Sinofuturism(s)

74 74 A&Q Virginia L. Conn and Gabriele de Seta Sinofuturism(s) This A&Q section takes its cue from a statement that is as pervasive as it is seemingly self-evident: China is the future. This bit of geopolitical folk wisdom, widely shared across popular media and domains of expertise, allows for the proliferation of multiple interpretations: that China will be a thriving future market, that China is on the path to achieving global dominance , that China will prove to be a model for future governance, and so on. Four decades after China’s “reform and opening up” era, its rise on the world stage—particularly as it involves economic leapfrogging, intensive urbanization, and digital technologies—seems to unquestionably warrant this assumption of futurity. Forward-looking informatization policies, the promotional imaginaries of digital media platforms and the global reach of science fictional narratives, all seem to consolidate the impression that China might, indeed, be the future. And yet, once questioned, this equivalence proves extremely puzzling: To which China is it referring? Whose temporality is it describing? And where is this future situated? Beginning in the early 2000s, tentative answers to these questions have been earmarked under an enticing descriptor: Sinofuturism. One of the earliest uses of this term is attributed to musician and theorist Steve Goodman (1998, 155), who defined it as a “darkside cartography of the turbulent rise of East Asia” that maps “seemingly heterogeneous elements onto the topology of planetary capitalism.” Inspired by Afrofuturism and embedded in the theoretical-fictional milieu of Warwick’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Goodman’s Sinofuturist speculation connects traditional philosophical systems and imperialist endeavors with undercurrents of organized crime and technological networks, offering a dazzling—if exoticizing—interpretation of China’s rise. Where earlier visions of a “Neo-China” arriving from the future thanks to “the A & Q 75 A & Q 75 superiority of Far Eastern Marxism” and exemplified by “Tao-drenched Special Economic Zones” (Land 1994) are closer to cyberpunk exotica, more recent articulations of Sinofuturism have been criticized for exhibiting a reactionary “orientalist gushing over Asian techno-authoritarian city states” (Shen Goodman 2015). When compared to other discourses around Asian temporalities, it becomes apparent that Sinofuturism rehashes many established tropes of Orientalist representation (Roh, Huang, and Niu 2015). In the 1990s, Japan was the subject of what David Morley and Kevin Robins (1995, 168) define as “techno-orientalism”; that is, as the country became “synonymous with the technologies of the future,” a generalized panic reflected the anxieties of Western economies suddenly exposed and threatened by Japan’s economic rise. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2006, 178) has identified the pervasiveness of this anxiety in cyberpunk narratives, emphasizing how—in contrast to Edward Said’s original formulation—this “high-tech Orientalism” conflates information technology and exoticized urbanism to make otherness and difference readable, to “steer through the future, or more properly represent the future as something that can be negotiated.” Techno-Orientalism is articulated to sustain Western imaginations of the future (Ueno 1999, 95) at the same time as global capitalism grapples with the modernization of Asian countries. Morley and Robins (1995, 195) were writing during Japan’s recession and prophetically noted that other Asian economies—Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore— would be at the center of techno-Orientalist representations to come. As China’s rise becomes a synecdoche for Asia as a whole, Sinofuturism has emerged as a way of negotiating similar Euro-American anxieties about ongoing geopolitical shifts (Ang 2014, 135). Just like techno-Orientalism originally thrived on imaginaries of stereotypically Japanese cybernetics, robots, and simulations, Sinofuturism finds validation in the success of China’s informatization. If, by the late 1990s, the internet had barely started to reach Chinese users, as of 2020, the country’s digital industries compete with Silicon Valley tech giants, and Sinofuturist imaginaries have at their disposal a limitless repertoire of digital technologies and social phenomena, including highly localized online cultures, shanzhai manufacturing, smart cities, cryptocurrency mining, and a burgeoning artificial intelligence industry (Renaud, Graezer Bideau, and Laperrouza 2020). In the context of contemporary China, Sinofuturism does not need to speculate about cybernetic undercurrents in the I Ching or find inspiration in Special Economic Zones: digital platforms embrace the rhetoric of...