Radical praxis of computing in the PRC: forgotten stories from the maoist to post-Mao era

Abstract

In his 1937 essay "On Practice (Shijian lun)", Mao Zedong argues for a distinctively Chinese model of communism that merges practise with theory, combining objective experience and subjective knowledge into a coherent dialectical process of praxis. This was, at the time, a radical idea within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the global communist movement dominated by Stalinism at its heyday. But it became institutionalized as a guiding principle of CCP, the ruling party of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949, which has led, among other things, to the establishment of one of the world’s most important computing industries since the 1950s. This article interrogates the idea of “radical praxis” and applies it to the Chinese contexts of the 1950s–2000s in developing a holistic, emic understanding of the computing industry from the Maoist to the Post-Mao era. As such, we aim at reconstructing plural histories of Chinese technology that are longer, less deterministic, and more imaginative than mainstream accounts that would begin, almost always, with Deng Xiaoping’s marketization reforms. Longer, because we trace the radical praxis of Chinese computing back to the 1950s with remarkable continuity. Less deterministic, because it has multiple trajectories full of unforeseeable twists and turns. More imaginative, because praxis is as much about knowing, theorization, and subjectivities as it is about doing, implementation, and embodied struggle. Drawing from policy documents, news archives, memoirs of key CCP leaders as well as secondary materials in both Chinese and English, this article reveals and discusses hidden stories of Maoist radical praxis.