EXCERPT How might we theorise computing beyond a Western perspective, and in particular through the lens of Chinese philosophy and history? This text takes the work of Qian Xuesen, a Chinese aerospace engineer with an interest in qigong (气功), as a critical starting point for approaching this question. Owing to his near canonisation in the Chinese history of technology, interpretations of Qian’s ideas have often been superficial, and as a result his work on complex systems design has not been given enough attention. My exploration of his legacy began in 2020, when I commissioned a film by artist Shi Qing for the Shanghai Biennale. Exploring how Qian’s work could inform our ideas about computation, the film took the form of a theory-fiction that speculated on the implementation of the hypothetical ‘Yangtze River Computer’ as a model for artificial intelligence in which qigong and what Qian called renti kexue (人体科学), or ‘somatic science’, are ‘written back’ into computation, uniting ‘nature’ and ‘artifice’, human and machine. Qian’s project, as reimagined and elaborated on by Shi, makes an important contribution to discussions about a possible Chinese ‘cosmotechnics’, a framework for computation and technological development based in Chinese philosophy which has recently nourished animated debates around the prospect of alternative modernities …