Surfing the Wave

China, K-Waves and other things

I’ve been reading Anna Greenspan’s recent book, China and the Wireless Undertow: Media as Wave Philosophy. I’m very much enjoying it—so what better way to spend one’s time than writing out a disjointed series of thoughts and observations for future refinement.

Greenspan's book is a kaleidoscope of waves: electromagnetic waves, Kondratiev waves, the recurrent motif of waves in ancient Chinese philosophy (and this philosophy's untimely return in the contemporary political and economic juncture). We are taken on fascinating detours—who knew that, against the backdrop of widespread proliferation of formal and informal telecommunication networks in the 1980s, a 'popular religious system' formed around the “somatic science” of attuning the body to cosmic waves of information? I was also delighted to see the appearance of cinnabar in the text, which was something of considerable interest in the early U/Acc days due to a series of puzzling AQ equivalences.

The motivating insight for Greenspan's study, which she alludes to in the books conclusion, was the realization that there might be an elusive connection between the philosophy of philosopher Mou Zongsan, which twists the Kantian system together with Eastern religion and philosophy to produce a schematic of vibrational self-cultivation, and “the imperceptible electromagnetic waves that form the abstract infrastructure of wireless media”.

Greenspan places wireless media at the center of her discussions of contemporary China: the aforementioned rapid diffusion (driven both top-down and bottom-up) of telecommunication systems in the post-Mao period, the importance of places such as Shenzhen in the global spread of cellular phone technology, and the more recent push to cement in place a grand infrastructure for 5G technology standards for cellular communication networks. 5G has not only been considered key for the upcoming wave of industrial automation and self-directing technics, but has become a geopolitical hot-button issue—as evidenced by the conflict between the US government and China tech behemoth Huawei.

I wrote a bit about Huawei, 5G, and the emergent 'haptic space' in a post on Reciprocal Contradiction's earlier wordpress iteration. What had interested me then was Huawei's proposed 5G-powered “Internet 2030”, which would harness this electromagnetic foundation to call forth a host of esoteric-sounding things: an industrial internet of things, “network computing convergence”, “digital twins”, and—most intriguingly—a “tactical internet”. The tactile internet is intimately bound to industrial applications, with promises of immersive simulated experiences that “close the data gap” between users and physical systems (imagine a VR simulation where what the users are doing is reflected in ‘real’ industrial processes).

Problems of distance compress to a pinpoint, and—to quote Huawei itself—“the lines between real and digital get even fuzzier”.

China and the Wireless Undertow links up these sorts of wireless telecommunication technologies and their spectral, electromagnetic underpinnings to a sort of wave: the legendary Kondratiev Wave, or the hypothetical phenomenon of cyclical patterns in the economy, each ranging roughly from 40 to 70 years.

I'm assuming that everybody knows what a K-wave is, so it suffices to say that that it is differentiated from the Juglar cycle (the 7 – 11 year fixed capital investment cycle) and the Kuznet cycle (the 15 – 20 year infrastructure investment cycle) in that the K-wave is based in the dynamics of technological innovation and the way that investment capital operates in relation to its ebbs and flows. I've tended to drift towards the approach to K-wave patterns developed by Christopher Freeman and expanded on by Carlota Perez, which is really a kind of neo- or post-Schumpeterian analysis of 'creative destruction' taken to its highest form.

The Freeman approach revamps the K-wave analysis into a wider analysis of what is called “techno-economic paradigms”. Here's a sample of what this looks like:

(K)-Wave theory is inherently slippery. Beyond a number of similarities like apprehending the generalized structure of the thing, there is little agreement between the numerous wave theorists. Periodization of waves vary from theorists to person to person, and many individuals—such as Carlota Perez—change their periodizations across their body of work (she seems to have ultimately rectified this by using symbolic points to anchor her analysis). From the mainstream of economic theory, the K-wave is more or less rejected, treated as hocus-pocus or apophenia.

But economics remains haunted by waves and cycles. It's there every time they say something about 'booms and busts' and in ruminations on the cyclical character of recessions. The K-wave is in many ways the troublesome ghost in the machine that blows up the fragile insularity of the technocrat's models.

In Greenspan's own work, a general schematic is laid out where the current wave began around 2000 and is currently reaching its zenith. The lead innovation or structuring mechanism for this wave is wireless technology. She writes:

In this interpretation of the theory, we have now entered the fifth K-wave, the wireless wave, to which China is so intimately tied. The early 2020s, when 5G is set to roll out, occurs just as the fifth wave is hitting its crest. If the pattern holds, the new technological platform of high-speed electromagnetic vibrations will host the evolutionary mutations that normally accompany a downturn, which is due to end sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century.

The previous wave, for Greenspan, runs from the end of the Second World War through 2000, with a high noon in 1973. This wave is organized around electronics: 1947 saw the introduction of the transistor by Bell Labs, and across the 1960s and 1970s the rapid development of the computer took place along the invention of the internet. Soon, consumer electronics began to flood the the market, corresponding to a massive re-organization of production (de-industrialization in the west, immense industrialization in the east) while ICT infrastructure remapped the very internal contours of corporate giants.

One could quibble with this periodization, but I'm not too interested in this debate right now. I'm reminded, though, of an intriguing comment made by Haz back in 2022 on the topic of K-waves:

Here, a pattern superseding individuals waves is being proposed. The waves become twinned: an ‘infrastructural’ wave, seemingly associated with what Haz calls “credit-backed national infrastructure”, followed by a ‘paradigmatic wave’, characterized by intensive development of markets. Read back into Greenspan’s analysis, this suggestion poses significant questions around the dynamics of the “Age of the Wireless”—especially as the 5G revolution promises in to usher the next epoch in industrial automation.

* * *

Speaking of intensive marketization, Greenspan dedicates a stunning chapter to Shenzhen, the sprawling city and Special Economic Zone on the shores of the Pearl River delta that grew from “a string of backwater coastal settlements with a population of 300,000” in the late 1970s to a megacity with a population of well over 17 million in 2020. Shenzhen’s headlong flight into the future was fueled by China’s Reform and Opening Up, which saw dense networks of industrial manufacturing zones and a mobile workforce luring a number of major companies from East Asia and elsewhere.

The result was a city defined by marginality: an ever-shifting Zone of complex political status, a periphery swept up in unrestrained development that has given rise to the story of “Shenzhen speed”. Beyond the advanced manufacturers centers is another sort of culture, one that has sprung up from the city’s dense streets and clusters of community. This culture is based on the fusion of the traditional street market with high-tech electronics fabrication and tinkering.

This culture is the incubator for the Shanzhai economy. The term shanzhai, meaning “mountain fortress”, referred to groups that flourished in the peripheral zones of China during the Song dynasty. These groups would undercut the traditional strictures of the economy of the day; today, their memory is applied to designate flexible systems of (usually electronic) design, often taking the form of counterfeited goods.

The shanzhai culture and economy has acted as something of an advanced vanguard, pioneering various low-cost production systems and techniques that have been adopted by more ‘mainstream’ commercial outfits (which have partially displaced or outright replaced shanzhai). But there are two other key components of shanzhai that add to the mythos of Shenzhen itself: the speed in which shanzhai production takes place, and its resistance to the worldwide intellectual property regime.

Taking up the flexibility, speed, and anti-IP dimensions of shanzhai, Greenspan writes:

The shanzhai ecosystem is composed of a dense, horizontal web of component producers, traders, design solution houses, vendors and assembly lines, many of them informal, which catered to lesser known or no-name clients that were not of interest to the larger players. This web of electronic fabrication is based on what is known as gongban (公版 public boards) and gongmo (公模 public shells and casings). Gongban are typically fabricated in independent design houses that connect chip manufacturers with factories that handle assembly. Boards are designed to fit a multiplicity of casings and customers can take a gongban of their liking as is, or modify it according to their tastes. Manufacturers are motivated to support as many customers as possible, who coat the gongban with a wide variety of ‘skins’ or ‘shells’ (gongmo).

This singular techno-economic culture operates through a system of guanxi (關係 social connection), in which local players mix in with diasporic alliances (especially from Hong Kong and Taiwan). In the electronic markets of Huaqiangbei competitors’ stalls sit side by side. There is a tendency to share resources in a way that is alien to the worldwide regime of intellectual property rights. Shanzhai allows for – and even feeds off – open trade in reference boards, BOMs (Bills of Materials) and other elements of design.

If there is something that approaches an 'Edbergian Utopia' (not that I'm a utopian), what is being described in this passage gets at it quite a bit. This is also what is at stake in the idea, long-simmering on the X timeline and in DMs but never fully developed (except for maybe here and here?), of 'nanobusiness'. I was asked once what separates nanobiz grindset from, say, the constructivist neo-mutualism of somebody like Kevin Carson. Interestingly enough, Carson's Homebrew Industrial Revolution—which I do like, and have been greatly influenced by—cites the 'shanzhai ecosystem' among its example of the emergent, hyper-productive social-technical matrix grounded in low-cost, flexible production systems.

But it would be somewhat outrageous to consider shanzhai—as well as the more generalized high-tech street economics of Shenzhen—as an expression of mutualist praxis. Carson's work has a bit of a collapsitarian or decelerationist position encoded within it: he sees the anticipated shift in the logic of production as exhibiting a 'slowing-down', and he flirts with outrageous notions like peak oil (shipwrecked on the terminal beaches of the Abiotic Paradigm). Similarly, his discussion hangs uneasily between an understanding of this techno-economic transformation as historical process that is constantly unfolding, and a more voluntarist understanding of these processes inherited from anarchism.

Another dimension to the problem is that I do not tend to take the Reform and Opening Up of China under Deng as a repudiation of socialism in China or a vicious counterrevolution that reinstalled bourgeois rule. Instead, I prefer to look at not only the breaks, but the continual development between a series of events—the Sino-Soviet Split, the 'Bombard the Headquarters' moment and the extended Cultural Revolution, etc—that both made possible and culminated in Deng's reforms.

A lot of this had to do with the intensification of the class contradictions in Chinese civilization, not between proletariat and bourgeoisie, but with the emergence of the 'new class' in relation to objective processes of socialization taking place not only in 'actually existing socialism' but in the world at large. But this must be left for other posts...

One aspect with respect to both shanzhai and Shenzhen more broadly that is worth mentioning is the particular Chinese emphasis on light industry, which is to say forms of industry (including electronics, but by no means limited to it) that require smaller capital input, machinery, and space than heavy industrial processes.

In April 1956, Mao gave the first signal of the impending Sino-Soviet split with a speech at the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party that was titled 'On the Ten Major Relationships'. The first order of business in Mao's speech was “the relationship between heavy industry on the one hand and light industry and agriculture on the other”, which began to draw out ways that China would pursue a path distinct from that of the Soviet Union.

The Soviets had a “lop-sided stress on heavy industry” relative to light industry, leading to a critical “shortage of goods on the market and an unstable currency”. Don't read this as a repudiation of heavy industry as such: Mao was quick to note that the “production of the means of production must be given priority”. Instead, a potential paradigm was being proposed where increasing importance on and development of light industry and agriculture would “lay a more solid foundation for the development of heavy industry”.

It was also a question of speed. Focus on heavy industry at the expense of light industry would lead, in the long-run, to a dangerous slowdown in heavy industry's pace of development. Turning towards light industry, would accelerate the process of generalized industrial development. Twenty years later, Mao's position would bear fruit with Shenzhen speed, right as the Soviet Union began to chug towards its ultimate collapse.

Isabella Weber's How China Escaped Shock Therapy is particularly interesting because she links up this dialectic of light and heavy industry to both the problem of price stabilization—but even more importantly, to the eternal return of ancient Chinese economic thought on the bleeding edge of modernity.

Key here is the Guanzi, a political and philosophical text dating back to roughly the 7^th century BCE. Often ttributed to statesmen Guan Zhong (though probably drafted by a number of advisors and planners), the Guanzi is known for its early engagement with what would only much later be described as 'political economy', with what might be the first exposition of the laws of supply and demand.

...the price of grain is heavy in our state and light in the world at large. Then the other lords’ goods will spontaneously leak out like water from a spring flowing downhill. Hence, if goods are heavy, they will come; if light they will go.

In this context, 'light' and 'heavy' take on complex, multifaceted meanings. In the most immediate sense, 'light' designates something of lower value, something cheap. Heavy means something serious, something expensive. Yet when it comes to a given good or commodity, the 'light' or 'heavy' character is not intrinsic—these qualities transmute into one another depending on historical, political, and economic circumstances. Weber:

...all economic phenomena can only be understood relationally; things can be heavy or light only in relation to other things. Heavy commodities are considered essential to production or human well-being, and light commodities are seen as inessential. But precisely what commodity is defined as heavy or light is subject to constant change and reflects the season of the year, production practices, and market dynamics, among other factors. The task of economic policy is to weigh and balance, to use what is found to be heavy in order to offset what is light.

Important lessons that were drawn from insights included the importance of economic regulation that did not seek to disrupt the natural flow of things, but to make use of these processes to bring them to points of reconciliation. This can be distilled further: utilization of market processes, not their obliteration. Or, as Weber puts it in a discussion of Xue Muqiao (an economist who helped lay the theoretical groundwork for Reform and Opening Up), the “conscious harnessing of spontaneous market forces by the state”.

Maybe we can do something vulgar and translate this into Delooz-speak to help this 'Dengoid' pill go down a little smoother for certain members of the audience. Crack open your tattered and battered copies of A Thousand Plateaus (that University of Minnesota Press edition which everybody has) and go to page 160, bottom paragraph. “Mimic the strata”. At first blush this seems to a sudden imposition of a conservative impulse within the pages of the Capitalism & Schizophrenia project, a far cry from the unrelenting, apocalyptic maxim of Accelerate The Process found in Anti-Oedipus. If we are to mimic the strata, crudely read as an ontological straitjacket bracketing free-wheelin’ flows, how will we achieve universal schizomarketization, “China-syndrome, irreversible social disintegration and oedipus melting away through 'trodes into voodoo inhumanity”?

Flip through the most esoteric of plateaus, the 'Geology of Morals'. It is there where the discussion of the strata—and destratification—constantly implodes onto itself, a cosmic tilt-a-whirl where even Deleuze and Guattari seem to get lost at what they're attempting to disentangle. The important element here is that at a high level, the very distinction between stratification and destratification begins to break down. The strata always has an advanced destratifying edge, destratified matter is always getting locked into stratification. Taken together, you end up with something that looks a lot like long-range development instead of short bursts of cyberpositive escalation that can only ever terminate in burn-out and collapse (this the ‘black holes’ that A Thousand Plateaus repeatedly reference).

To 'mimic the strata' means to occupy both positions simultaneously, to maintain a 'dynamic equilibrium' between order and unrelenting transformation (the parable of Professor Challenger growing lobster claws). It's just pragmatics (or pragmatism).

That's how you ride the Wave.

* * *

Given all this talk of China and waves, there's a fertile cross-link to be found here to K-dynamic deep cuts that seemed to trouble a number of wave theorists in profound ways. In the introduction to The Long Twentieth Century, Arrighi provides a summation of various wave theories, with a focus on where the theoretical relationship between the wave and capitalism itself begins to break down. Nicole Bousquet, for example, was 'embarrassed' to find wave-forms rippling through disparate economic structures long predating the break-out of modernity, tentatively fixed to 1500 AD. Arrighi himself found the proposition of Barry Gills and Andre Gunder Frank—that “fundamental cyclical rhythms” can be found to have been oscillating across the world for some 5000 years—to be “unsettling”.

Arrighi ultimately seems to toss up his hands. The wave almost comes to look like some sort of elusive cosmic infrastructure that can neither be contained nor explained by political economy.

One of Arrighi’s sources here was a pretty interesting paper by Robert Hartwell with the rather dry title “Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations of China, 750-1550”, published in the December 1982 issue of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. The crux of Hartwell’s argument is that in premodern China—particularly the period running from the mid-Tang to Song dynasties—saw the emergence of a cyclical, quasi-waveform process of staggered social, economic, and technological development.

There's several essential differences between Hartwell's cyclical movement and K-waves. The first major one is that in Hartwell's analysis, the movement is fundamentally spatial in character, while in K-wave theory, the temporal element is foregrounded (the wave as successive blocks of duration with a structuring pattern that repeats in time—a machinic time). This isn't to say that spatial dynamics—or even geopolitical—dynamics do not play a role in K-waves: in the Christopher Freeman – Carlota Perez 'techno-economic paradigm' model that I prefer, they note that movement from one wave to the next not only involves the re-calibration of governmental and bureaucratic systems, but the passage from one (or more) center(s) of economic and political power to the next.

Greenspan makes use of this approach as well, citing Wallerstein's poignant comment that capital “is essentially one process with the whole world as its stage”. Importantly, Greenspan notes that the geographical movement across successive waves generates an oscillating pattern where capital, technology and the like “tend to diffuse unevenly from core to peripheral zones”. What counts as periphery today will start to look like a core tomorrow.

(This is why we shouldn't make too much of language that designates the US and the EU-NATO Forth Reich as an 'imperial core'; the world system can have multiple cores or poles, and so talk of a singular imperial core obscures geopolitical contradiction more than it elucidates the inner-workings of the system).

This core/periphery dialectic is at the heart of Hartwell's spatial rhythms. It is all about frontier dynamics that unfolds in four steps: “(1) frontier settlement, (2) rapid development, (3) systemic decline, and (4) equilibrium.” In the first step, peripheral zones in certain regions of China began to undergo accelerative paces of development, sometimes moving quicker than what was taking place in the cores. Much of this was triggered by the opening of new, fertile lands to agriculture, necessitating a population influx and demographic transformation.

Population shift towards these 'hinterlands' would reach a point of densification which would trigger a 'take-off', which saw spread of peoples deeper into the frontiers, the emergence of markets, and the appearance of industrial enterprises (which acted as a diffusion mechanism for different types of technological innovation over wider and wider areas). One can see the ghostly outline of the K-wave...

Though the regions where these forces played out would be fundamentally transformed, Hartwell repeatedly suggests that they were forever running into a premature terminus:

Periods of development ended either when natural or man-made catastrophes-flood, famine, pestilence, rebellion, or war-abruptly terminated them or when the marginal returns on husbandry reached the limits of agricultural technology. The ensuing eras were ones of either systemic decline or equilibrium. 

And again:

Catastrophes led to sequences of longer or shorter cycles of development-temporary migration to "safe" areas, abandonment of marginal lands, partial return after normal conditions were reestablished, and resettlement of marginal lands.

Reading between the lines, one could posit—tentatively, of course, lest one wants to awaken the slumbering beast of academic securocrats—that if the K-wave is something like an abstract diagram of long-range capitalist development, then it makes sense that in times and places that are defined as “protocapitalist”—and the exact time periods discussed by Hartwell have indeed been identified as this—one would find traces of wave-forms and ‘cyclical rhythms’. 

Because capital is only germinal in such circumstances and has yet to find the essential lock-in effect to make it path dependent, these waves would be lopsided. They would wobble, shake, extend messily along the line of time or be terminated prematurely. 

Marx’s keen insight is that capitalism is a system that self-escalates: money as the “self-moving substance” that constantly uses itself to propel itself. The M-C-M’ loop exemplifies this, as does the ceaseless qualitative transformation in the ‘hidden abode’ of production itself. Put simply: capital operates at the expense of the external factors, and its climb across history repeatedly fails to respect catastrophic intrusions. In the Chinese protocapitalist world sketched by Hartwell, external forces constantly intrude, choking off developmental trajectories. 

At the same time, the blockage of the rhythmic churn of development never constituted a reset or return to some kind of degree zero; the great movement of social evolution jolted onwards. 

…these cycles also played a role in the permanent expansion of the densely settled areas of the empire-migrants reclaimed land, invested in improvements such as dikes and irrigation networks, etc., and created a political control system that improved the security required for productive economic activity. After favorable conditions had been restored in the hitherto troubled region, a portion of the migrant population remained in the newly colonized area and spread from the most fertile lands to the marginal. As a result, the comparative advantages among macroregions were altered permanently. 

There’s also a kind of anomalous temporality taking place here. Capitalism, as we all know, “has haunted all forms of society… as their terrifying nightmare”. This blue-green murk of maritime flux exists constantly as a potential disaster, and dispersed social formations all have internal histories of striving to “ward it off in advance”. This is already a temporal displacement, the moves made against some looming, contingent inevitability (“universal history… is contingent, singular, ironic, and critical”) that has hardly become visible. 

From another direction, there is a folding. In the relationship between China and the wave, disclosed most acutely in the most advanced frontlines of techno-economic development, we find not only the fractal outlines of what the 21st century might look like, but a reflection of China’s past. 

Out on the far side of both of these (conjoined) trajectories, maybe we find ourselves pulled downwards, not in the sense of the downswing of the K-wave, but pulled towards the metallic body of the earth itself. 

Electric vibrations are the ripple effects of the Earth’s iron ocean. Comprising one third of terrestrial mass, approximately three thousand kilometres below the surface lies a semi-fluid metallic sea. Its solid inner core is wrapped by an outer core that consists of a 2,000-kilometre-thick layer of liquid metal whose currents and whirlpools bathe the planet in vast energetic fields. Earth’s metallic interior is unencumbered by the integrity and identity of the organisms that live on the planet’s surface.