had recently jumped from the Pearl River Delta to the Yangtze River Delta. In 2005, a magazine published by the General Administration of Customs talked about ketamine being distributed in the mail from Fujian. The journal of Henan’s Public Security Bureau noted its presence in dance halls in Zhengzhou a year later. By 2009, there were notes in a legal newsletter about discovering ketamine as far afield as Lhasa in Tibet.

The Party’s Red-Black Nexus

By the time ketamine started trickling across the border, the state’s grip had loosened to such an extent that it could no longer fight against vice.

The compromises reached between reformist and conservative factions in the 1980s had resulted in the ‘90s in a regime of uneven reform, with the economy split between dynamic coastal growth in the Special Economic Zones and a crumbling Maoist framework everywhere else.

Deng Xiaoping made this growth his clear priority, downplaying political stability and ideological work as he stated that the “crucial factor” was growing the economy: “Why do the people support us? Because over the last ten years, our economy has been developing and developing visibly.” Deng Xiaoping Theory and Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents successively mutated China’s official Marxist ideology, which paved the way for private entrepreneurs to join the Communist Party. The state stepped aside for the private sector. Workers, meanwhile, were set free to sink or swim.

State-owned enterprises tended not to generate profits, so the government often tried to reform or privatize them, or even allow them to go bankrupt. It was laid-off workers from these firms that inflated the ranks of xiagang across China.

The initial focuses of these reforms were underperforming smaller enterprises on the periphery of the economy. But eventually, all except the very largest firms were opened up for sale or lease. By the end of the 1990s, the government had fully or partially privatized the majority of state-owned enterprises. For labor-intensive industrial enterprises, seventy percent were at least partially privatized by 2001.

These state-owned enterprises had offered more than employment and wages to their employees, providing a wide range of social services through their danwei work unit system. These perks included housing and childcare, as well as the unofficial benefits that come from close-knit communities. The danwei system also performed a granular supervisory and disciplinary function: it allowed the state to officially monitor workers and unofficially kept them under the watchful eye of community members that usually shared housing with them.

With political reforms, these workers entered a floating population, unprotected and unmonitored by the state.

The number of migrant workers in this floating population was in the tens of millions in the 1980s, but grew to include hundreds of millions by the 2000s. These hundreds of millions of workers, most of them in their twenties or thirties, were suddenly thousands of miles from home, free of the supervision of their families and work units, and forming new social networks.

But these reforms didn’t just inflate the demand side of the drug market. Smart operators could take advantage of these widespread privatizations to expand their capital base for production too. In one infamous case, a crew of Hong Kong gangsters maneuvered to get a struggling state-owned factory called Taiyuan Pharmaceutical to make their ketamine for them.

Taiyuan Pharmaceutical was opened as one of the 156 key projects of the First Five-Year Plan, the exact copy of a factory in Shijiazhuang. The Taiyuan factory made sulfonamide antibiotics, while the Shijiazhuang factory made penicillin. Neither had any competition, testaments to the redundancy-reducing efficiency drives of central planning. In 1979, when Deng sent PLA infantry and tanks over the Vietnamese border, chemists from Beijing and Shanghai arrived en masse in Taiyuan to convert some of the factory’s workshops to produce ketamine. But once hostilities ended, so did the ketamine market. Antibiotics didn’t prove much of a cash cow, so the operation began to flounder.

The Shanxi government struggled to find a buyer for the forty-year-old pharmaceutical plant in the northwestern hinterland; a merger with the more successful Shijiazhuang operation went nowhere. When a Hong Kong gangster arrived in 2002 to order several tons of ketamine—paid for with cash—nobody spent much time scrutinizing the deal.

If the ketamine hadn’t been intercepted by Guangdong police on its way to Hong Kong, it’s likely that nobody would have raised the alarm until much later. Even the pharmaceutical firms that were doing well didn’t have much objection to selling ketamine. Only five firms had a license to produce it. But in 2003, authorities carried out an investigation into how a pair of drug dealers got their hands on 150 kilograms of ketamine and determined that illicit manufacturing took place at 35 pharmaceutical firms in eight provinces.

The drug trade compromised not only these former jewels of the command economy, but even the party leadership and bureaucracy.

With the party-state in retreat, alternatives arose. One of them was the red-black nexus, a coalition of bureaucrats and gangsters. The bureaucrats and party officials provided the criminals with legitimacy and organizational support, while the criminals offered the politicians a source of income that could be kicked up to the next level. Private enterprises often benefited from the patronage and protection of the first two categories, adding a third element to that nexus. As long as the money kept coming, higher levels tended to be uninterested in how it was generated.

They also turned a blind eye to practices like land seizures, that filled the coffers of many local governments. Municipalities expropriated state-owned land from residents, sometimes with the help of organized crime muscle, offering it up for sale to private investors. These seizures only became an issue when riots over them made the news.

This contributed to a general atmosphere of social chaos, and it directly assisted in allowing ketamine to be manufactured inside China, instead of being imported through Hong Kong.

One example was Boshe, a village in Guangdong in which the party-state was almost completely absent by the early 2000s, having delegated authority to a local elite organized through the red-black nexus. Close to a third of Boshe residents were involved in the drug trade, all operating under the direction of Cai Dongjia, a local clan patriarch who had become party secretary of Boshe and representative in the Shanwei Municipal People’s Congress. The money he earned through manufacturing ketamine and methamphetamine, as well as by acting as a clearinghouse for shipments of drugs toward Hong Kong, smoothed Cai Dongjia’s climb up the political ladder. His position in the party allowed him to traffic even more dope in turn.

The Return of the State

When I describe club tables covered in powder to anyone too young to have been in nightclubs in the 2000s, they’re a little stunned. By the 2010s, ketamine had mostly disappeared.

It disappeared from clubs. It was scarce in karaoke boxes. I still saw it sometimes—snorted by two sculptors during a screening of Beetlejuice at an art space in Tianhe sometime in 2013, offered for sale at Catwalk in Yuexiu around 2014, and flaunted by some girls at a bar in Datong in 2015. But it was nothing like back in the day.

A 2014 study of Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Shanghai’s water treatment plants searched for drugs and their metabolites in wastewater. It discovered a sharp decline in ketamine use, with significant prevalence only in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. An even wider sewage study involving eighteen cities concluded that ketamine use was in decline. A team from Renmin University in Beijing, checking for traces of ketamine and metabolites in the wastewater of several cities, found a 67% decrease in ketamine usage in 2015 alone. The China National Narcotics Control Commission reported a steep decline in busts of “production dens.”

The clandestine manufacture of ketamine that began toward the beginning of the 2010s was itself a sign of a problem with supply since it seemed to suggest that there was not a significant amount of pharmaceutical ketamine being diverted. The authorities were seizing more ketamine, but much of it was being interdicted at border crossings, rather than seized from manufacturers in the country. The increase in seizures of ketamine at laboratories in Myanmar and Vietnam also pointed to victory over the ketamine scourge.

There were external factors involved in this drought, as we can see from the global ketamine shortage of 2014, directly linked to changes to the drug’s legal status in India. But the real reason for the internal shift in China is that the years of chaos came to an end with the return of the state under Xi Jinping. Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour and WTO accession in 2001 are signposts on the road to state retreat; the first term of Xi Jinping as General Secretary marked the initial signs of the party-state’s return.

In the years leading up to 1992, conservatives and reformers publicly struggled to decide the nation’s direction. In the years leading up to 2001, Jiang Zemin, Zhu Rongji, and other members of the Shanghai Clique sought to beat back factional rivals and theoretical criticism from figures like Deng Liqun, who advocated for a more conservative turn.

Similarly, the years leading up to 2012 and the elevation of Xi Jinping were a contentious period: Hu Jintao, general secretary from 2002 to 2012, had pushed a populist message about reducing runaway postsocialist inequality and improving grassroots democracy. But he was undermined by the continued influence of Jiang Zemin’s henchmen in the Shanghai Clique. Years of decentralization in party power and the hollowing out of state capacity further thwarted his efforts, making it hard to contain the unprecedented unrest over land seizures, ethnic strife in Tibet and Xinjiang, and increasingly organized liberal dissent.

Jiang Shigong, writing about the transitional period between Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, describes “political forces, inside the party and out, that hoped to pit the Deng Xiaoping era”—state retreat, marketization, depoliticization—“against the Mao Zedong era”—unimaginable state power under personalized leadership. Jiang accused these political forces of hoping “to use the Reform and Opening line created by Deng Xiaoping to negate the socialist system established during the Mao Zedong era, and that [the reformists] advocated undertaking subversive reforms of the political system…”

The party under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao had promised the moon and failed to deliver much. They were in the cockpit, but none of the controls actually worked. Those unnamed advocates that Jiang Shigong describes as pushing political reforms might have hoped to maintain power and wealth through a further weakening of the party-state. Xi Jinping went in another direction: he wanted to restore the link between party and state, the capabilities of the renewed party-state monolith, and the ability of central leadership to call the shots.

Xi’s opponents derided his anti-corruption drive as mere factional warfare. There’s truth to that: he had seen Hu Jintao undermined and knew that it would be impossible to manage the party without taking out the remnants of previous regimes. But the extension of the drive from the “tigers,” like senior leader and Shanghai Clique capo Zhou Yongkang, down to the “flies” helped disrupt the red-black nexus that allowed Cai Dongjia to flourish. Within the space of several years, more than fifty thousand officials and bureaucrats were locked up.

The anti-corruption drive was only one part of a multi-pronged assault. Xi set up the National Security Commission as a new institution to lead it, circumventing any potential challenges or foot-dragging from the bureaucracy.

Xi Jinping and his deputies ran the crackdown on drugs, corruption, and organized crime simultaneously. It was similar to the anti-opium drive of 1949-1952, which took place alongside the land reform, the purging of landlords, consolidation of borders, and the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries. The latter had likewise been aimed at shoring up the leadership’s power; Mao’s loyalists mopped up Nationalists, bandit raiders, and anyone that looked at a PLA man the wrong way.

The number of drug-related arrests and convictions spiked. Local jurisdictions established student anti-drug volunteer teams. This crackdown was as egalitarian as any good Maoist campaign, sweeping up the wealthy and powerful, even throwing Jackie Chan’s son in jail. They went after artists and intellectuals, maintaining an unofficial blacklist of those who got caught with dope. Even the foreigners got shut down, with cops marching into clubs and ordering urine tests.

The crackdown was explicitly political, with state media reporting that it was “primarily aimed at consolidating the [Communist Party] ruling foundation, strengthening political power at the grassroots level and safeguarding lasting peace and stability for the country.” This is especially interesting from a Western perspective: the naked political imperative of the state in its actions is much more taboo in the West, though of course no less present.

These drug war methods broke with those used by Hu Jintao a few years prior. In the late 2000s, government authorities distributed 2.4 million pocketbooks on illicit drugs in Shanghai, built a thousand “anti-drug education centers” in the city of Maoming, aired 80 anti-drug TV specials and commercials, published 10 special anti-drug editions of provincial newspapers, and launched an anti-drug awareness week on state broadcaster CCTV. By comparison, Xi Jinping’s drug crackdown looked more like the 1983 Strike Hard campaign, when the conservatives lashed out at both the nebulous concepts of spiritual pollution and bourgeois liberalism, as well as street crime and public dancing.

Cai Dongjia, the corrupt local clan leader and party secretary of Boshe, got a bullet in the head. Boshe, formerly a hive of the drug trade, became a tourist site; a canny entrepreneur took advantage of the area’s expertise in chemistry and set up an herbal medicine operation.

Xi and his deputies tweaked the role that economic growth played as a key source of legitimacy. China’s growth was not to be merely about GDP numbers, but was leading toward an ideal of common prosperity. The most notable tweaks perhaps came from Wang Huning, a key architect of Hu Jintao’s populist message and a Politburo Standing Committee member since 2017.

Xi’s reforms didn’t bring firms back under complete state ownership. After more than four decades since Reform and Opening Up, and two decades on from the restructuring ordered before WTO accession, that move would have been unfeasible and undesirable to top decision-makers like Wang Huning and Wang Yang. Instead, decision-making at state-owned and private enterprises—and at the various combinations thereof—was put back in the hands of the Communist Party. In the wake of the Nineteenth National Party Congress in 2017, the reformers stepped up the presence and power of Communist Party branches in enterprises and tasked them with ensuring “social responsibility.” The fact that this prompted panicked articles at The Wall Street Journal about Xi Jinping bringing private enterprise to heel could be a sign of its effectiveness.

Looking back at Taiyuan Pharmaceutical, it seems unlikely that a similar disaster like gangsters getting a state-owned factory to produce ketamine for them could be repeated in the face of now-increased party power. Reforming the pharmaceutical system is a work in progress, which involves setting aside state money to increase research and development budgets, but the days of crumbling state-run factories churning out ketamine are over.

Taming the private sector involved decreasing the floating population. It was the newly unmoored workers who consumed the ketamine that first flowed into the Pearl River Delta and who then carried it around the country.

A massive floating population was one of the key contributors to the chaos of the years after the 1992 Southern Tour. Hundreds of millions found themselves disconnected from their hometowns by geography and from their adopted communities by the lack of a path to legal residency in the city. This contributed significantly to crime: even if the police statistics from China are sometimes unreliable, tending to undercount offenses by migrant workers without legal status, special economic zones were known for high crime rates.

The financial crisis of 2008 pushed workers inland from the coasts. A state initiative for “westward relocation of investment” accelerated the process. By the 2010s, the proportion of migrant workers going to the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta had begun to fall. By 2018, 74% of all migrant workers were employed in their home province—and 40% of those in their own region—leaving a mere 26% to seek jobs beyond provincial borders. By 2020, the number of migrant workers—both long- and short-distance migrants—was falling.

The reform of the residency registration system helps direct migrant workers toward smaller centers, but also gives them a path to settle down in booming coastal cities. Reforms had been hamstrung for years by the power of local party leaders and bureaucrats to make decisions on controlling their own populations. Xi’s reform puts control more firmly in the hands of the central leadership.

The Future of National Rejuvenation

Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang have transformed China over the past decade. The drive to tamp down on the chaos of the post-1992 years by returning the party-state to power is visible most concretely in the re-centralization of power, but its new ideological underpinning has been just as important.

Think of ketamine as the appearance of Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions in a patient with HIV: an opportunistic cancer that is one of the symptoms of the chaos. You can blast the lesions with radiation, but what you really need is powerful antiretrovirals to shut down the root cause: the virus replicating in the body. In this case, the ideological root-cause solution is restoring the moral legitimacy and grassroots political power of the party-state.

Neo-Maoist Zhang Hongliang has written about what he calls the ethical decline of post-socialist China: “The most prominent features of the period between 1981 and present is the stunning accumulation of wealth and the shocking rate of moral degradation.” This is suspiciously non-Marxist–Leninist-Maoist language for Zhang Hongliang to be using, but he is actually drawing on the party’s own ideas. Xi Jinping’s direction for the nation is one in which the party-state will enforce a new moral age.

Morality and other less tangible qualities like cultural confidence, or the Core Socialist Values are part of how Xi Jinping has tamed the nation. The idea of “spiritual civilization”—the opposite of “material civilization”—is a concept that was used by leaders like Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, but mostly as an ineffective counterbalance to the glory of getting rich. With legitimacy uncoupled from pure economic growth, it can begin to mean something.

Ketamine was one of many symptoms of the chaotic environment that was unleashed by the retreat of the party-state in the 1990s and 2000s. The story of how Xi cleaned it up reveals the much larger shifts at work.

The assault on corruption, crime, and drugs, and the establishment of the National Security Commission signaled that the Communist Party was retaking its leading role. Likewise, the theoretical updates of Xi Jinping Thought about the party-state’s role in Chinese society are part of the updated constitution. That update combines the humane reformism of Wang Huning and Wang Yang with a new moral code to replace the growth obsession of the 1990s and 2000s.

It remains to be seen how long the Communist Party and Chinese state under Xi Jinping can hold out and resist the lure of financialization of the economy. But as China gets richer and its factional lines get drawn across social battles instead of economic ones, we can expect rhetoric about moral regeneration to become more potent. The party’s turn towards encouraging family and child-rearing might well be the first sign of things to come. When all your political capital has been invested in the narrative of national rejuvenation, there’s no easy way out when the low-hanging fruits of the market start to run low.

Zhong was born in 1970 and went to college in the mid-1980s. If he had been born a decade earlier, he would have come of age before the university entrance exams were reinstated. At that time, he would have been forced to elbow aside the thousands of elite youth who returned from the countryside to sit the reinstated gaokao. If he had been born a decade later, he would never have known the opportunities afforded to him by growing up in the twilight of the socialist economy. He was old enough to have lived under an alternative to market logic and he was young enough that he could get on the internet to complain about it. He was too young to take part in the “culture fever” of the 1980s, but old enough that he could still soak up some of its revolutionary atmosphere.

Zhong Qing’s activity on the bulletin boards of the early 2000s prefigured and possibly inspired the vision and rhetoric of the Xi era. It was also among the first instances of a fork from party orthodoxy among young, dissatisfied Chinese professionals. Twenty years later, the vision he inspired has reached prominence. But the party’s increasing focus on financialization over industry, and the growing demand for an exit from industrial modernity among the most alienated segments of China’s middle class, suggest a coming fork in China’s carefully developed social order.

The Industrial Party

As Reform and Opening Up kicked into high gear, there was a new openness toward questioning what direction the country might take. The incarceration or death of the last generation of leaders and the end of the Cold War meant that grand narratives were up for debate. The new helmsmen—Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang, Hu Yaobang, and Jiang Zemin—were still feeling their way toward an ideological consensus. Discussions about Alvin Toffler’s futurism, neo-Confucianism, critical theory, the scientific merits of qigong exercises, and the relative benefits of accepting colonialism could take place publicly.

The events of 1989 turned down the volume on intellectual debate. The leadership reached a consensus on key issues. It became too risky to let a cultural fever turn into political paralysis again.

The party re-marginalized the intellectuals and its leaders turned instead to their friends at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. As the end of the 1990s approached and the promise of World Trade Organization accession was extended, the state further relinquished control over the economy. They tossed more state-owned enterprises to the market and embarked on liberalization of the banking system. By the end of the decade, the number of workers laid off stood at around a hundred million. Fortunately, relations had greatly improved since the Americans objected to the way the party handled things in the summer of 1989.

There was less space than there had been in the 1980s for dissenting views to run in traditional media, but internet message boards had flourished on computer networks at elite universities. By the early 2000s, they were spreading out onto commercial networks. Men like Zhong—particularly with academic backgrounds in science, technology, and engineering—found a community online. Their boards shared a focus on military affairs and current events.

In an essay written years later, Wang Xiaodong, the writer and famous stoker of nationalist sentiment, retroactively christened them the Industrial Party.

These young men were ideologically heterogeneous but united by the nationalistic undercurrent of the 1990s. They took a step beyond angry or pitiful patriotic rhetoric, moving instead to discussions on how industrial policy and the use of unparalleled scientific expertise could guide the country. Their core idea was that industrialization should become, like science and democracy, a universal value. They were reacting to the seeming abandonment of industrialization as the country shifted to a market economy.

In one of the defining moments of the new tendency, Zhong squared off with fellow Industrial Party member Chen Jing in an online debate on the future of the nation.

Chen and Zhong agreed on the basics—accelerate industrial development and technological advancement—but disagreed on the question of opening up the economy. Chen Jing sided with official political and economic orthodoxy, which relied on foreign direct investment, low-end export-oriented manufacturing, and allowing certain sectors to be exposed to the market. Zhong, meanwhile, went as far as predicting the collapse of the Chinese economy if current policies continued.

The Zhong Qing program called for technocratic state control of key sectors to shield them from competition. It also advocated a radical industrial policy that could catapult the nation forward and give it a technological and political lead over the West.

This debate caused an early split in the Industrial Party, but Zhong seems to have been vindicated by history—and by a publishing deal. The material he had blasted Chen Jing with was collected into a book called Scrub Dishes or Study?, published in 2005, while Zhong was working as an electrical engineer in Japan.

The title draws on a metaphor commonly employed to describe Chinese economic policy: a Chinese student gets a visa and travels to America; instead of taking on the costs of pursuing education, he decides he would rather take a steady job and quick cash scrubbing dishes in the back of a restaurant. The construction of an industrial base and technical expertise between Liberation in 1949 and Reform and Opening Up in the ‘70s required an investment of capital and effort without immediate benefit—but the China that joined the WTO was content to wash dishes.

In the book, Zhong took the example of Japan, which developed itself in the postwar period by allowing central planning of core industries, and by harnessing the scientific spirit and expertise built up during the previous century of industrialization. They built their industrial base with a wealth of technical expertise. The same was possible in China. Zhong predicted that China would eventually reach Japan’s level of GDP, but it could leapfrog the developed nations with aggressive industrial policy and the development of science and technology.

He was writing at a time when the idea that China might abandon its comparative advantage in low-end manufacturing to start building jets and chips was still a radical one. There was little conception that China could or should challenge Western hegemony, much less that it might overtake the developed West.

In the years that followed those early internet discussions and publications, the Chinese found themselves continually humiliated by the United States and Europe. In the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics, the Western media’s coverage of race riots in Lhasa and terrorism in Xinjiang, capped with political blustering and threats of boycotts, brought people into the streets across China. The Anti-CNN website, a reactionary clearinghouse founded by huckster Rao Jin, got funding from Eric X. Li and praise from state media.

Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao were replaced by Xi Jinping. The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation began.

Under Xi, it seemed as if the key ideas of the Industrial Party—restoring the grand development narrative, cherishing scientific thinking, and leapfrogging the West through a focus on advanced technology—might energize the leadership. The economic theories of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era still leaned on an interpretation of Marxist economics. But the idea of developing and unleashing advanced productive forces through scientific and technical innovation was strongly reminiscent of what had been discussed on military affairs boards in the early 2000s.

It’s conceivable that Industrial Party message board theorists and Communist Party policymakers arrived independently at the idea of industrial development as a way of both transitioning from an export-oriented economy and of winning legitimacy from nationalists. It’s also conceivable that some members of the embryonic Industrial Party—young men from elite science and technology academic backgrounds concerned about the nation—later found themselves in positions to guide Communist Party policy. But the anonymous nature of message boards and the black box of Chinese policymaking means that it’s difficult to establish a causal relationship between Industrial Party thinkers and the official turn to national rejuvenation through industrial policy.

Whatever the case, the Industrial Party moved from obscure opposition to accelerationist cheerleaders just as the message boards were giving way to social media. Online thinkers on China’s development could now reach a much wider audience.

Zhong Qing stepped aside for a younger generation.

Passing the Industrialist Torch

Shenzhen Ningnanshan, another anonymous blogger who has written extensively on industrial policy and development, has become the new face of the Industrial Party. Little is known about the writer’s true identity. He’s been credited as Ning Nanshan in his latest published work, which looks closer to a real name. His online biography only reveals that he is a middle-class man from Shenzhen, who possibly works in supply chain management.

He echoes the gospel of saving the nation and breaking Western hegemony through technological development. The frame is backed by Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era and energized by a trade war with the United States.

He has nearly seven hundred thousand followers on Weibo and a quarter million on Zhihu, which means he is being listened to—and by people with the ability to put state power behind his suggestions. The link between the turn to industrialization gospel around 2011 and the Industrial Party of Zhong Qing is unclear, but it is almost certain that Shenzhen Ningnanshan has—or had—the ears of the leadership.

In an interesting contrast to the West, the Chinese Communist Party listens to bloggers and message board theorists. Sometimes they do it so that they know who to put under house arrest during key anniversaries; more often, it’s so that they know what’s being said about their policies. They are particularly interested in the massively popular finance and development bloggers. These circles are usually—but not always—immune from the routine online rectification campaigns that see widespread takedowns even of more innocuous social media accounts and websites. The People’s Online Public Opinion Annual Report in 2011 specifically mentioned the value of tracking the opinions of “high-income groups, such as real estate investors, businessmen, and investors.”

Political authorities have increased their surveillance of what is being posted, but also recognized that posters can give valuable feedback and ideas to the leadership. In China, ministries and even smaller state bodies have access to sources like Online Public Opinion, a People’s Daily publication that compiles online thought, and other service providers.

Going the other direction—spreading the message from the leadership to the people—it is clear that those in power have confidence in Shenzhen Ningnanshan’s message. He is routinely quoted in state media, with the Global Times translating one op-ed into English. Shenzhen Ningnanshan’s most recent book on industrial policy was published by Red Flag Publishing House, which is closely linked to the theoretical party journal Qiushi.

The first half of his latest book—The Future is on China’s Side—is a celebration of China’s accomplishments:

In the four major first-tier cities of Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou, the per capita GDP mark of $20,000 USD has already been broken, but second-tier cities like Nanjing, Suzhou, Changzhou, Wuxi, Zhuhai, Wuhan, Changsha, and Hangzhou are already there, as well. They have already reached or exceeded developed nations. Within ten years, the entire country will break that mark, putting us within striking distance of Portugal, the Czech Republic, and Greece.

In his view, this is explained by China’s incredible technical innovation. There are jet fighters, petroleum exports, high-performance bearings, offshore oil drilling, high-stress springs, agricultural chemicals, titanium alloys, and optical membranes. He even boasts about China’s tire industry: ChemChina’s Pirelli deal made them the fourth-largest manufacturer of commercial vehicle tires. There’s plenty about high-end manufacturing, finance, and software, too. The earnest young nationalists discussing industrial policy on military affairs bulletin boards in 2005 could only dream of a position like this.

In the remaining three sections in the book, Shenzhen Ningnanshan gives a roadmap for a radical industrialization policy that will allow China to break Western hegemony and accelerate past developed nations. The focus of that policy, he suggests, would be aerospace, robotics, artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering, pharmaceutical, energy, and information and communications technology. These are mostly areas where the West still has an advantage but relies on Chinese expertise or equipment. Tesla is one example; the United States has a clear advantage in electric vehicles but needs Chinese battery technology. One sector that the West has a clear advantage in is biotechnology, so Shenzhen Ningnanshan suggests that should be a target for investment by the state.

Expertise and equipment aside, he believes that China can leapfrog the West through advantages of scale, as well as state planning. Artificial intelligence is one example, with the American government having nothing akin to the State Council’s “Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan,” which lays out a scheme for developing the industry that extends out to 2030.

For Shenzhen Ningnanshan, there is nothing that industrialization cannot achieve. But there are signs that the Communist Party is no longer following the program as diligently as they once did.

The Industrial Party as represented by Shenzhen Ningnanshan, as well as his northern counterpart Beijing Saidong, would like things to go a step further. Both writers have expressed concern that putting financialization of the economy over industrial development will end the party prematurely.

Shenzhen’s Ningnanshan’s online writing has more bite than his cheery book for a state publisher. He made waves in 2018 for a piece questioning the liveability of cities, titled “My Complaints as a Member of the Middle Class.” He warned the leadership not to pursue the Hong Kong model of using real estate to “squeeze the common people to make a minority of capitalists extremely wealthy.” This post also specifically mentioned his readership among the higher-ups.

Beijing Saidong has likewise warned that the country could “enter a period of declining fertility and aging population much more rapidly than Japan did, and while we’re at a much lower rate of development.”

Shenzhen Nanshan describes the worst-case scenario as a continued drop in fertility among the majority, with a stable birth rate among ethnic and religious minorities, as well as the introduction of an immigration program, leading to serious social conflict; a middle class slaving to pay off mortgages, while even the relatively wealthy live in conditions worse than those enjoyed by the average Westerner; and most people living in small, cramped accommodations similar to the cage homes of Hong Kong.

But contrary to what either Shenzhen Ningnanshan or Zhong Qing would advise, COVID-19 recovery in China has relied on freeing up credit and triggering a real estate market boom.

What Shenzhen Ningnanshan and Beijing Saidong are talking about in their unsentimental ways is the idea that financialization robs people of their humanity and the nation of its lifeblood. Financialization reduces people to numbers.

That’s what the controversy around 996 working hours—9 AM through 9 PM, 6 days a week—is about. That’s what the JASIC protests were about. The government introduced the term “low-end population” during a municipal effort to clear out migrant workers and unregistered residents after a fire ravaged an apartment block in Beijing’s Daxing District, killing nineteen, injuring eight, and leaving dozens homeless.

If the alternative to financialization and giving up the grand narrative of national rejuvenation is not industrial policy, then what is it?

Digital Counter-Modernity

Some answers have again emerged from the world of “keyboard politics.” This online political philosophizing differs in significant ways from that practiced by the Industrial Party on message boards in the 2000s. Yao Yunfan has argued that there was a significant change in online politics around 2008. Closer online supervision and the dominance of a handful of sites gave heterodox thinkers stable platforms supported by algorithms. Meanwhile, those at the extremes are forced to use creative language to express their opinion and generate clicks.

This helps explain phenomena like Liu Zhongjing: he is more notable to the few Westerners familiar with him for his map of an alternate China carved up into dozens of independent states than for his ideas about Spenglerian ethnic invention. Creative language helped him evade censorship, while also setting him apart from other rightist voices on the Chinese internet.

In recent years, the most durable keyboard politics phenomenon has been Ruguanism: “entering the pass studies.” Ruguanism analogizes contemporary China’s relationship to the liberal international order with the Jurchen people’s breaching of the Great Wall—during which important battles happened at the Shanhai Pass or Shanhaiguan—and their later takeover of the leadership of China as the Qing Dynasty. The Chinese are the barbarians, kept outside the wall and forced to make a living selling ginseng. But with proper strategy, they can topple the corrupt Ming represented by Western hegemony. Although the metaphorical breaching of the Shanhaiguan is more philosophical and academic, this vision of the world sees a military showdown with the Western powers as imminent. Preparing for war is certainly one way to handle economic directionlessness.

The Ruguanism discourse also introduced Cao Fengze and his philosophy of Caoism, which helped popularize the idea of involution. The essence of involution is that although output per worker grows with technological development, that connection is eventually severed, leading to decreased output. Cao takes the metaphor of Ruguanism and extends it to explain not only the situation of China against Western hegemony but also the problems of the individual worker. The frame is straightforward:

Major premise: We have to work 996 working hours because of “involution.”

Minor premise: “Involution” is caused by the Great Ming (America) hegemony and their ability to expropriate the fruits of our labor.

Conclusion: We have to “enter the pass” and destroy the Great Ming to live a peaceful life, get a pretty girl, live in a big house (achieve a standard of living similar to that of developed nations).

The ideas of Caoism eventually led to posters suggesting a more pragmatic and personal response to involution. If you can’t wait for China to break through the pass and you find yourself jogging on the treadmill of life, the solution is to find your own personal “Africa,” where primitive accumulation of a sort might still be possible:

Your very own Africa is waiting, as long as you open your eyes and fight for it. That Africa might be a job that pays less but doesn’t force you to do overtime. It might be a move to a second-, third-, or fourth-tier city. It might mean sending your kids to a less competitive school that’s more affordable and taking them out of their forty grand a year programming classes. It’s 2020: if you’re still a slave, it’s because you want to be. If you can get over yourself, you don’t have to live that way anymore.

There are abstract Africas out there too. The new urban cores built from scratch in peripheral areas—like the “ghost city” Kangbashi District in Ordos, or projects like Nanhui New City—are one way that China has tried to create its own. Building tertiary industry and agribusiness on the fringes are other strategies. This is related to the recent celebration of young people returning to the countryside. Reports on the phenomenon focus on things like fish farming and fruit growing. But even they are bound by the same law of Caoist involution. The inevitability of climate change means that some of the agricultural and industrial projects underway or proposed will not survive.

Then, there’s Li Ziqi.

No normal account of keyboard politics would include Li, but she might have the most potent and thorough response to the problems of the age. If the dream of industrialization is really dead, and if a future of cage homes or of seizing comparative advantage running a fish farm in a fourth-tier “Africa” is not appealing, the answer for individuals might be deindustrialization. Like the ascetic for Siddhārtha, Li is pointing to the exit: exit from progress, exit from modernity, and exit from the nation.

Since 2015, Li has been making videos about rural life. They are photographed through soft focus filters. Everything is clean and dreamy. She rarely speaks. She plants, picks, and spins cotton. She preserves persimmons. She cooks over a wood stove. She does embroidery. She grows flowers. She washes her grandmother’s feet. She makes furniture out of bamboo. She pickles vegetables. She wears modest, traditional clothes.

The project began when she gave up on a dream of living in the city. She had worked as a waitress, her biography says, starting when most kids are still in high school, and then as a DJ. She returned home—a village in Sichuan, roughly equidistant between Xi’an and Chengdu—to look after her grandmother, who had cared for her after her parents separated and her father died. The videos were originally intended to generate interest in her Taobao shop.

There were rural video bloggers before Li, but she went in another direction: pure fantasy. In her carefully curated pastoral vision, there is not much of the modern. Rare glimpses of walk-behind tractors, plastic basins, or farmyard trash are jarring. You might guess she is in Western China, but she weaves together culinary and craft traditions from multiple regions. One of her most popular videos embroiled her in a controversy about the birthplace of kimchi.

This is a vision of life without conveniences, untangled from the cash nexus, and unencumbered by modernity. The idea of a rural utopia is itself novel for China. Despite being a nation that only recently embarked on rapid urbanization, there are few positive cultural images of rural life in socialist or postsocialist China.

The back-to-the-land movement that produced “roots-seeking” literature saw artists—many of whom had been part of the group of elite students involuntarily rusticated during the Cultural Revolution—returning to adopted or actual native places. There, many attempted to reconstruct a local culture that might challenge the grand narrative of the Chinese nation. But few of these books made decamping to the hinterland particularly attractive, and most were composed in the comfort of studios in Beijing.

The fact that they were written far away from their subject is a jab at their authenticity. But it’s not particularly important to understanding what writers like Han Shaogong or Zhang Chengzhi were attempting. We need not get too hung up on the authenticity of Li Ziqi, either. We already know she was snatched from relative obscurity by a content producer, and it’s not unfair to think of her as the latest iteration of manufactured web celebrities. Before her, there were Hooligan Sparrow and Furong Jiejie. Hooligan Sparrow is the online alter ego of Ye Haiyan, known at first for sexually suggestive pictures and then for her activism on behalf of sex workers. Furong Jiejie, a charmingly oblivious loser played by Shi Hengxia, got launched by the online public relations whiz Chen Mo from the Tianya message board in the mid-2000s.

Li’s “romantic counter-modernist”—to borrow a term from Maia Ramnath’s Decolonizing Anarchism—rural fantasy is in reaction to the celebration of industrialization as the solution to China’s problems, as well as to the financialization of the economy.

What makes her project interesting is that it is personal. Her rural fantasy is one that revolves around her.

That choice must be personal because collective action is politically risky. Since 1949, any movements that might be classifiable as representing agrarian resistance have come under pressure that could not be withstood. The Mashan Uprising in Guizhou in 1956 lasted seven months before being smashed. The White Sun Society managed to hold out in the mountains for years during the 1960s and ’70s, but even the Cultural Revolution’s distraction couldn’t stop their leaders from being executed. The rebels of Pingyuan in Yunnan found that even stolen military arms couldn’t hold back the tide. Even the holdout communes like Nanjie and Huaxi have given in to the logic of marketization. One could go back before 1949 for more theoretical meat, but nothing in the way of success stories.

The Li Ziqi vision of actually-existing personal deindustrialization—exit from the city, the embrace of subsistence agriculture, and disconnection from state apparatuses—also appeals for its lack of a circumscribed political or social program. This allows her romantic counter-modernism to glide seamlessly through the algorithms and make headlines in state media, but it also leaves it open to interpretation. Her viewers know that they desire an exit, and she teaches them the methods required to make it. As for theory, they can supply their own.

Ruguanism and Caoism, as well as the Industrial Party and thinkers like Shenzhen Ningnanshan, have been given attention by academics, journalists, and state censors; Li, however, has been under-analyzed. Serious writing on Li has focused on her use as a “cultural export,” or, more relevant to her romantic counter-modernism, the idea of her as a bellwether for urban young people disillusioned with the urban dream. Her sex and choice of medium, as well as the sheer depoliticization of the age, means that she can be celebrated for something as dull as keeping alive local tradition without those in power considering the implications of the rural fantasy.

The present trajectory that China’s leadership has put the nation on is one of convergence with the West. The theories and the apparatuses that govern that convergence will look slightly different from those in the West, but the outcome is the same: Shenzhen Ningnanshan’s worst-case scenario of dehumanization, simmering social problems, and a failing core population.

With the logic of industrialization and its grand narrative seemingly abandoned, it remains to be seen what the alternative to financialization will be. Even given China’s political history and the continued adoption of Marxist language, thorough depoliticization after 1979 and the strangling of left-populist attempts in recent years makes it unlikely that the answer could be as simple as a collective attempt to nudge the party-state back toward its Maoist roots. The idea of a liberal alternative that’s cooked up within a middle class immiserated by debts and desperation is equally improbable. Those who can’t take it will cash out and head to Northern Virginia or the San Gabriel Valley.

There were those in the early 2000s who saw the possibilities in Zhong Qing’s political imagination. Similarly momentous alternatives may be bubbling up even now. It might not ultimately take the form of an apocalyptically confrontational Ruguanism, or of an army of Caoists headed out to find their new Africas. It might not even be Li Ziqi’s romantic counter-modernism inspiring a generation of eco-anarchists. But the path of rapid development and its associated pains and dreams will unleash social and ideological forces which the party-state cannot understand on its own. Out there somewhere are the next generation of message board theorists who will eventually present a potent antithesis to the party’s best-laid plans. The future, both in China and beyond, depends on whether they are embraced as insightful sources of new ideas, or suppressed as a threat to political stability.