“What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.“
—Nick Land

SHANGHAI — Today, China and the United States are co-creating a powerful new technology that changes how we think, communicate with each other and understand what consciousness itself means. Some compare it to the invention of fire, or electricity. But a more apt analogy might be the invention of writing: a system that both liberates our thoughts — and constrains them.

When did civilization, as a collective archive of thoughts put down into writing, first begin? Do those beginnings encode certain tendencies into the users of language today, whether those using the language are aware of it or not? Our world has two dominating cultural source codes: one from the West, however construed, and the other that began in Yinxu, Henan, around 3,500 years ago, where the written Chinese language emerged in the form of prophetic oracle bones. Scholars like Yuri Pines have long argued that the ideographic nature of the Chinese script was the primary engine of its cultural continuity.

Take 文, the root word for writing, literature, culture, civilization. The oracle bone inscription was of a person’s body, undergoing a painful ritual transformation of tattooing or scarification. Originally, the word meant “interlocking patterns.” And that is what the Chinese language and civilization form: a huge mental map of interlocking patterns. The written Chinese language is what makes China, China.

Today, the dominant mechanism by which information is transmitted in China is transitioning from the Chinese language to digital networks that communicate in binary or qubits. Paradoxically, this algorithmic form of consciousness is deeply compatible with the traditional Chinese civilizational source code. The concept of an individual being part of a larger network of thought and action transitions seamlessly into the digital age. A civilization whose thinking has always been about the optimized, visual juxtaposition of concepts finds its ultimate realization in the neural network.

Language And The Origins Of The Chinese State

You Shou (1906–1994) was a prominent Chinese archaeologist and master calligrapher. She argued that the oracle bone script (jiaguwen) and the bronze inscriptions (jinwen) were intrinsically linked to the materials that were used to make them: the bones, the human labor, the metal, the climate. The Chinese characters emerged from the Chinese people and the Chinese landscape; the people and the land predated the words, and the words described and sought to control the people and the land, in a literal sense. 

You’s theories linked the development of character stroke structures to the physical tools, labor and materials (bone, bronze, stone) used by ancient peoples: The act of writing was the consummation in and about Yinxu, the place where they were developed, from a hierarchical social structure to the work of the workers who provided the bones and metal in the first place. The evolution of Chinese characters, You wrote, tracks China’s development as a society, with new ways of seeing literally inscribed in the language. Recent examples would be Japanese loan words like zhuyi (主义, “ism”) or jingji (经济, “economy”), or new compound words like diannao (电脑), which means computer. By analyzing character structures, she traced changes in early Chinese geography, social organization and ancient ritual practices. The words, she thought, were invented as a way to answer questions about the order of the cosmos.

The oracle bones were a little like a Ouija board; the person preparing them did not know the outcome in advance. The priest or diviner would pose a question, usually to the high god Di or the ancestors, then apply heat to ox shoulder blades or turtle shells. Shang scribes routinely split a single question for the spirits into positive and negative outcomes: It will rain tomorrow or It will not rain tomorrow. Heated, the bone would crack and the holy man would read a response to his question. Auspicious divine answers, dates and consequences would be recorded on the bones. The Shang had intense self-doubt; they couldn’t go to war or plant crops without performing rituals to check in with God. The priests, surrounded as they were by the stench of blood and bone, asked God: What is going to happen to us?

“And that is what the Chinese language and civilization form: a huge mental map of interlocking patterns. The written Chinese language is what makes China, China.”

And yet, much as the story of Adam and Eve is about forbidden knowledge, the Shang didn’t think of God as telling them these things; what they were doing was more like eavesdropping on divine knowledge. They lived in a world where all of human life was enveloped in the safety of ritual. But by using oracle bones to solve trivial, anxious survival puzzles, they accidentally built the infrastructure of the Chinese mind: assigning an unalterable, concept-driven visual symbol to a natural phenomenon. It was an act of cosmic taming. They were bringing the terrifying, unpredictable movements of ancestors, rivers and seasons into a stable, legible linguistic architecture. Like today’s five-year plans, the oracle bones were not economic forecasts; they were magical, state-directed inscriptions designed to conjure a reality into existence.

These archaic concepts shape the language of Chinese statecraft today. For example, 盟 or alliance, which is used to describe the European Union and ASEAN, consists of a bowl or vessel (皿) at the bottom topped by the character for bright or clear (明), which originally depicted a window illuminated by the moon or by a sacrificial fire. In ancient times, to seal a political pact, lords dug a pit, slaughtered a sacrificial animal (often a bull or dog), cut off its left ear and caught the blood in a bronze vessel (皿). The lords smeared raw blood on their lips and swore an oath to the gods (明). The 盟 character thus physically encodes the wet, copper flavor of shared blood that bound ancient factions together.

Yinxu was, some say, a city of perhaps 150,000 people, and had no physical walls but was sharply divided by class. The Shang elite lived in a state of ritualistic intoxication. Occupying grand palaces, they spent their days hunting big game on the Henan plains (elephants, rhinoceroses and tigers still roamed the warm, humid landscape); drinking vast quantities of warm, herb-infused wine from heavy bronze jue vessels; and conducting military raids on neighboring tribes. Their entire psychological reality was geared toward validating their lineage through conspicuous feasting and violence.

Shang craftsmen, meanwhile, enjoyed a privileged, middle-tier status, protected by the state because they produced the technology of power. In industrial quarters like Xiaomintun, they operated massive, hyper-coordinated bronze foundries. The vast majority of the population were ordinary peasants whose lives were grindingly hard. They did not live in houses; they lived in pits dug into the earth and covered by rough timber and thatch roofs to shield them from the freezing winters. 

Aside from bronze, Yinxu’s largest industry was bone tool production. In a single workshop site, archaeologists uncovered millions of discarded animal bones (primarily cattle, pig and deer) that had been systematically carved into arrows, hairpins and awls. The city must have smelled of boiled animal fat, charcoal smoke and raw marrow. When a king died, or when a major palace foundation was laid, hundreds of human beings were systematically executed to serve as structural or spiritual filler. Captured prisoners were bound, decapitated or dismembered by the dozens, their heads buried in neat, geometric rows in the palace plazas to appease the high god Di and the royal ancestors. To keep the world from collapsing, the Shang kings had to unleash torrents of human blood, torch bones with fire and mobilize hundreds of thousands of hands to dig earth and melt bronze.

“A civilization whose thinking has always been about the optimized, visual juxtaposition of concepts finds its ultimate realization in the neural network.”

I first learned of You Shou while researching the history of the Cultural Revolution in Harbin. She was at the center of a group called the “eight weirdos,” Harbin scholars who were singled out for torment by Red Guards who were trying to eradicate the “four olds,” (四旧): old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. The Communist project had to crush scholars like You Shou because her work revealed that the Party was not a radical break from the past, but an unwitting captive of it. The uncanny image of a hierarchical and violent Chinese elite who used semi-mystical techniques to conjure a future into being was too uncomfortable, heresy to the notion of a New China.

None of the great ethicists of ancient Chinese culture — Confucius, Laozi and friends — lived in Yinxu. All of that came later. But the invention of language was a prerequisite to their work. 

The conclusion might be that today, as the world stumbles terrified into future climate change and cultural decadence, that sometimes, the sacrifices work. The AI being built is not a good in itself; the questions we ask it may be as trivial as the Shang asking the oracle bones what part of the forest was a good place to hunt. But the platform created may birth systems, ideas and thoughts which we cannot currently imagine, in formats that exceed our wildest dreams. That’s what happened to the Shang, anyway.

The Scientific Sovereign

For the past few months, I’ve been corresponding with Pan Jianwei, China’s quantum computing champion, trying to understand his views on how Chinese science fits into the world and what the significance of quantum computing will be for China’s future. Pan’s adviser, Anton Zeilinger, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2022. Working in Zeilinger’s lab, Pan was part of the elite team that achieved the world’s first experimental demonstration of quantum teleportation in 1997. When Zeilinger asked Pan what his long-term dream was, Pan famously replied: “To build a world-class quantum physics lab in China.” By 2016, Pan had become the mastermind behind Micius, a satellite that enables quantum communication across vast distances. Pan is largely seen as one of China’s most likely candidates for the Nobel. But China has bigger fish to fry.

Quantum computing replaces the traditional language by which computers organize information with a new way, our understanding of which originated with Albert Einstein’s theories. While classical computers rely on binary logic — processing information through rigid transistors as individual bits that must be strictly a 0 or a 1 — quantum computing uses qubits. Qubits are particles that exist based on two seemingly contradictory concepts: superposition and entanglement. Superposition means a qubit can exist in multiple states simultaneously — a complex, fluid blend of both 0 and 1 at the same time. Entanglement is a unique connection where qubits become linked, allowing a change in one to instantly dictate the state of another.

By manipulating these fluid probabilities rather than processing data step by step, a quantum computer can map out massive, complex solution spaces all at once. In this sense, quantum computing is to computing what Chinese characters are to the Roman alphabet: Both apparently fulfill the same function, but the way in which they do so is radically different.

“AI may birth systems, ideas and thoughts which we cannot currently imagine, in formats that exceed our wildest dreams. That’s what happened to the Shang, anyway.”

In recent months, the White House has been tweeting about quantum supremacy alongside the usual half-baked AI-generated images; in the 2025 National Security Strategy, quantum is mentioned, along with AI and biotech, as a field that the U.S. must not cede to rivals like China. It’s seen as important because if China breaks through on quantum computing, it’ll have a way around traditional public-key encryption and be able to read all of America’s secrets.

Although he is increasingly prominent in China’s political ecosystem, Pan is not a member of the Communist Party. His allegiance lies with the Jiusan Society, one of China’s eight legally sanctioned political parties. Rather than being elevated to an administrative role like, for example, Chen Jining, the environmental scientist turned Shanghai party secretary, Pan continues to manage his quantum lab in Hefei. In a China increasingly more interested in social development through advanced computation rather than human resources, that position might be equally powerful — and a lot more fun. Instead of wasting time navigating the standard, hyper-competitive and granular grant application cycles that consume Western researchers, Pan just gets large sums of money transferred into his jurisdiction. Under Xi Jinping’s mandate for absolute “sci-tech self-reliance,” Pan’s operational authority means that if he identifies a critical bottleneck, the state quickly funnels funding and manpower directly to him. 

His work and influence extend far beyond university walls to the commercial monetization of his discoveries. QuantumCTek was founded by his academic research team, for example. In a massive vote of confidence, China Telecom acquired a 23% stake in the firm to build out unhackable national communications infrastructure based directly on Pan’s proprietary hardware. In this sense, Pan exemplifies a new class in China: politically untouchable, trusted enough to receive a blank check for funding and proactively supported in commercialization by state-owned entities.

In an email to me, Pan shared five pages of thoughts of his own and other quantum scientists in China. In short, he said, China’s government believes that technological change creates economic change creates political change. It also believes that the world is on the brink of a technological revolution driven by AI, quantum computing, biotech, new energy sources, materials science and other fields. In the tradition of the Shang, the Chinese are ready to make any sacrifice, as long as the new language that is being created is one they understand. 

As Hong Ding, a Chinese Academy of Sciences academician, put it in an email to me:

A New Golden Age?

Michael Kratsios is an alumnus of arguably the two most forward-looking incubators of science policy in the world today: Thiel Capital and Tsinghua University. Today, he is Trump’s science adviser. In his report on reforming American science, which he presents as being the biggest revision to American science policy since Vannevar Bush’s postwar “Science: The Endless Frontier,” we see one of the most concrete and detailed indications yet that the Trump administration is adopting Chinese mechanisms, inspired by a close and meticulous study of what makes the Chinese model successful. 

Kratsios likely wouldn’t admit it, but his report represents a fundamental shift away from the traditional, decentralized Western model of free academic inquiry toward a centralized, mission-driven, state-backed system that mirrors Beijing’s tech-governance model. For example, echoing a long-time Thiel idea, the report fiercely critiques traditional, consensus-driven Western academic peer-review boards as sluggish and conservative; by definition, peer review means that new ideas must be checked by the gatekeepers of the old. Kratsios proposes a “broader menu of selection mechanisms,” specifically introducing “golden tickets” that empower individual, state-appointed reviewers to unilaterally fund highly ambitious, high-risk proposals without consensus approval. That’s exactly what high-flyer scientists like Pan Jianwei have: They’ve earned the trust of the system and are treated as partners in a venture capital fund.

The centerpieces of the Kratsios report are the “Genesis Mission” and a newly funded National Science Foundation initiative called “X-Labs.” These are explicitly structured as “Manhattan Project-style” efforts designed to build highly focused, multidisciplinary independent research organizations that apply AI directly to accelerated scientific productivity, totally bypassing legacy academic boundaries. Kratsios is effectively recreating the structure of China’s National Laboratories and State Key Laboratories (such as Pan Jianwei’s quantum facilities in Hefei or Fudan University’s Xuemin Institute, itself modeled on the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton).

But even if the U.S. adopts many Chinese methods, it lacks the critical ingredient of Chinese science success: Chinese people. Lots of them. Effectively, Kratsios is proposing to make up for this gap by letting AI, a “country of geniuses in a datacenter” as Dario Amodei once put it, do for America what millions of Chinese STEM graduates do for China.

Democratic critics (like Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California) have explicitly denounced this policy, noting that the administration “has been systematically destroying the U.S. science enterprise.” Dan Wang and Julian Gewirtz criticized Trump policies in The New York Times for emulating China, particularly the proactive way that the Pentagon is seeking to supervise Anthropic, which they allege is a direct copy of China’s state capitalism.

“In the tradition of the Shang, the Chinese are ready to make any sacrifice, as long as the new language that is being created is one they understand.”

Beijing doesn’t nationalize tech firms; it integrates the state into private enterprises. But to be fair to Kratsios, China’s science structure is clearly working, and the degree of integration between policymakers, fundamental research (in fields like materials science or chemistry), burgeoning fields (like batteries) and global domination of supply chains, can feel new. The Thiel wing of the Trump administration is seeking truth from facts. The questions for Americans are: Is the overall strategy of rivaling Chinese scale effects via AI likely to work? And: As we pursue these processes, how will our own society change? Are we comfortable with that?

In 2014, Thiel wrote in his tech-founder bible “Zero to One” that China is a society characterized by definite pessimism: The Chinese believe that tragic disaster lurks, so they make comprehensive plans to avoid it. In contrast, American society of the Vannevar Bush era (the 1950s) was one of definite optimism: America made plans because it believed that the future was bright. These outlooks don’t neatly map onto countries today (if they ever did), but if anything, as AI changes everything, the Chinese seem more optimistic than the Americans.

The Silicon Valley radicals adjacent to Thiel — and therefore the White House — have been making provocative remarks about science for some time. For example, Curtis Yarvin recently asserted that NASA was founded by Nazis who’d gone to Alabama. Yarvin’s claim rests entirely on the historical reality of Operation Paperclip, the American mission to relocate top German scientists and engineers to the U.S. during the final stages of World War II. China today resembles the U.S. then: an industrial superpower that senses it is not quite as sophisticated as the decadent power it wishes to replace. From this vantage point, Kratsios (a former instructor at Tsinghua who knows what the Chinese are thinking as well as any American government official) doesn’t want the U.S. to be eclipsed. 

The Chinese AI policy that American policymakers like Kratsios are inspired by proceeds with great clarity: There is a list of problems and AI is being used systematically to solve those problems. The Chinese assume that private companies and new technologies that depend on government support and the participation and consent of the population should serve that population. And as with the rest of their products, what happens in China doesn’t stay in China, but is exported to whoever will take it, which increasingly means the Global South.

When AI Runs The World

Not long ago, I was invited to Nanning, the capital of Guangxi Province, a three-hour train ride from Shenzhen but culturally a backwater.The Chinese five-year plans allocate different tasks to different regions: Big cities like Beijing and Shanghai are for capital-heavy innovation and research, which Guangxi is positioned to disseminate to Southeast Asia. Inside the China-ASEAN Artificial Intelligence Application Cooperation Center, a digital display advertised different AI applications: agriculture, logistics, public safety, manufacturing, local finance, healthcare and education. China invites leaders from Vietnam, Laos and Indonesia to this place and says: Look, we figured out how to use AI to make our farmers richer, our factories better, our streets safer. We can do that for you too.

Nanning itself felt like a display of what Chinese style development could bring. Technically, this is the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, with ethnic minorities such as the Zhuang dominating. Signs on government buildings are bilingual. Nanning’s nominal GDP per capita sits at nearly $10,000, double Vietnam’s and nearly five times higher than in Laos or Cambodia. And the infrastructure, public safety and general atmosphere is excellent. So the vibe of the AI center was very much showing off: All this could be yours. Sign on the dotted line.

The Chinese government’s AI+ plan focuses on applications in sectors that the government has a role in and often in places where the population can’t afford what others can (high-quality education, healthcare, etc.). AI is understood as a tool, or perhaps a commodity like electricity, and the Chinese plan is to use that tool to solve Chinese problems — reducing the cost of electricity, safeguarding the country’s food supply, providing national healthcare via AI-driven medical solutions. China’s civilization, patriarchal and authoritarian though it may be, has a clear goal in mind: make Chinese people safer, richer, stronger and, ultimately, more Chinese.

“AI is understood as a tool, or perhaps a commodity like electricity, and the Chinese plan is to use that tool to solve Chinese problems.”

At the recent World AI Conference in Shanghai, I saw an ancient Chinese scroll painting underneath a fancy screen made by CamScanner. The proximity of the pair seemed to underline the message that Chinese tech companies are expected to serve Chinese civilizational needs — as defined by the government. Even when this feels like an afterthought, it’s politically important for Chinese AI companies to symbolically pledge allegiance to their country’s heritage.

That’s them; American civilization is different. Many aspects of the Chinese model would not fly in America. Surveillance, for example. Look at the backlash to Flock. A government that makes decisions for individuals without asking for their permission is, generally, an unwelcome idea in the States.

But Americans need not adopt any of China’s specific solutions to ask the important questions: What is AI actually doing for Americans? Is the general population in control, or are the Silicon Valley oligarchs? And which system — China’s state-directed planning or America’s obviously eroded democratic capitalism — will be more universally acceptable over the long term?