Socialism with hyperreal characteristics. The traditional urban-rural dichotomy is disrupted by a four-decade modernisation speedrun. Custom Doraemon Tesla parked up beside caged chickens. Temporal collapse. Cousin purchases cucumber lays with Weixin’s biometric palm scanning after haggling with elderly farmers for produce by the roadside. IP is rendered obsolete. Chinese aunties sporting Kuromi x Balenciaga pyjamas stroll by the river. Culture is stripped from context. This process is only accelerated by the geolocked internet. Everything is appropriated, remixed. Everything is predicated on speed: manufacturing, livestreaming, trends, people. Everything everywhere all at once.
- Written in my notes app in Zhuzhou, China after falling sick with a fever whilst visiting my grandmother.
Simulacrum and Sino-futurism
AI gorilla sofas, car headlight eyelashes, horse heels, Peter Griffin chin mousepads. Pastiche, cryptic and surreal products run rife on the domestic, Chinese, shopping platform Taobao (more widely known by its international counterpart Aliexpress). The pandemonium of manufacturing assemblages sees mass production churn out and transform bizarre, AI-generated ideas (literal and figurative) into reality. ‘The aesthetic of Sinofuturism combines gloss with grime’. While it is often conflated with contemporary China, Lawrence Lek proposes Sinofuturism as a form of Artificial Intelligence, one that is: ‘addicted to learning massive amounts of raw data’ with an ‘unprecedented sense of collective will to power’. Just as the unknowable consciousness of the Artificial Other poses a threat to humanity, the Orientalist Other instils fear into the western subject by its alleged unknowability.
This techno-orientalist stereotype is particularly pertinent after the AI arms race’s latest DeepSeek saga. Through machine learning and ‘copying rather than originality’, Sinofuturism partakes in a Yellow Techno-Peril to overcome inconsistent distinctions between China’s ancient past and its contemporary modernisation. Almost a decade after Lek’s proposition and two decades after China’s ascension to the WTO, this geopolitical and techno-cultural aesthetic has only further proliferated in its factories and manufacturing hubs. Functioning like a large neural network, these structures devour vast quantities of global production processes, transfiguring their morphologies into slop-like, hallucinogenic innovations. Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined. If Artificial Intelligence and Deepfakes produce infinite digital timelines, then Chinese manufacturing manifests these into infinite physical realities. If you can conceive it, you can make it. One AI Gorilla Sofa please 🤲.
“Copy everything. Respect for historical tradition is a main principle of Chinese aesthetics. Replicating old masters, memorising old texts, following moral standards, are all part of this tradition. But Sinofuturism absorbs everything. Nothing is sacred. Authorship is overrated. Copyright is wrong.”
- Lawrence Lek, video essay ‘Sinofuturism’
The notion of China as a site of extreme copy and counterfeit culture reveals a racialised trepidation harkening back to the days of Yellow Peril. Daniel F. Vukovich argues that this sinological form of orientalism is rooted in a projected fear of Chinese mimicry threatening the dominance of western hegemony. Homi Bhabha’s mimicry with sinic characteristics. One scroll on reels or TikTok will reveal a collective anxiety of Xi aura-farming on the agricultural fields of Huawei and BYD. This point is shared by Laikwan Pang, who relates the logic of the counterfeit to the logic of capitalism. In the article China Who Makes and Fakes, Pang notes that a pirated product has the unique semiotics of a magical (pre-modern) and self-reproducible simulacrum (post-modern) object. The ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin coined, or otherworldly, abstract power (as Marx postulated) granted to luxury goods is destroyed by the replica or counterfeit. The IP rights regime and commodity fetishism and its application of ‘authenticity’ or social logics to these objects is questioned. Counterfeit LVMH and Kering handbags are frequently manufactured using the same designs, materials and labour as their authentic counterparts and sometimes even within the same factories. Balenciaga Pandabuy Warriors exist as an extreme manifestation of commodity obsession, fully displaying the performative promise of reaching the ultimate signified.
The dichotomisation of creation and the copy, one which ‘reifies creativity and condemns mimesis’ is an outdated modernist framework that sees creativity as abstractly new. In our hyper-referential world, mimicry and derivative labour is the dominant form of cultural production. Online, witnessing the dissemination of Lao Gan Ma memes and drill beats sampling ‘Red Sun in the Sky’ unveils this flux of semiotic drifts. Appropriation is diminished as unimaginative, but industrialised creativity is a function of replication, a contention that Adorno has analysed extensively. Likewise, China innovates through an industrial piracy where production becomes an iterative, collective process rather than a system of individual authorship. This concept, named ‘Shanzhai’, sees iterative evolutions of commodities become a form of continuous industrial mutation. Bootleg Shanzhai iPhones from the early 2000s pioneered dual sim slots before Samsung or Apple. Many contained eccentricities to the extent that seeing Shanzhai iPhones accommodating electric razors or watches was not an uncommon sight. This haphazard, mishmash of concepts and components is reflected in a distinctly Chinese landscape of cultural production. Life in China today unfolds with a lucidity, and a dreamlike strangeness, exacerbated by the velocity of technological shifts. Anything and everything feel possible; I consume osmanthus cream cheese explosion lava lattes by day and go raving to the pulses of a Chongqing temple club by night.
The China-verse and Non-linear Temporality
While living in China, I have attempted to articulate this feeling of entering alternate timelines and riding the currents of temporal shifts, a prevalent attitude shared by our digital cultural milieu. Under Douyin content farming livestreams that have crossed the deterritorialized internet, a feeling of ‘watching interdimensional cable’ is professed. Under the lustrous and oversaturated cyberpunk edits of Chongqing or Shanghai, some ask: ‘is this AI?’. Others declare that ‘China is the future’. Gabriele de Seta, in the article Sinofuturism as Inverse Orientalism explicates this phenomenon:
“It posits some sort of equivalence between China and the future: China is the future, China comes from the future, the future will come from China, and so on.”
Many diasporic Chinese people, like me, are familiar with a pressure to improve their Mandarin skills, because it might aid our careers sometime in the future. Likewise, Sinofuturism implicates a future-oriented temporality. These speculative imaginaries have roots in the writings of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) around the turn of the Millenium. Notably, in 1994, the esoteric accelerationist turned right-wing grifter Nick Land, who now resides in China, proclaimed that ‘Neo-China arrives from the future’. Likewise, the less meth-pilled Sadie Plant wrote of an Asian convergence of ‘bamboo mats’ with the ‘manufacture of computer games’ in the collapse of modernity. However, de Seta posits the problematic nature of this cyber-exotic techno-orientalist discourse. Namely, the denial of ‘coevalness’ or the assumption of a colonial linear temporality.
These futurist temporal positionalities of China have a ‘shizogenic use of time’, an anthropological framework that is predicated on a temporal distancing of the Other. De Seta contends that it is precisely this ‘denial of coevalness’ that Sinofuturism partakes of, whereby China is temporally bounded to other timelines. This notion is contingent on a western conception of temporality that views history as linear and time as a continuity divided into discrete instants. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Infancy and History interrogates this concept:
‘Western man’s incapacity to master time, and his consequent obsession with gaining and passing it, have their origins in this Greek concept of time as quantified and infinite continuum of precise fleeting instants. A culture with such a representation of time could have no real experience of historicity.’
Other ethnofuturisms, such as Afrofuturism, understand that upending hegemonic and colonial frameworks must come from counternarratives that emanate from the periphery of western time. Categories of blackness and Otherness produced under enlightenment philosophy serve to maintain a separation from historicity, as Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, it ‘transubstantiates juridico-economic effect into a moral defect’ by constantly reproducing categories of being, sameness and difference that consistently place blackness outside of the development of history. Thus, it is imperative to seek emancipation outside these categories of being, such as the Kantian subject and Hegel’s racial others that are reproduced by the framework of time. Therefore, this necessitates the rejection of the colonial linear trajectory of time, rather than be conjured as part of techno-orientalist fantasy.
Rather than placing China in the futurity of a linear, chronological timeline, we can understand it to have a field-like quality, one that Agamben frames as charged, suspended and transformative. Chinese cultural and technological production shows that ‘there is nothing radically new; we can see history as an enormous process of mimesis’. Pang notes how this notion of time as fluid and circular is evidenced in the traditional Chinese calendar and even in the narrative structure of Chinese novels. These reject chronological succession, seeing time as non-linear and simultaneous. History is absorbed and futures are pre-empted. “It makes no sense to produce visions of the future. It’s already here”.
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Sinofuturism. Available at: https://sinofuturism.com/.
Agamben, G. and Heron, L. (2020) Infancy and history: On the destruction of experience. S.l.: Verso.
Da Silva, D.F. (2014) ‘Toward a black feminist poethics’, The Black Scholar, 44(2), pp. 81–97. doi:10.1080/00064246.2014.11413690.
de Seta , G. (2020) ‘Sinofuturism as Inverse Orientalism: China’s Future and the Denial of Coevalness’, SFRA Review , 50(2–3). Available at: https://sfrareview.org/2020/09/04/50-2-a5deseta/.
Dirlik, A. (1996) ‘Chinese history and the question of orientalism’, History and Theory, 35(4), p. 96. doi:10.2307/2505446.
Pang, L. (2008) ‘`China who makes and fakes’’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25(6), pp. 117–140. doi:10.1177/0263276408095547.
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Lina Deng is a London-based British-Chinese interdisciplinary artist. Her experimental approach moves fluidly between performance, new media, sculpture, and theory-inflected research. She’s deeply invested in how the internet shapes consciousness through digital absurdities, algorithmic pastiche and the attention economy. Loitering through our ever-evolving, schizophrenic digital landscape, she interpolates the psychic-ontological shift brought about by content collapse and the spiritual residues of spectral ecologies.