Qian Xue Shen and the central place of systems engineering in China's modern mass surveillance state:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/...e-its-citizens
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/...e-its-citizens
A revered rocket scientist set in motion China’s mass surveillance of its citizens
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In the West, systems engineering's heyday has long passed. But in China, the discipline is deeply integrated into national planning. The city of Wuhan is preparing to host in August the International Conference on Control Science and Systems Engineering, which focuses on topics such as autonomous transportation and the "control analysis of social and human systems." Systems engineers have had a hand in projects as diverse as hydropower dam construction and China's social credit system, a vast effort aimed at using big data to track citizens' behavior. Systems theory "doesn't just solve natural sciences problems, social science problems, and engineering technology problems," explains Xue Huifeng, director of the China Aerospace Laboratory of Social System Engineering (CALSSE) and president of the China Academy of Aerospace Systems Science and Engineering in Beijing. "It also solves governance problems."
The field has resonated with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who in 2013 said that "comprehensively deepening reform is a complex systems engineering problem." So important is the discipline to the Chinese Communist Party that cadres in its Central Party School in Beijing are required to study it. By applying systems engineering to challenges such as maintaining social stability, the Chinese government aims to "not just understand reality or predict reality, but to control reality," says Rogier Creemers, a scholar of Chinese law at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies in the Netherlands.
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In the West, systems engineering's heyday has long passed. But in China, the discipline is deeply integrated into national planning. The city of Wuhan is preparing to host in August the International Conference on Control Science and Systems Engineering, which focuses on topics such as autonomous transportation and the "control analysis of social and human systems." Systems engineers have had a hand in projects as diverse as hydropower dam construction and China's social credit system, a vast effort aimed at using big data to track citizens' behavior. Systems theory "doesn't just solve natural sciences problems, social science problems, and engineering technology problems," explains Xue Huifeng, director of the China Aerospace Laboratory of Social System Engineering (CALSSE) and president of the China Academy of Aerospace Systems Science and Engineering in Beijing. "It also solves governance problems."
The field has resonated with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who in 2013 said that "comprehensively deepening reform is a complex systems engineering problem." So important is the discipline to the Chinese Communist Party that cadres in its Central Party School in Beijing are required to study it. By applying systems engineering to challenges such as maintaining social stability, the Chinese government aims to "not just understand reality or predict reality, but to control reality," says Rogier Creemers, a scholar of Chinese law at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies in the Netherlands.
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