American Nightmares
Wang Huning and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Dark Visions of the Future
THERE IS A PASSAGE in Democracy in America that has appeared in many of my essays.[1] "In the United States,” Tocqueville reports, “there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined power of individuals." Tocqueville contrasts his vision of the American yeoman with the stereotypical “inhabitant of some European nations,” who “sees himself as a kind of settler, indifferent to the fate of the place he inhabits… enjoying what he has as a tenant, without any feeling of ownership or thought of possible improvement.” In contrast, the stereotyped American
learns from birth that he must rely on himself to combat the ills and obstacles of life; he looks across at the authority of society with mistrust and anxiety, calling upon such authority only when he cannot do without it. Should an obstacle appear on the public highway and the passage of traffic is halted, neighbors at once form a group to consider the matter; from this improvised assembly an executive authority appears to remedy the inconvenience before anyone has thought of the possibility of some other authority already in existence before the one they have just formed.[2]
If Americans had faith in anything, Tocqueville suggests, it is in themselves. They trust themselves as individuals, but more important still, in what they as individuals can accomplish when acting in concert. Theirs is an untrammeled belief in the power of self-government.
Tocqueville was a more gifted sociologist than most Europeans who traveled to the United States in the 1800s. But his caricature of America as a land of unbounded optimists was not his alone.[3] A century of European travelogues describes Americans as a people utterly convinced that no feat lies beyond their reach. The 19th century American sincerely believed a determined group of American citizens could surmount any challenge, provided they had time to put their minds to it. Some found this trait arrogant, even silly; others found it commendable. For Tocqueville it was a defining feature of the American character. He hoped this character trait would spread to other lands as their peoples sped towards democracy.
Wang Huning also marveled at the can-do spirit of the Americans he encountered on his journey through the United States. Wang visited the United States more than a century after Tocqueville. Perhaps this is why Wang did not identify the “free action of the combined power of individuals” as the engine of 20th century American self-confidence. Wang argues that if the Americans he met believed they had the power to change the world it is because they had faith in the transformative power of science and technology.
In January the Center for Strategic Translation published two new excerpts from Wang Huning’s travelogue-cum-philosophical meditation, America Against America.[4] Excerpts translated a few months previous covered Wang’s fascination with American technological might and his attempt to isolate the aspects of American culture and politics responsible for its technological success.[5] In these newly translated passages Wang turns that question around, asking not how American society has shaped modern technology, but how modern technology has shaped American society.
His conclusions are dark and sobering.
WANG HUNING OBSERVED a complex set of relationships between American self-confidence, American individualism, and American faith in science and technology. In drawing connections between these aspects of American life Wang follows in the Tocquevillian tradition: Wang would agree with Tocqueville’s claim that “social states… dispose the minds” of those who experience them.[6] He likewise tends to see human behavior as Tocquevillian described it—as the expression of the “passions, needs, education, [and] circumstances” of an individual, each in turn shaped by economic conditions, spiritual traditions, and cultural inheritances shared across society.[7]
Tocqueville, a European aristocrat, was struck most forcefully by the equality of the American people. Wang, citizen of an underdeveloped nation that still relied more on animal power than electricity, was most awed by American technology.[8] The two forces surge towards the same end.
Tocqueville feared equality might birth baleful individualism. This sort of individualism “persuades each citizen to cut himself off from his fellows and to withdraw into the circle of his family and friends in such a way that he creates a small group of his own and willingly abandons society at large.”[9] The European aristocrat was a representative of his family and a member of the nobility first, individual second. In democratic nations that “thread of time is ruptured, and the track of generations is blotted out.” The American was an individual first, nothing second.[10]
If democracy dissolves distinction, what will remain? Tocqueville’s answer: a “people who owe nothing to anyone and, as it were, expect nothing from anyone. They are used to considering themselves in isolation and quite willingly imagine their destiny as entirely in their own hands.” Democratic equality, in this view, “constantly brings [citizens] back to themselves and threatens in the end to imprison them in the prison of their own hearts.”[11]
Wang—who like Tocqueville generally admired American life—shares these concerns. He describes the contradictions of American equality in great detail.[12] He is troubled by American egoism.[13] He is pained by American loneliness.[14] But the America Wang visited was different from the one Tocqueville journeyed through. Wang came to America on the other side of James Beniger’s “control revolution.”[15] Tocqueville’s independent American yeomanry, bound only by civic ties and market transactions, had morphed into a nation of technicians and salarymen whose lives were slotted into the workings of a vast “societal machine” [社会机器]. Wang sees this social state as the child of science and technology:
Science and technology’s advanced development requires a more meticulous division of labor where every person has their own defined task. Thus science and technology guarantee the values of individualism. Automation and electronification cause every person to complete their designated work in their designated position with no need to depend on other humans, or to obey the commands of another human. They only need to depend on a machine; the only commands they obey are that of a machine…
Applying science and technology–especially advanced technology–in a particular manufacturing process requires splitting this process into innumerable parts. Each and every part requires someone to take charge of it. Even if any particular part is minute, replacing the person tasked with it without training would be very difficult. The more advanced the technology, the more this is the case.
A seventeenth century artisan crafted their products from beginning to end. Today, circumstances have completely changed. Generally speaking, the development of science and technology has improved the status of individuals, increased individual self-consciousness, and strengthened the sense of individual responsibility. It has caused every individual to find their determined position in the great societal machine…This is the strongest organizational force in modern society. While it lies outside the confines of politics and law, it is nonetheless very powerful.[16]
Thus Wang concludes: “techno-scientific development fragments society.”[17] What Tocqueville feared “equality of social conditions” might do, techno-scientific development has actually done.[18]
For all of its boons, the America that Wang Huning visits is a place of deep social isolation. Tocqueville mused that “if an American were to be reduced to minding only his own business, he would be deprived of half of his existence; he would experience it as a gaping void in his life and would become unbelievably unhappy.”[19] In Wang’s America this is not a potential future but a present reality. 20th century Americans spend most of their time employed in bastions of “egoism” [自我主义]. As their work is conceived of as a “a purely technical or material activity” employees are denied both “sentimental and spiritual communion” with other human beings.[20] But if modernization has changed man’s working conditions it does not seem to have changed his nature. Human connection is a human need.[21] Thus the “socially imposed loneliness” of American life creates a people prone to “dejection, loss, indecision, despondence, anxiety, and worry.”[22] In contrast to Tocqueville’s Americans, who “perfected the art of pursuing in concert the aim of their desires,”[23] Wang believes that social isolation has fostered “a sort of introverted and passive mentality” that makes it difficult for the Americans that Wang meets to work with strangers.[24] As Tocqueville feared, social atomization invites centralized administration: “When you analyze many government policies [in America] it is not difficult to see that their fundamental motivation [is in fact] the complex and persistent role played by widespread loneliness.”[25]
Unlike Tocqueville, Wang observes few countervailing forces in American life. Tocqueville celebrated American associations, societies, and local government organs as an antidote to equality’s atomizing tendencies.[26] Wang visits the 20th century counterparts to these institutions—chamber of commerce meetings, think tank panels, and conversations with radical protesters are a few of the American happenings he describes in his book—and discovers the same America that he found everywhere else.[27] As in industry, these are fields dominated by the logic of fragmented expertise. Whether they live in Iowa or Washington, the behavior of ordinary citizens is decided by disembodied technocratic processes and the technocrats who create them. Individuals play an important role in these processes, but few feel like they control them. Thus American society is best thought of as a sequence of “small, interconnected nodes, with each person occupying their own node in the chain."[28]
These nodes are hemmed in by a thicket of regulations. Wang describes America as a “regulatory society” and a “regulatory culture.”[29] In America, “every area of social life is defined by certain regulations.”[30] Most of these regulations are not decreed by the federal government. Universities bind students with codes of conduct. Professional societies bind their members with model rules. Credit reporting companies bind just about “everyone.”[31] The diktats of local governments are intricate and demanding. Reviewing the numerous city ordinances that govern pet ownership in one small town, Wang concludes that not only are American men and women “not so free,” but American “dogs and cats are not free” either.[32]
Why do Americans so meekly accept this arrangement? Wang points again to the influence of high technology. Gadgetry demands compliance. Many devices—weed eaters, cars, anything that plugs into an electric outlet—are hazardous if used incorrectly. The citizen who withdraws money from ATMs, buys stocks, and cashes checks in an advanced economy has to master “a set of rules” that are “more complex” than the citizen of any underdeveloped economy ever deals with. Even photocopiers and office printers, Wang notes, “refuse to work if their users do not obey their rules.” [33] So Americans learn to obey rules.
Americans can hardly do otherwise: to “enter out into [American] society” means incorporating advanced technology into daily life. Consumer tech guarantees that every American “grows up in an environment” that makes compliance with strict procedure a matter of habit.[34] American life plays out under the shadow of the safety label.
Perhaps this is why Wang has so little to say about Tocqueville’s “free action of the combined power of individuals.” He credits the citizens of 20th century America with great deeds—but does not credit those deeds to an impulse for self-government. The economic and social relations Wang observes are mediated through technology. Why should an American learn the old democratic arts when he can complete his “designated work… with no need to depend on other humans?” The machines that Americans “depend” on follow a pre-determined plan. They function smoothly only if the individual worker subordinates himself to these plans. When all works as it should “the only commands [Americans must] obey are that of a machine.”
By doing this the individual becomes something like a machine himself. The years of education and training many Americans receive in order to qualify for especially important or prestigious positions does not change the node-like nature of their role.[35] A cog in the machinery is a cog in the machinery, no matter how shiny or well-greased.
THIS SKETCH OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY is incomplete. Thus far Wang’s arguments all proceed from the habits and patterns of organization nurtured by advancing technology. However, Wang also believes that there is a clear ideological component to the elect role technology plays in American life. Americans are not only habituated to technological processes—they have a deep and abiding faith in science and technology. To the American mind scientific knowledge is endowed with an almost sacred authority.
A comparison with Tocqueville is again instructive.
Tocqueville describes equality as a natural enemy to authority, intellectual or otherwise. Aristocracy stands only when its illusions are unquestioned. Reveal the essential equality of man, and the laws, norms, and orders of all ancient regimes, built on baseless if ancient distinctions, will not stand. “At such a time, men no longer perceive their native land except in the feeble and ambiguous light; their patriotism is centered neither on the land which they see just as inanimate earth nor on the customs of their ancestors which they have been taught to view as a yoke, nor on religion which they doubt, nor on laws which they do not enact, nor on the legislator when they fear and despise.”[36] “It is only with great difficulty,” Tocqueville adds, “that men who lives in times of equality are led to place outside and above human bounds the intellectual authority to which they submit.” Democratic men “seek the truth in themselves” and “do not easily believe” or submit to authority that claims a transcendent or “divine source.”[37]
These conclusions pose an empirical problem for Tocqueville: the Americans, democrats par excellence, live in an orderly and law-abiding fashion. Tocqueville provides three explanations for why this is possible. The first is a historical accident: unlike in Europe, American Christianity was never thoroughly interwoven with an existing aristocratic order. Democratic revolution did not erode the authority of religion in a country where both religion and democracy coexisted since its colonial childhood.[38] Added to this equation is the source of American law and American institutions: the American obeys the laws of his country because he believes these laws are the work of his own hands.[39] He feels a sort of “paternal affection” for the political order, regarding it as “a contract to which he is one of the parties.”[40] Finally, this affection is buttressed by a shrewd appraisal of what Tocqueville calls “self-interest rightly understood.” As “the “common man in the United States perceives the influence of public prosperity upon his own happiness… he sees in public fortune his own and he works for the welfare of the state, not simply from duty or from pride, but, I would venture to say, from greed.”[41]
This sort of self-interest is the ultimate motive force in public affairs and the keystone to public authority in an age where old traditions have withered and old identities are wisping away:
Do you not see the decline of religions and the disappearance of the divine conception of rights? Do you not realize that morals are changing and with them the moral notion of rights is being removed? Do you not notice how, on all sides, beliefs are sitting placed to rationality and feelings to calculations? If, amid this general upheaval, you fail to link the idea of rights to individual self-interest, which is the only fixed point in the human heart, what else have you got to rule the world except fear?[42]
To this question Wang Huning would answer: “We have science and technology.”
WANG HUNING IS NOT BLIND to the forces of self-interest. Selfish incentives guide public conduct across Wang’s America.[43] These incentives are a powerful form of decentralized regulation; they keep the American people peaceable without need for suffocating central state.[44] Yet these incentives do not account for the whole picture. If Tocqueville believed that in pre-modern cultures society can “rest gently on an ancient order of things whose legitimacy is uncontested,”[45] then Wang believes that science provides a new source of uncontested legitimacy for modern day life. Wang’s Americans live in a country where men are “governed by technology.”
This story starts not with technics but with science. Tocqueville’s America still lived on the cusp of industrial revolution. Science had not yet changed the face of the American continent.[46] Tocqueville reports that “Scientific traditions hold little sway” over the American mind. His Americans “do not easily defer to the reputation of their fellow men” and “are never inclined to swear by the authority of an expert.”[47] This was tenable in a world where most scientific experiments were conducted on table tops. The technical innovations of that age were produced by tinkering mechanics. Any man might tinker.
A much smaller number of us might become nuclear scientists.
When Wang Huning traveled to the United States, he met Americans four generations into a world of wonders. The clothes they donned, the homes they built, and the rooms they furnished teemed with synthetics. Lightening traveled through their wires. They were blessed with heat in winter, ice in summer, and light in darkest night. They worked in glittering monoliths that stretched up into the heavens. They hurdled towards their labors faster than fin, hoof or wing. They heard voices sound at a thousand mile distance. They saw atoms level cities; they saw atoms power others.
All of these wonders were the fruits of scientific expertise. Never swearing by experts was a practice for a more primitive age. In the age of the computer programmer, nuclear physicist, and chemical engineer this was no longer tenable. Wang Huning does not review this history of invention at any length, but the Americans he met had been deeply shaped by it. It is little wonder they equated science with power and truth.
These were truths to be acted on. To use a phrase of more recent provenance, Wang’s Americans were committed to “following the science.” Wang understood that “the science” had the sort of authority that Tocqueville assumed had passed irretrievably from the Earth. As with science, so with its gifts. For Wang’s Americans, the implementation of a new technology is not understood through the lens of politics or values, but the lens of technical efficiency.[48] Problems of power or morality breed argument and dissent. Technical efficiency does not. Thus Wang’s key observation: in developed societies “it is immensely more difficult for people to obey political and legal commands than it is for them to obey techno-scientific imperatives."[49]
Over time this would create a strong incentive to frame increasingly large slices of both private and public life in terms of these techno-scientific imperatives. “Faced with various complicated socio-cultural problems,” Wang notes, “Americans often think about them as if they were scientific or technological problems” instead.[50]
Wang's feelings about this development are ambivalent. On the one hand, he is eager to find ways to maintain order that do not rely on coercion or constant top-down control, errors he associates with the excesses of Maoist China.[51] Thus when he writes that
Those that advocated using science and technology in times past did not have a clear understanding of how [science and technology] would eventually become a method for managing men, yet the use of science and technology has now become one of society’s greatest methods for managing men. To a great degree, American society is managed by a technological order. Man is more obedient to the technological than he is to the political.[52]
Wang is in part exploring a program for managing Chinese society. Great upheavals—like the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution he experienced in his youth—are easily avoided in a country where men are “obedient to the technological.”[53] Thus this program has potential.
Yet it is a program with a problem.
THE GREAT DANGER POSED by technological management is intellectual confusion. Wang Huning fears that a people in the habit of following techno-scientific imperatives will forget that technology is first and foremost a tool. "With great scientific and technological development," Wang writes, "also comes an illusion: it seems that the agent ultimately solving a difficult problem is not human; rather, science and technology become the ultimate power while man becomes their slave."[54]
It is significant that Wang calls this an "illusion" [错觉] (at other points in the text he also uses the words "misdirection" [误导]).[55] The Americans embedded in techno-scientific systems may not feel like they have any agency over the system as a whole. They may believe they are simply following pre-set technical imperatives. Some of them truly are what they feel. But not all of them. Technology is a tool created to accomplish human aims. Somewhere there are humans in control.
In Wang’s view, American faith in technical expertise and scientific knowledge masks this reality. It veils what decision makers are doing and why they are doing it—even, sometimes, from themselves. Subjective moral judgements are mistaken for scientific truths; careful political calculations are portrayed as matters of mere technical implementation.[56]
The truth of this point should be intuitive to anyone who remembers the COVID policy debates. If those debates taught us anything, it is that scientific knowledge is an uncertain guide to novel problems and complex systems. Even when the problem set is small and well defined, science has limits. Scientific knowledge is only capable of telling us what is, not what we ought to do in response to it. The ought is a question of values and interests. Such questions cannot be easily settled by appeal to technical expertise.
Wang Huning wrote three decades before the coronavirus pandemic. The central example he uses to make this point will be less intuitive: NASA and the space exploration program.
Wang was awestruck by American spacecraft. He mentions them repeatedly throughout America Against America, usually as example of American ingenuity and creativity. But in the chapter published by CST Wang takes a different tack. Here the space shuttle represents the entire problem of "misdirection."
On its face, space exploration seems to be about scientific discovery. Dig one layer deeper and you find, as Wang does, many other motivations: geopolitics, bureaucratic power games, and presidential opinion polling all lie at the center of the American space program.[57] Many features of a spacecraft such as the shuttle Discovery can be understood in terms of engineering. But the Discovery’s existence, along with many of its specific design features, are products of these more “human” concerns.
This is not an original point to Wang Huning. The early astronauts were among the first to realize that space exploration flipped the normal relationship between master and tool. From a pure scientific perspective most of the experiments astronauts conduct in space could be more efficiently performed by machines. As the chief NASA geologist groused about the first Moon missions, “the same job could have been done with unmanned systems at one third the cost three or four years ago.”[58] Nor were the astronauts essential for piloting their spacecraft. “I had the impression,” one of the Mercury Seven remembered, “that this was just a matter of tying a man onto one end of a missile and flinging him out there. I rather doubted that they cared whether they had a trained pilot in there or just any human body.”[59] At one training conference the seven were informed that the ostensible pilots of the craft would not once “need to turn a hand” for the craft to reach its destination. After all, the astronauts “have been added to the system as a redundant component.”[60] This was difficult for many astronauts to swallow. Buzz Aldrin bitterly remembered how he became an astronaut to “prove man's usefulness in space” only to discover that “we were to become public relations men for space exploration.”[61] As much as anyone else, the astronauts were cogs in a great machine.
The cog-nature of their flights was not apparent to the public. They were ostensibly sent into space for discovery—the name of the space shuttle Wang watched ascend into the heavens. But astronauts were hardly necessary for scientific discovery. Science was not the reason the American people sent those men skywards. Science is often not the reason we do what we do.
But it is often the reason we give for what we do.
For Wang this is a characteristic American—and by extension, modern—problem. When faced with a societal crisis, Wang’s Americans do not try to discern the spiritual or political roots of their problems, but instead hope to engineer them out of existence.
There are two difficulties with this impulse. The first, and perhaps more obvious, is that not all solutions are amenable to engineering. Wang points to disabled Americans as a case in point. To help the disadvantaged, enterprising Americans invented “[mechanized] wheelchairs, a bedside service device that obeys commands, and eyeglasses that can provide orientation.” These aids help “the disabled to move freely,” but “as a human being, their problems are not solved.”[62]
Or as the CST introduction to the translation rephrases this point: “the infirm may purchase motorized wheel chairs; the blind may buy computers that respond to voice commands. These devices improve the wellbeing of those who use them… however, no machine can protect them from the prejudice of their countrymen. No device can defend the dignity of the downtrodden. These problems defy technological solutions.”[63] Wang insists that the “the same [pattern] holds true in politics and international relations.”[64] It is easy enough to get Americans to carefully follow the directions on safety labels: societal problems, such as widespread “racial prejudice,” are not so amenable to scientific solutions.[65]
The second difficulty with the engineering impulse is that it diffuses both responsibility and agency. To pursue this claim Wang cites John Kenneth Galbraith idea’s about the "techno-structure" of modern firms. Here is how Galbraith makes this argument:
Group decision-making extends deeply into the business enterprise. Effective participation is not closely related to rank in the formal hierarchy of the organization… [any] decision will require information. Some power will then pass to the person or persons who have this information….
If an individual has taken a decision, he can be called before another individual who is his superior in the hierarchy, his information can be examined and his decision reversed by the greater wisdom or experience of the superior. But if the decision required the combined information of a group, it cannot be safely reversed by an individual. He will have to get the judgment of other specialists. This returns the power once more to organization….
Conceivably [a new product proposal] could come from the president of General Electric. But the systematic proliferation of such ideas is the designated function of the much lowlier executive who is charged with product development. At an early stage in the development of [a new appliance] the participation of specialists in engineering, production, styling and design… would have to be sought. No one in a position to authorize the product would do so without a judgment on how [the design problems involved] were to be solved and at what cost. Nor, ordinarily, would an adverse finding on technical and economic feasibility be overridden. At some stage further development would become contingent on the findings of market researchers and merchandise experts on whether the [appliance] could be sold and at what price…. It will be evident that nearly all powers — initiation, character of development, rejection or acceptance — are exercised deep in the company. It is not the managers who decide. Effective power of decision is lodged deep down in the technical, planning and other specialized staff…. It follows from both the tendency for decision-making to pass down into organization and the need to protect the autonomy of the group that those who hold high formal rank in an organization - the president of General Motors or General Electric - exercise only modest powers of substantive decision…
… [The group that actually makes decisions] embraces all who bring specialized knowledge, talent or experience to group decision-making. This, not the narrow management group, is the guiding intelligence — the brain — of the enterprise. There is no name for all who participate in group decision-making or the organization which they form. I propose we call this organization the Technostructure.[66]
Wang sees good and bad to this arrangement. On the one hand, distributing authority makes it less onerous. This is especially appealing to a thinker coming from a top-heavy political system that stifles innovation and development. “This kind of management,” Wang concludes, “can alleviate the burden placed on political systems to a great degree…. If one mechanism can keep [human] behavior within the scope of [what is] rational, society will be easier to govern."[67]
On the other hand, being subjected to a vast techno-capital apparatus that lacks any clear seat of authority is “alienating.”[68] By reducing men to nodes in a giant chain where decisions seem to emerge instead of are made, “giant strides in techno-scientific development” have left the average American emotionally adrift. Galbraith’s technosphere has “penetrated the inner world of every person.” Economic efficiency and distributed scientific expertise have not only stripped Americans of their agency but have also accommodated them to this status. In this sense industrial development has accomplished what totalitarianism could not: it “perfected the means for governing man.”[69]
Wang does not think this state of affairs will persist. Alienation is not a stable state. Human nature rebels against it.[70] Eventually, Wang fears, that rebellion might escalate.[71] It might take decades, but the Americans will eventually have to face squarely the system they have created.[72]
AND WHAT OF WANG’S home country, the People’s Republic of China? Should China follow the American course, or seek some other way?
Wang Huning does not think China has much of a choice. In modern times “there is no society that can do without technology.”[73] “Today's world,” Wang tells us, “is one… of comprehensive competition between states in the political, economic, cultural, military, and [even] lifestyle domain. To be defeated or left behind in this competition will mean backwardness and poverty.”[74] To succeed in such an environment the Chinese people must gain what Wang calls a “modernity consciousness.”[75] He asks his readers to “imagine people who used to drive ox carts and lead leisurely rural lives coming together with people who board jet planes and live in fast-paced urban environment. Together on the global stage, in the face of various complex systems, who will be more competitive?”[76]
Therefore, to survive and thrive China must build its own techno-structure. This is, after all, how the Americans rose to power. “If the Americans are to be overtaken,” Wang concludes, “one thing must be done: surpass them in science and technology.”[77] Wang is quite certain that the Americans will be overtaken in the coming century. He hints that China might be the country to overtake them.[78] Therefore, the “key question” is not whether a developing country with grand ambitions should choose to embrace modern technology, but “how [to] bring about the harmonization of society once these choices are made.”[79]
Wang’s book says very little about how this should be done. America Against America is not a manifesto. The main emotion Wang Huning associates with his journey through America is “uncertainty.”[80] Wang poses many questions but offers few solid answers.
These ambiguous musings may prove more useful for understanding 21st century China than is apparent at first sight. Long essays have been written trying to make the contradictions of recent Chinese economic policy—tech-crackdowns yesterday, techno-nationalism today!—cohere.[81] This may be a misguided effort. It is quite possible that Wang’s fundamentally uncertain and conflicting vision of technology lives on in Beijing today.
Your support makes this blog possible. To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. If you found this post worth reading, you might find some of my other essays on science, technology, and American or Chinese life worth reading. In addition to the pieces written linked to above, check out “Wang Huning and the Eternal Return to 1975,” “Watch Xi Jinping Slowly Strangle the Dengist Paradigm,” “Mr. Science, Meet Mr. Stability,” “Xi Jinping’s War on Spontaneous Order,” “Lessons from the 19th Century” and “Myths of the Over-Managed.”
First time reader here, and I absolutely loved this piece. Decoding Huning's thinking has a lot of explanatory power! On a related note, I wonder whether Huning has written anything on India (w.r.t. economic, social, military, trade matters)?
Greer, this is a masterful excavation of the "Operating System" update that happened between 1835 and 1991.
Wang Huning correctly identified that Technology replaced Religion/Custom as the primary governance layer of System A (America). But from a 2026 perspective, we can see the divergence:
The Calcification of System A: The "Technostructure" that Galbraith described (and Wang observed) has decayed into a High-Entropy Bureaucracy. It is no longer the efficient machine of the Apollo era; it is the risk-averse, compliance-heavy machine of the Boeing 737 MAX era. The "Technological Order" Wang feared has become a "Compliance Order"—suffocating the very ingenuity Tocqueville admired.
The System B (China) Realization: China took Wang's "Technology Governs Man" thesis to its logical extreme: The R.I.C.E. System. Instead of allowing technology to atomize society into lonely nodes, System B used it to Integrate them into a hive mind (The Hive). It replaced the "social contract" with an "industrial contract."
The System C (Silicon Valley) Rebellion: What we are seeing now in Austin and San Francisco (e/acc) is a rebellion against Wang's nightmare. System C is attempting to use technology not to manage man (as Wang predicted), but to supercharge the individual (Tocqueville's yeoman returns as the 10x Engineer).
Wang Huning saw the cage being built. The e/acc crowd is trying to print the key. Ref https://chinarbitrageur.substack.com/p/the-underlying-operating-system-of?r=71ctq6