"Neo-China Arrives From the Future:" On Nick Land's Sino-Futurism (The Meltdown Lectures)

[00:00:00] "Neo China arrives from the future." This is the ninth sentence from Nick Land's 1994 essay "Meltdown," and it is probably the single most famous sentence from this notorious 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. Many people think that this is a kind of stupefying bunch of mumbo jumbo, but I've always [00:00:30] believed that it's one of the most empirically sophisticated and prescient texts from the early nineties.

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 think we should pause on and understand about this sentence. First, if capital is this kind of alien invasion from the future, which Land talks about [00:01:00] elsewhere, then for Land, China is the privileged site of that invasion. Second, the reason is that the bourgeois 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. And third, in my opinion, this is the most famous statement of what will later be called Sino-futurism, which is a more [00:01:30] long-running tradition in cultural studies.

We'll talk a little bit about that term and some of the work that comes after this statement. Nick Land is writing at a time in 1994 when there are other people also interested in the same thing. It was actually Steve Goodman who coined this term, I believe.

So first, to really understand what he means by "Neo China arrives from the future," you have to understand this larger theory of capital that Land builds up. We've talked [00:02:00] about this in some of the previous videos in the series, but basically, Land introduces this idea that capitalism is not a human invention.

It's this kind of autonomous historical force, 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—still obscure to us, perhaps—but it's pulling us into it. In fact, it's even assembling itself from us in a way that is not [00:02:30] perfectly clear to us.

We get the paradigmatic statement of this idea in his essay "Machinic Desire" from 1993. He says, "What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligence space." The obvious analogy here is to the Terminator films. If you've seen them, you'll know what I'm talking about; he cites them explicitly. This is no secret reference.

Basically, it's the idea that capital is this kind of runaway, self-improving intelligence [00:03:00] that uses humanity as its temporary host or bootloader. It goes back in time to where we are now and uses us to do its bidding, to create itself—even out of enemy resources. In some sense, our human instincts and morality are opposed to this cold [00:03:30] escalation of intelligence into machinic systems. So the machinic intelligence has to go back into us and manipulate us. There's this sort of war going on, where humans don't really want to do it, so we have to be manipulated by this superior intelligence. Land takes this very seriously and almost treats it as a kind of scientific postulate.

Then we see what kinds of predictions will emerge from it if we really take it [00:04:00] seriously. That's the "arriving from the future" element.

Now, what is Neo China, or what role does China have in all of this?

Land seemed pretty convinced throughout most of his life, to my knowledge, that China is, as far as we can tell, the 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 [00:04:30] gets us out of the current impasse we're in, where the resources of modernity are running out of steam and self-negating, which is what you see in American or Western postmodern culture.

Because of all that, something new is going to have to emerge, and Land believes that by far the most likely place that will happen is China. Let's look into this and assess the reasons for that and see how convincing [00:05:00] we find it.

As you know, China has a fascinating history. It's obviously an ancient, very long-running civilization. In the early 20th century, there were revolutionary movements, which culminated, of course, in the Chinese Revolution of Mao.

In many ways, it was a really terrifying disaster. What happens after the revolution is this very strange and unique kind of reckoning with capitalism, where the country remains [00:05:30] nominally a Marxist-communist regime, but especially with Deng Xiaoping, basically takes on the policy frameworks of capitalism, but it's steered by the Chinese Communist Party.

The best examples of Chinese acceleration that Land would be thinking about at this time—remember, he's writing this essay in 1994—would be the special economic zones, which you may or may not have heard of. One of the biggest experiments [00:06:00] that Deng was associated with was carving out particular geographical areas in China and making them libertarian free-for-alls: max capitalism, max technological development, and all of the normal rules would no longer apply there. Capital and technology could go into these little petri dishes and go full throttle. This was incredibly successful.

The most famous one, of course, was Shenzhen, established in 1979. Then there's [00:06:30] Pudong as well.

There were several of these. This is the kind of stuff that Land would be looking at, but note that China was not actually taking off in the way it is now. At the time of 1994, this was only just beginning. It's easy now to say, "Oh yeah, obviously Neo China arrives from the future. Look at China, it's accelerating really fast." That's easy to say now, but that's not giving Land enough [00:07:00] credit and this essay enough credit, because at the time of 1994, China was nowhere near the rate of development it's at now. That's notable in terms of how we assess this essay and its empirical logic.

Those are some of the types of things he's thinking about: the special economic zones, Shenzhen, and so on. Let's unpack this a bit more by looking later in the essay, where he talks about Far Eastern [00:07:30] Marxism and China again. Much further down, he says:

"While Chinese materialist dialectic de-izes itself in the direction of schizophrenic system dynamics, progressively dissipating top-down historical destination in the Tao-drenched special economic zones, a re-heal. Western Marxism degenerates from the critique of political economy into a state-sympathizing monotheology of economics.

Siding with fascism against deregulation, [00:08:00] the left subsides into nationalistic conservatism, asphyxiating its vestigial capacity for hot speculative mutation in a morass of cold depressive guild culture."

This is the opposition between what's happening in the West, according to Land, and what's happening in China.

He goes on to say: "As Sino-Pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crash the neo-colonial world system, the metropolis is forced to re-[00:08:30]endogenize its crisis. Hyper-fluid capital, deterritorializing to the planetary level, divests the first world of geographic privilege, resulting in Euro-American neo-mercantilist panic reactions, welfare state deterioration, cancer-rising enclaves of domestic underdevelopment, political collapse, and the release of cultural toxins that speed up the process of disintegration in a vicious circle."

There's a lot going on there, but if you break it down, it's quite prescient. For instance, [00:09:00] Trumpian tariffs and the resurgence we're seeing now in demands for industrial policy and active support for domestic industries. This sounds a lot like Euro-American neo-mercantilist panic reactions. Think about the deindustrialized Rust Belt and the opioid crisis in the United States—these are cancer-[00:09:30]rising enclaves of domestic underdevelopment.

Land really has his finger on the pulse here. When you look at our culture wars today and the state of politicized ideological conflict, you see the most morbid and pathological formations on the left, but also increasingly on the right. This pattern matches what he calls the release of cultural toxins that speed up the process of disintegration in a vicious circle. [00:10:00]

This is what Land is seeing and foreseeing already in the early 1990s, looking at the very early emergence of these accelerationist, special economic zones and [00:10:30] Marxism in the Far East. This is what he calls the superiority of Far Eastern Marxism. China has none of the moral fixations that we have. No one in China, and certainly not the Communist Party, is sitting around worrying about what educated American college students think about gender.

Frankly, Chinese culture doesn't really care that much about a lot of the basic moralities that we care about. I'm not going to pretend I'm an anthropologist of China or anything like that—it's not my expertise.

I don't pretend to know too much, but [00:11:00] even a brief look at Chinese culture makes it clear they have a very different attitude towards the value of human life, for instance. That's a very Christian idea that has suffused Western culture in a way that it just has not in Chinese culture.

We are obsessed with all kinds of highly developed and, well, you could say refined, but you could also say overripe, moral fixations about personal identity, [00:11:30] safety, the right to life, and the right to various forms of respect. The Chinese culture is obviously very different, and this is what Land is noting. He's basically saying that this is going to be the ground upon which a properly accelerationist, techno-capital future can be built. It's not going to happen in the United States or the West because of all this human moral drag that we suffer from [00:12:00] and which China does not.

It might be interesting to look at this in more detail.

Let me show you this graph of GDP in constant US dollars in China from 1984 to 2024. If you look at this, you have to go to the left-hand side of the graph to see—right? In 1994, it's [00:12:30] barely taken off. The real inflection begins sometime around 2005. The slope of the graph clearly changes and accelerates, and they've been more or less on that slope ever since.

This really speaks to the empirical prescience of this essay. It's not just poetic mumbo jumbo. This is [00:13:00] really sensitive to empirical dynamics that I don't think anyone else was seeing quite as clearly at this time. That graph is very vindicating, I think, for this idea that Neo China arrives from the future.

## Nick Land's Predictions and Legacy

The other interesting element here is that Land puts this theory into practice. He really puts his money where his mouth is. It's a famous story: he disappears from his academic work at Warwick University in the late 1990s, and [00:13:30] for a few years, no one hears from him. Then, sometime around 2004, he pops up in Shanghai and moves his entire life and family to China.

Around that time, he becomes a key figure in what is now thought of as the so-called neoreactionary movement of the 2010s. In essays like "The Dark Enlightenment" (2012), he again mentions China only one [00:14:00] time, but in a significant way. He talks about China as the most promising path to what he calls Modernity 2.0, in contrast to the decadent West. I am just going to read it at some length.

It is important context for this idea that Neo China arrives from the future: "Given Modernity's inherent trend to degeneration or self-cancellation, three broad prospects open. These are not strictly exclusive and are therefore not true [00:14:30] alternatives, but for schematic purposes, it is helpful to present them as such.

One: Modernity 2.0.

Global modernization is reinvigorated from a new ethno-geographical core, liberated from the degenerate structures of its Eurocentric predecessor, but no doubt confronting long-range trends of an equally mortuary character. This is by far the most encouraging and plausible scenario from a postmodernist perspective.

And if China remains even approximately on its current track, it will be assuredly realized. [00:15:00] India, sadly, seems to be too far gone in its native version of demosclerosis 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 Renaissance. To be reborn, it is first necessary to die. So the [00:15:30] harder the hard reboot, the better. Comprehensive crisis and disintegration offer the best odds, most realistically as a subtheme of option number one." Here you can see very clearly, Land believes there are only a couple of stark possibilities for the future of the world.

Either this Western postmodern mess continues to dominate the world and lock itself in, in which case it's basically a new dark age, [00:16:00] or China unleashes the techno-economic growth of the next era of the world, thanks to its distance from Western moral degeneracy. Possibly, he holds out some hope that there could be a Western renaissance where Western postmodernity is somehow overcome from within.

But even then, he says, fat chance, and if it [00:16:30] happens, it's probably going to be as part of a larger process where China resuscitates the West or forces it—maybe he doesn't say this exactly, but to me, this suggests that perhaps it's the competition with China that could generate a Western renaissance.

I think there's some evidence for that. That's sort of what we're seeing with Trump and a lot of the new life, let's call it, on the cultural right. This is basically Nick Land's [00:17:00] viewpoint from at least around 1994 all the way to 2012, at least. To my knowledge, he still lives in Shanghai, so I suspect he has not fundamentally changed this viewpoint.

This is a funny meme in the sentence, "Neo China arrives from the future." People love to say this in a joking way because it is interesting and funny, but it's a very serious idea. In fact, it's arguably one of Nick Land's [00:17:30] most serious and high-conviction viewpoints, given how many times he's talked about it very clearly.

When you look at what he's saying, these are serious statements, not minor comments in passing. So that's Neo China arriving from the future—Neo China being this creative concept of whatever this teleological version of China that exists far in the future, [00:18:00] coming back in time to compose itself out of us. Neo China is that kind of abstract teleological endpoint that is presumably the source of the retrocausal force underwriting all of this.

Before I let you go, I wanted to look a bit more at some of the detail around this economic acceleration. It's really quite remarkable. If you look at what China has done since it started [00:18:30] its capitalist reorientation—for instance, Shenzhen expanded from about $0.6 billion US dollars in 1980 to about half a trillion in constant US dollars in 2024.

That's about an 800x real increase, controlling for inflation. On a per capita basis, income rose from about [00:19:00] $2,000 per person in 1980 to $28,000 in 2023, again in constant dollars. That's about a 13 or 14x real increase in the income of individuals in that region.

More broadly, Chinese technological acceleration is beyond question. If you read the news at all, you already know this, but to put some numbers on it: China added about 277 [00:19:30] gigawatts of solar power in 2024. For comparison, the United States only had about 236 gigawatts cumulatively by the end of 2024. So China added more than everything we had in one year.

You could list many other examples. You've probably seen Dan Wang's new book that goes into a lot of this in detail. [00:20:00] Another fun fact: four Chinese shipyards over four years, from 2019 to 2023, produced warships with a combined displacement equal to the entire Royal Navy. That really puts it in perspective, and you could go on and on.

There's no doubt that China is technologically accelerating at a rate that puts us in the dust. If you just look at the growth rates, it's [00:20:30] obvious. Where all that goes is an open question. Whether it's sustainable is an open question. Perhaps China will suffer the same kind of liberal democratic processes that we suffer. There's a lot of reason to believe that tends to be the case. I'm much more bearish on this.

Personally, I'm more skeptical. I think it's quite likely that as China grows economically, it will face many of the same structural issues and problems that the West has faced. China is still quite poor and also quite [00:21:00] uneducated as a whole.

From my perspective, the critical view here is that they simply have not yet hit the thresholds where, according to all the political science knowledge we have of all countries over all time, they would be expected to start facing Western liberal democratic transitional processes, which could very well put them back in the same place that we currently are.

I'm personally much less convinced than Nick Land that this is a [00:21:30] destined, long-term, singular, idiosyncratic country that is going to pave the way for the next several hundred years. It's totally possible, but I'm skeptical. I think if they keep growing, it's very likely that they will liberalize, democratize, and become much more like us than we currently imagine.

That's a counter-hypothesis, but the point is Land was incredibly prescient. This idea that Neo China arrives from the [00:22:00] future—he predicted pretty accurately. Over the following couple of decades, Neo China, in fact, did arrive from the future. We have to give him a lot of credit for that.

That's basically what it means empirically. I believe that's a pretty full accounting of it. But I would be remiss to overlook that there was a kind of idea at this time, not just associated with Nick Land. Many of the CCRU-affiliated [00:22:30] individuals, such as Steve Goodman (also known as Kode9), who was a musician and DJ, actually coined the term Sino-futurism. There was also, much later, a video essay from 2016 called "Sino-Futurism," which you can find online. It's a fascinating and interesting art film that looks at Chinese culture and art in many different ways, analyzing it through several lenses: computing, copying, [00:23:00] gaming, studying, addiction, labor, and gambling. My research suggests that Lawrence Lek, the creator of this video, was in touch with Steve Goodman.

It's not that Nick Land single-handedly invented it and all of them are downstream of him, but this is an iconic phrase and slogan that is much more influential than virtually any other, and it was at the same time as [00:23:30] Steve Goodman's thinking around the topic as well.

Certainly, this beautiful, evocative phrase—"Neo China arrives from the future"—is one of, if not the single most iconic texts for what is today called Sino-futurism. I wanted to say a few words about that and give you some pointers to other works and figures who have thought about this topic and contributed to it.

That is what it means: the ninth [00:24:00] sentence of "Meltdown"—"Neo China arrives from the future." Thanks for listening. Subscribe to the channel, the podcast, and the newsletter if you want to receive all of my future analyses of every other sentence in this famous essay. We're going to go deep. I'll take as long as it takes, and we're going to understand this essay better than anyone has ever understood it. Thank you, everyone.