Neo-China Arrives From the Future, Nick Land (Explanation and Discussion)

Quote, "NeoChina arrives from the future." End quote. This is the ninth

future." End quote. This is the ninth sentence from Nick Lan's 1994 essay, Meltdown, and it is probably the single most famous sentence from this notorious

essay. If you've been following along,

essay. If you've been following along, you know that I've been doing a sentence by sentence breakdown of this essay, trying to understand it as deeply as possible because a lot of people think

that this is a kind of stupifying bunch of mumbo jumbo. And I've always believed that it's one of the most empirically

sophisticated and preient texts from the early '90s. So here we come to the most

early '90s. So here we come to the most legendary, most widely memed and repeated idea or single sentence in this

entire essay. There are three things I

entire essay. There are three things I think we should pause on and understand about this sentence. first is that if capital is this kind of alien invasion

from the future which he talks about elsewhere for land China is the privileged sight of that invasion second the reason is that the boogeoa

morality of western democracy is basically just too much of a drag we'll take a look at a few different places where he writes about this number three

third point is that this is in my opinion the the most famous statement of what will then later be called syofuturism which is a more kind of longunning tradition in in cultural

studies and so we'll talk a little bit about that term and some of the work that comes after this statement land is writing at a time in 1994 where there

are other people also interested in the same thing was actually uh Steve Goodman who coined this term I believe so first to really understand what he means by neo China arriving from the future, you

have to understand this this larger theory of capital that that land builds up. And so, we've talked about this in

up. And so, we've talked about this in some of the previous videos in this series. But basically, land introduces

series. But basically, land introduces this idea that capitalism is not a human invention. Okay? It's this kind of

invention. Okay? It's this kind of autonomous historical force. Uh, but it doesn't work in the way that you generally think of history working. It's

a kind of entity or space in the future.

It's still obscure to us perhaps, but it it it's pulling us into it and in fact it's even assembling itself from us in a

way that is not perfectly clear to us.

So we get the kind of paradigmatic statement of this idea in his essay called machinic desires from 1993. He

says, quote, "What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligence space." And the obvious analogy here is to the

Terminator films. If you've seen them, you'll you'll know what I'm talking about here, which he cites, by the way, explicitly. This is no, you know, secret

explicitly. This is no, you know, secret reference or anything. This is well known, but basically it's the idea that capital is this kind of runaway self-improving intelligence that uses humanity as its kind of

temporary host or bootloadader. It goes

back in time to where we are now uh and uses us to do its bidding to create itself. And um even out of enemy

itself. And um even out of enemy resources, you know, we we in some sense our human instincts, our human morality

is kind of opposed to this cold kind of escalation of of intelligence into machinic systems. So the machinic

intelligence has to kind of go back into us and kind of manipulate us. There's

this sort of war going on uh where humans don't really want to do it. So we

have to be kind of manipulated by this superior intelligence. So land kind of

superior intelligence. So land kind of takes this very seriously and almost treats it as if it's a kind of scientific uh postulate and then we see what kinds of predictions will emerge

from it if we really take it seriously.

That's the arriving from the future element. Now what is neochina or what is

element. Now what is neochina or what is what role does China have in all of this? So, Land seemed pretty convicted

this? So, Land seemed pretty convicted throughout most of his life to my knowledge that China is, as far as we

can tell, the kind of most likely site or source for all of the most important developments coming down the pike in

what he calls modernity 2.0 or whatever gets us out of the current impass we're in. where kind of you know the resources

in. where kind of you know the resources of modernity are kind of running out of steam and kind of self negating which is what you see in kind of American or

western postmodern culture because of all of that something new is going to have to emerge and land believes that by

far the most likely place that that will happen is going to be in China so let's explain a little bit let's look into this and assess the reasons for that and see how how convincing we find it So

as you know, China has this fascinating history. It's obviously an ancient, you

history. It's obviously an ancient, you know, very long-running civilization.

In the early 20th century, uh there are revolutionary movements um which culminate of course in the Chinese revolution of Mao of course and in many ways it was a really terrifying

disaster. What happens after the

disaster. What happens after the revolution is this very strange and unique kind of reckoning with capitalism where the country remains nominally a

kind of Marxist communist regime but especially with Deng Xiaoing basically takes on the the kind of policy frameworks of capitalism but is

sort of steered by the Chinese Communist Party. The best examples of Chinese

Party. The best examples of Chinese acceleration that land would be thinking about at this time. Remember he's

writing this essay in 1994 uh would be like the special economic zones which you may or may not have heard of. But one of the biggest

heard of. But one of the biggest experiments that Deng was associated with was basically carving out particular geographical areas in China and basically making them libertarian

free-for-alls. Max capitalism, max

free-for-alls. Max capitalism, max technological development, and all of the kind of normal rules would no longer apply there. It was just capitalist

apply there. It was just capitalist capital and technology could kind of go into these little petri dishes and just go full throttle. This was incredibly successful. The most famous one of

successful. The most famous one of course was Shenzen uh and that was in 1979. And then there's Pudong as well.

1979. And then there's Pudong as well.

There there were several of these. Um

and this is the kind of stuff that you know land would be looking at. But

notice or or you know take note that it China was not actually taking off in the way it is now. At the time of 1994 it was the stuff was only really just

beginning. So it's easy now to kind of

beginning. So it's easy now to kind of be like oh yeah obviously neo China arrives in the future. Look at China.

It's you know accelerating really fast.

That's easy to say right now, but that's actually not giving land enough credit in this essay because at the time of 1994, it was China was nowhere near the the rate of of development that it's at

right now. And so that's kind of notable

right now. And so that's kind of notable um in terms of how we assess this essay and it its empirical logic. Uh but those are some of the types of things that he's thinking about the special economic

zones, Shenzen or what have you. And

let's kind of unpack this a little bit more by looking later in the essay where he talks about um Far Eastern Marxism

and China again. Okay. So much further down he says quote whilst Chinese materialist dialectic dgativizes itself in the direction of schizophrenizing

system dynamics progressively dissipating top- down historical destination in the towrenched special economic zones. A rehiggalonianized

economic zones. A rehiggalonianized western Marxism degenerates from the critique of political economy into a state sympathizing monotheology of economics. Siding with fascism against

economics. Siding with fascism against deregulation, the left subsides into nationalistic conservatism, esphyxiating its vestigial capacity for hot

speculative mutation in a morass of cold depressive guild culture. Okay, so this is the opposition between what's happening in the west according to land

and what's happening in China. And he

goes on to say, quote, "As cinopacific boom and automatized global economic integration crashes the neoc colonial world system, the metropolis is forced

to reindogenize its crisis. Hyperfluid

capital dter territorializing to the planetary level digests the first world of geographic privilege resulting in Euroamerican neo mercantalist panic reactions, welfare state deterioration,

cancerizing enclaves of domestic underdevelopment, political collapse, and the release of cultural toxins that speed up the process of disintegration in a vicious circle. Okay, so there's a

lot going on there, but really break it down and look, it's quite preient. for

instance, Trumpian tariffs, for instance, and the kind of resurgence we're seeing now in demands for industrial policy, demands for um you

know uh active uh support for domestic industries.

This is it sounds a lot to me like Euroamerican neo mercantalist panic reactions. And you know, think about

reactions. And you know, think about like the de-industrialized rust belt opiate crash out in the United States.

Like these are cancerizing enclaves of domestic underdevelopment, right? So

land really has his finger on the pulse here. And of course, when you look at

here. And of course, when you look at our culture wars today and just the state of politicized ideological conflict all over the culture, you see the most kind of morbid and pathological

formations on the left, but also increasingly on the right. Let's be

frank. This pattern matches a lot in my view to what he calls the release of cultural toxins that speed up the process of disintegration in a vicious circle. Okay, so this is what land is

circle. Okay, so this is what land is sort of seeing and foreseeing already in the early 1990s and he's looking at the very early emergence of this kind of

accelerationist drenched special economic zones and rehaggalonized you know Marxism in the Far East. Okay,

this is what he calls the superiority of Far Eastern Marxism.

Okay, obviously China has none of the moral fixations that we have. You know,

China, no one in China and certainly not the Communist Party is sitting around, you know, wasting time worrying about what educated American college students think

about gender. Frankly, the Chinese

about gender. Frankly, the Chinese culture doesn't really even care that much about a lot of the basic moralities that we care about. Okay? So, I'm not going to go too deep and pretend I'm

some kind of anthropologist of China or anything like that. It's certainly not my expertise. I don't pretend to know

my expertise. I don't pretend to know too much. Uh, but I do know enough that,

too much. Uh, but I do know enough that, you know, you look even quickly and briefly at Chinese culture and it's very clear they have a very different attitude towards the value of human

life. for instance, that's a kind of

life. for instance, that's a kind of very Christian idea that has suffused Western culture in a way that it just has not suffused Chinese culture. And

you know, we are obsessed with all kinds of highly developed and well, you could say refined, but you could also say just sort of overripe moral fixations about,

you know, personal identity and safety and the right to life and the right to various forms of respect and all this kind of stuff that we are obsessed with today. you know, the trendy's culture is

today. you know, the trendy's culture is obviously very different and this is what land is noting and he's basically saying that this is going to be the ground upon which a properly

accelerationist techno capital future can be built on.

It's not going to happen in the United States or in the west because of all of this kind of human moral drag that we suffer from which China does not suffer

from. Okay. So it might be interesting

from. Okay. So it might be interesting to kind of look at this a little bit in more detail.

Let me show you this graph of GDP in constant US dollars in China from 1984 to 2024. Okay. So if you look at this,

to 2024. Okay. So if you look at this, you have to go to the left hand side of the graph to see look right 90 94.

It's barely taken off. You see, uh, the real inflection begins sometime around 2005.

The slope of the graph clearly changes and accelerates. And they've been more

and accelerates. And they've been more or less on that slope ever since then. But again, this really speaks to, I think, the empirical

precience of this essay. It's not some poetic u mumbo jumbo. This is, you know, really really sensitive to

empirical dynamics that I don't think anyone else was seeing quite as clearly at this time. So that graph is, you know, very vindicating I think uh for this idea that neochina arrives from

from the future. Now the other interesting element here is that land puts this theory into practice. Okay, he

really puts his money where his mouth is. It's a famous story. He disappears

is. It's a famous story. He disappears

from his academic work at War University in the late 1990s and there's a few years where no one hears from him and then sometime around 2004

he pops up in Shanghai and he moves his entire life and his family to China.

Sometime around that time he becomes then a key figure in what is now thought of as the so-called neo-reactionary movement of the 2010s. um you know in

essays like the dark enlightenment for instance that's a tw 2012 essay um where he again mentions China only one time but he mentions it in a pretty

significant way he talks about China as the most promising path to what he calls modernity 2.0 though in contrast to the decadent west. I'm just going to read it

decadent west. I'm just going to read it at some length is important context for this idea that neochina arrives from the future. Quote, given modernity's

future. Quote, given modernity's inherent trend to degeneration or self- cancellation, three broad prospects open. These are not strictly exclusive

open. These are not strictly exclusive and are therefore not true alternatives, but for schematic purposes, it is helpful to present them as such. One,

modernity 2.0 No, global modernization is reinvigorated from a new ethnographical core, liberated from the degenerate structures of its euroentric predecessor, but no doubt confronting

long range trends of an equally mortuary character. This is by far the most

character. This is by far the most encouraging and plausible scenario from a promodernist perspective. And if China remains even approximately on its current track, it will be assuredly

realized. India sadly seems to be too

realized. India sadly seems to be too far gone in its native version of demos sclerosis to seriously compete. Number

two, postmodernity amounting essentially to a new dark age in which Malthusian limits brutally reimpose themselves.

This scenario assumes that modernity 1.0 has so radically globalized its own morbidity that the entire future of the world collapses around it. If the

cathedral wins, this is what we have coming. Number three, Western

coming. Number three, Western Renaissance. To be reborn, it is first

Renaissance. To be reborn, it is first necessary to die. So the harder their hard reboot, the better. Comprehensive

crisis and disintegration offers the best odds most realistically as a subthe of option number one. So here you can see very clearly land believes there are

only a couple stark possibilities for the future of the world. Either this

western postmodern mess continues to dominate the world and kind of take over and spread and lock itself in which case it's basically a new dark age.

or China basically unleashes the technoeconomic growth of the next era of the world

thanks to its sort of distance from western moral degeneracy.

But possibly he holds out some hope that there could as well be a western renaissance where you know western postmodernity is somehow overcome from within.

But even that he says fat chance and if it happens it's probably going to be as part of a larger process where China kind of resuscitates the west or forces

maybe he doesn't say this exactly but to me this is kind of suggested that perhaps it's the competition with China that could generate western renaissance and I think there's some evidence to that right that's sort of what we're

seeing with Trump and a lot of the kind of new life let's call it on kind of the cultural Right. And so

cultural Right. And so this is basically Nick Lan's viewpoint from at least around 1994 all the way to

2012 at least and I think he to my knowledge he still lives in Shanghai. So

I suspect he has not fundamentally changed this viewpoint. Okay. So this is you know this is a funny meme. The

sentence Neochina arrives from the future. People love to say this in a

future. People love to say this in a joking way because it is just kind of interesting and funny.

But it's a very serious idea and in fact arguably one of Nick Lan's most serious and kind of committed high conviction viewpoints. Uh given how many times he's

viewpoints. Uh given how many times he's talked about it very clearly and you know when you look at what he's saying these are serious kind of statements.

These are not minor comments in passing.

Okay. So that's NeoChina arriving from the future. NeoChina obviously being

the future. NeoChina obviously being this kind of creative concept of whatever this teological version of China that exists far in the

future that is coming back in time to compose itself out of us. NeoChina is

that kind of abstract teological endpoint uh that is presumably the source of the retrocausal force that is underwriting all of this.

So yeah, I thought before I let you go, I wanted to look a little bit more at some of the detail around this economic acceleration. It's really quite

acceleration. It's really quite remarkable if you look at what China has done in the time since it started its kind of capitalist reorientation. If you

look at Shenzen for instance, Shenzen expanded from about6 billion US in 1980 to about half a

trillion in constant US dollars in 2024.

So that's about an 800x real increase.

That's that's controlling for inflation.

Okay, so that's pretty nuts. On a per capita basis, income rose from about 2,000 per person in 1980 to 28,000 in uh

2023. And again, that's in constant

2023. And again, that's in constant dollars. So that's a about a 13 or 14x

dollars. So that's a about a 13 or 14x real increase in the income of individuals in that area in that region.

Uh now more broadly, Chinese technological acceleration is obviously, you know, sort of beyond question. If

you, you know, ever read the news at all, you already know this. But to put some numbers on it, China added about 277 gawatt of solar power in the year

2024.

And to give you some sense of the scale, the United States only had about 236 gawatt cumulatively by the end of 2024.

Okay, so China added more than everything we had in one year. Okay, uh

in around 2024. So, you know, you could you could list many other examples.

You've probably seen Dan Wang's new book that uh goes into a lot of this in detail. But another fun fact is that

detail. But another fun fact is that four Chinese shipyards over four years uh from 2019 to 2023 produced warships with the same combined displacement

equal to the entire Royal Navy. So

that really puts it in perspective and you could go on and on. So there's no doubt about it that China is technologically accelerating at

a rate that puts us in the dust. If you

just look at sort of the growth rates, it's obvious. It's very clear. Now,

it's obvious. It's very clear. Now,

where all of that goes is a very open question. Whether it's sustainable, it's

question. Whether it's sustainable, it's a very open question. Perhaps will China kind of suffer the same kind of liberal democratic processes that we suffer.

There's a lot of reason to believe that.

That tends to be I'm much more bearish on this personally. I'm more skeptical, I should say. I think it's quite likely, you know, that China as it grows economically will face a lot of the same

structural uh issues and problems that the West has faced. Um, China is still quite poor and they're also quite uneducated as a whole. And so uh from my perspective the critical view here is

that they just have simply not yet hit the thresholds where according to all the political science knowledge we have of all countries over all time. Um you

know they have not hit the thresholds where we would expect them to start facing kind of western liberal democratic transitional processes which could very well put them back in the

same place that we currently are. So,

I'm personally much less convinced than Nick Landis that this is a kind of, you know, destined long-term singular idiosyncratic uh country that

is somehow going to, you know, pave the way uh for the next several hundred years. It's totally possible, but I'm

years. It's totally possible, but I'm less skeptical. I think if they keep

less skeptical. I think if they keep growing, it's very likely that they will basically just kind of liberalize, democratize, and become much more like us than than we currently can imagine.

So that's a counter hypothesis, but the point is land was incredibly preient this idea that Neochina arrives from the future. He predicted pretty accurately

future. He predicted pretty accurately and in fact over the following couple decades, NeoChina in fact did arrive from the future. So we have to give him a lot of credit for that. And that's

basically what it means empirically. I

believe that that's pretty much a full accounting of it. But the one thing that I would be remiss to overlook is that there was a kind of idea at this time

which was not just associated with Nick Land. A lot of the CCRU kind of

Land. A lot of the CCRU kind of affiliated individuals such as Steve Goodman who I alluded to at the beginning also known as Code 9. He's a

musician and DJ. I believe to my knowledge he actually coined the term Sofuturism.

And there was also much later this video essay which you can find online from 2016 called Sofuturism.

And it's a fascinating and really interesting kind of art film that looks at Chinese culture, Chinese art in many different ways and analyzes it through several lenses, computing, copying,

gaming studying addiction labor and gambling. And I believe my research

gambling. And I believe my research suggests that Lawrence Lack, who's the creator of this video, kind of was in touch with Steve Goodman. So, it's not that Nick Land single-handedly invented

it and all of them are kind of downstream of him or something like that, but this is an iconic phrase and slogan that I think is much more kind of

influential than virtually any other.

And it was at the same time as, you know, um, Steve Goodman's thinking around the topic as well. And so

certainly this beautiful evocative phrase that NeoChina arrives from the future is um certainly one of if not the single most kind of iconic texts for

what is today called syofuturism. So

just wanted to say a few words about that and give you some pointers to some other works and figures who have thought about this topic and have contributed

work to it. So that is what it means.

the ninth sentence of meltdown. NeoChina

arrives from the future. Thanks for

listening. Appreciate you. And uh

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Okay. Thanks everyone. Appreciate you.