Sinofuturism is an invisible movement — a spectre already embedded into a trillion industrial products, a billion individuals, and a million veiled narratives. It is a movement, not based on individuals, but on multiple overlapping flows. Flows of populations, of products, and of processes.
Because Sinofuturism has arisen without conscious intention or authorship, it is often mistaken for contemporary China. But it is not. It is a science fiction that already exists.
This video essay is a retroactive manifesto for Sinofuturism, combining historical fantasy, documentary melodrama, and social realism, with Chinese cosmologies.
Although China only recently became the factory of the world, this is only the latest incarnation of the Chinese work ethic. It is a work ethic based on farm labour and large families, in an agrarian society prone to natural disasters, within a Confucian belief system that values hard work as the only insurance against a turbulent world.
Multiple stereotypes of this Eastern 'Other' are everywhere. Whether Chinese Olympic athletes are branded as 'robots', or Chinese students or tourists are likened to 'swarms', or Shenzhen factory workers are criticised for 'flooding the marketplace', the subtext is the same. It is the dehumanisation of the individual into a nameless, faceless mass.
On the other hand is the Orientalist aesthetic narrative, where China is the exotic other, eternally unknowable, mysterious, powerless yet seductive.
But rather than resisting cultural cliches, Sinofuturism embraces seven key stereotypes associated with China. These are its guiding principles: Computing, Copying, Gaming, Studying, Addiction, Labour, and Gambling.
At a material level, it is already everywhere: in architecture, in the products and technologies that we use every I propose that Sinofuturism is in fact a form of Artificial Intelligence: a massively distributed neural network, focused on copying rather than originality, addicted to learning massive amounts of raw data rather than philosophical critique or morality, with a post-human capacity for work, and an unprecedented sense of collective will to power.
Rather than resisting stereotypes, Sinofuturism embraces cliches, many of which are reinforced by both East and West. Just as Afrofuturists answered the historical problem of slavery by declaring themselves as post-human super robots, Sinofuturism answers the Chinese problems of physical servitude, intellectual conformity, and computational OCD, by openly embracing Artificial Intelligence.
In computer science, one of the most promising routes to developing AI is a combination of neural networks and machine learning. Here, an interconnected mesh of programmed neurons learn from sets of data based on real-world phenomena. Engineers declare that the results of neural network s are always surprising, especially in competition against humans.
For a long time, grand masters of the ancient game of Go considered themselves unbeatable against AI players. But in March 2016, the AlphaGo AI developed by Google DeepMind beat Go world champion Lee Sedol by four games to one. Most surprising was Lee's comment about some of AlphaGo's inhuman moves; Lee said he witnessed moves so profoundly unconventional that only a program could conceive of them.
This essential unknowability of the AI to the human, of the mystique of a consciousness beyond conventional understanding, is exactly the same 'Other' identified in  Orientalism. It is this oppositional 'Other' which Sinofuturism identifies with, reorienting the technological narrative in a way that the nameless, faceless mass of Chinese labour becomes a collective body.
Could Sinofuturism be said to constitute an artificial intelligence? The ‘Chinese Room’ is a thought experiment by John Searle that questions the possibility of computers reaching consciousness. Like the game of Chinese whispers, the word 'Chinese' here is taken as synonymous with something fundamentally foreign and unknowable. Replicating old masters, memorising old texts, following moral standards, are all part of this tradition. But Sinofuturism absorbs everything. Because the physical components of high technology are literally made in China, it makes no sense to produce visions of the future. It's already here. Sinofuturism shares a critical optimism about technology with other movements including the Italian Futurismo, Afrofuturism and Gulf Futurism, while integrating specific cultural, historical and industrial patterns unique to the region. All of these Futurisms are minority movements which share an optimism about speed, velocity, and the future as a means to subvert the institutions of the present. Unlike Western Enlightenment forms of government, which revolve around a humanist belief in democracy as liberation from Feudalism, Futurism uses technology as the basis of freedom. Each futurism in turn applies a magical narrative about technology specific to their own geographic context. Games are a training ground for a future reality, one where the individual will most likely perform repetitive tasks — both individually and in groups. Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism studies the cultural representations that are the basis of the West's patronizing perceptions and fictional depictions of the ‘East’, the societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. He argues that Orientalism, the Western scholarship about the Eastern World, was and remains inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power, and therefore intellectually suspect. He argues that ‘Western knowledge of the Eastern world’ depicts the Oriental as an irrational, psychologically weak non-European Other, which is negatively contrasted with the rational, psychologically strong West. Such a binary relation derives from the psychological need to create a difference of cultural inequality, between West and East. Although important, Said's narrative created a paradigm where Orientalism has become a generalised swear-word. That was a long time ago. Since the Millennium, many journalists and writers have explored the significance of China as a rising global superpower, replacing Russia to balance America. Airport bookstores around the world are lined with titles like 'China Shakes The World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation', 'Chinese Rules: Five Timeless Lessons for Succeeding in China', and 'Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China'. In these titles — geared towards a global corporate elite, the desire to understand is deeply intertwined with an agenda to exploit. This is nothing new. Within China, the so-called 'century of humiliation' refers to the period of intervention and imperialism by Western powers and Japan in China between 1839 and 1949, Today, the memory of colonial exploitation is mixed with rising nationalism. Yet the new market economy gives individuals unprecedented opportunities for growth and prosperity.
The future always changes. In Communist China, there was no need for Futurism, Utopia, or Science Fiction. Unlike Soviet Russia, China had no space programme, and thus there was no need for state-sponsored films about a better tomorrow.