EXCERPT Qian Xuesen is one of the best known Chinese scientists of the twentieth century. He made early and foundational contributions to Chinese cybernetics and strategic weapons research, and it seems only natural that textbooks are now beginning to retrospectively treat Qian’s brand of cybernetics, developed from the 1950s onwards, along with his later involvement in the pseudoscience of renti kexue (人体科学) or ‘somatic science’, as a distinct chapter in the history of AI in the PRC. However, neither the idea of a plurality of AI histories nor Qian’s significance with regard to them can be taken for granted. The question of a distinctively Chinese AI requires careful historiographical and paradigmatic reflection, and it is with this in view that this text aims to offer a close reading of some of Qian’s key concepts concerning human and machine thinking. […] Recently, a tendency to revisit Qian as an early thinker of contemporary technologies has emerged. However, it is important to keep in mind that such a framing does not exhaust his relevance, and sometimes risks detaching his ideas from their original contexts. Qian’s much discussed rendering of virtual reality as the ‘spirit realm’, lingjing (灵境), for example, was more than just a poetic translation. It belonged to his theorisation of a giant sociotechnical management system, and it is only when placed within this broader theoretical context that its potential for helping us rethink contemporary terms such as ‘metaverse’ can be realised. For Qian’s contemporary importance is rooted firmly in his work as an engineer of the discourse and design of systems—systems that govern society and the state, systems whose logic we are subject to but often scarcely understand …