Toffler in China

A year and a half ago I arrived in China after a long Covid-induced absence and reached my hotel in a big central-western city in the early evening, seriously disoriented by the long flights from the US and the drastic change in time zones. I was hungry, but to my dismay I discovered that the restaurant in the hotel did not serve dinner, and I had no money in my account in the Chinese phone app WeChat. Without electronic cash I couldn’t order food, so I would have to wander out and search groggily for a place to eat that would accept paper money.

Eager to avoid this, I asked a friend if she could help me find a good delivery meal and order it for me—I’d pay her back later, of course—and I made a choice from among the many links she sent. I asked her if I should wait for it in the lobby, and she said no, it will come straight to your room. After thirty minutes there was a ring at my door, but there was no one in the dim hallway. At knee height, though, there was a round-bodied white robot with blue trim, vaguely R2-D2-like in appearance. It spoke in a robot’s voice, and on the top of its flat head scrolled a message with my name telling me to press a button to accept delivery of its payload. Once I did, a door on its torso slid open, revealing the packaged and still-steaming meal. “Your transaction is complete, please rate my service,” the robot said.

There are innumerable ways in which today’s China can serve up tastes of what feels like the future, even to this somewhat jaded longtime visitor. It radically transformed itself when I lived there between 2003 and 2008, possibly the period of fastest modernization any country has ever experienced. But the China of 2008 has been transformed anew since I left. There have been enormous physical upgrades, including a nationwide extension of a high-speed rail network whose 28,000 miles of track make a mockery of America’s halting efforts to modernize Amtrak. During that recent visit, I traveled on equally majestic new highways in spiffy Chinese electric vehicles from companies with names like Build Your Dreams that have become global EV brands.

The most striking changes, though, relate to virtual technology and automation, and they are better glimpsed through my startling experience with the robot. China has become an almost entirely cashless society. WeChat, which was launched by a company called Tencent in 2011, has become so all-encompassing that it is challenging to describe it to an American. It is the Chinese consumer’s rough equivalent of WhatsApp, but for hundreds of millions of them, it also serves as their bank, their travel agent, and their platform for an immense variety of e-commerce transactions. WeChat is perhaps best thought of as an operating system that sits atop a phone’s own operating system, whether Android or Apple, because many users start their days within its capacious universe of apps and never leave it. People book rideshares and doctors’ appointments on it, use it to pay their bills and taxes, engage with their local government, play games, conduct business meetings, buy stocks, transfer money, reserve train and airline travel, share documents, live-stream entertainment, and yes, arrange food delivery.

WeChat is only the most ubiquitous app in China’s booming world of online services. It is the most consequential, though, for a darker reason: its all-purpose indispensability has made it an ultraconvenient clearinghouse of data on people’s behavior for a government that accepts few bounds on the monitoring of the population. Elon Musk has stated his interest in turning X, the former Twitter, into a WeChat-like, all-in-one platform that supports financial and commercial operations. Critics cite this as a motive in the recent elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which would supervise such a company and the banking and data privacy rules that would govern it.

This virtual, data-driven, and electronic transformation of China has surprising roots in the writings of an eclectic American thinker, Alvin Toffler. His books were the rage in the 1970s and 1980s but are all but forgotten today. The most famous of them, Future Shock, sold six million copies within five years of its publication in 1970. For such a popular work, Future Shock is surprisingly dense with abstruse theorizing. It focuses on ideas about various stages of human history, from the advent of agriculture to the rise of “super-industrial” society and finally to the arrival of the information age, upon whose cusp the world sat poised, Toffler (and his wife, Heidi, an uncredited coauthor) claimed.

Toffler’s The Third Wave (1980) also sold millions of copies. Though intended for Western audiences, it exerted a profound and wholly unanticipated influence on China just prior to the era of globalization. Students of the country typically think of the 1980s as the decade when China broke with the political chaos and economic autarky of its long Maoist period and began its rise based on industrialism and exports. This untold boom earned it the nickname “factory of the world,” but that may cause us to gloss over the awesome scale of the country’s economic achievement. In the late 1970s China generated less than 2 percent of the world’s economic output. In 2023 it accounted for roughly 34 percent of global manufacturing exports.

Even as China was working hard to realize prodigious advances like these, Beijing had already begun thinking about how it could eventually transition to a service-driven, digital, automation-dominated future, one built on a mastery of cutting-edge sciences that its leaders believed could allow them to catch up with and even leapfrog the long-dominant West. This ambitious dream took shape under the spell of Toffler’s second book at a moment of unusual receptiveness to outside ideas on the part of powerful reformers like Zhao Ziyang.

Zhao was China’s premier between 1980 and 1987 and then the head of the Communist Party for more than two years. In a speech before China’s State Council in 1983 he drew on Toffler’s ideas to proclaim that “at the end of this century and the beginning of the next century,” China would usher in a “New Technological Revolution” with sweeping implications “for production and for society.” Zhao had gotten wind of Toffler’s The Third Wave from a researcher at the state-funded Institute of American Studies, Dong Leshan, who had also translated George Orwell’s 1984. Dong published a summary of The Third Wave in Du Shu, a Chinese magazine then intended for politically trustworthy officials. One of the problems that made the book politically sensitive was Toffler’s recounting of his youthful renunciation of Marxism. Concerns about this were apparently outweighed by his inspirational message, which seemed so in sync with the reformist ethos then sweeping the Chinese political elite. Some of Toffler’s phrases even had the ring of slogans then being used in China’s Communist Party–controlled press. “Old ways of thinking, old formulas, dogmas, and ideologies, no matter how cherished or useful in the past, no longer fit the facts,” The Third Wave claimed.

Three thousand copies of an unauthorized Chinese translation of the book were soon printed for the party’s elite. Toffler was brought to China, where he shared his theories with top leaders and rapt audiences, and as enthusiasm for his vision spread, The Third Wave was released to the general public. By 1986, according to one opinion survey, 78.6 percent of Chinese college students claimed they had read The Third Wave.

Zhao, Toffler’s biggest Chinese enthusiast, was arrested during the 1989 student and worker protests at Tiananmen Square that ended in a massacre. But by that time, many of Toffler’s big ideas had taken root—their influence can be seen nearly everywhere one looks in the China of today, even though almost no one invokes his name.

The Third Wave, like all of Toffler’s works, is much more inclined toward the piling up of ideas than literary style. Some of the book’s most vivid writing, though, comes relatively early, in its recounting of his employment in factories during what he depicts as the peak years of America’s bygone industrial age. In January 1950, as a gangly twenty-two-year-old freshly armed with a college diploma and a suitcase full of books, Toffler rode off by bus with his girlfriend to the American Midwest in search of factory work, which he called “the central reality of our time.”

America was the heartland of the world. The region ringing the Great Lakes was the industrial heartland of America. And the factory was the throbbing core of this heart of hearts: steel mills, aluminum foundries, tool and die shops, oil refineries, auto plants, mile after mile of dingy buildings vibrating with huge machines for stamping, punching, drilling, bending, welding, forging, and casting metal. The factory was the symbol of the entire industrial era and, to a boy raised in a semi-comfortable lower-middle-class home, after four years of Plato and T.S. Eliot, of art history and abstract social theory, the world it represented was as exotic as Tashkent or Tierra del Fuego.

Toffler spent five years laboring in this world, working in gritty factory jobs, not as a clerk or personnel assistant. This provided him with a keen sense not only of how industrial production functioned but also of how difficult it was to make a satisfying living as a laborer. Years later he argued that the same was about to become true for every industrialized country. Sophisticated services and new technologies, not smokestack industries, would produce the greatest wealth in the future. Toffler immediately segued from a description of the midcentury American world he came of age in—much of which was later laid waste to by China’s startling industrial rise—to a panorama of what he predicted would be a radically different future. To a large degree, it is the future we now inhabit.

As a literary genre, futurism, like much of science fiction and self-help writing, has long struggled for respect.^* One reflection of the low esteem in which it stands is the scant serious effort invested in retrospectively holding up its predictions to scrutiny. Despite the title of Future Shock, Toffler, who was sensitive to criticism that he was an intellectual lightweight, rejected the label “futurologist.” He always insisted that he was more interested in describing the forces that drive change than in predicting the future. This makes the advent of the many sweeping changes in the international economy and in human society that he foresaw in the 1970s all the more astonishing.

Ideas, both big and small, flood onto the pages of The Third Wave, and as impressive as what one might call Toffler’s hit rate is in predicting the transformations that have occurred since its publication, it is equally remarkable how little of what he foresaw now reads as outlandish or even widely off the mark. He told his readers to expect the rise of what he called minicomputers, which he said were about to invade American homes and become as standard as toilets and cheaper than televisions. This might seem unsurprising given the ubiquity of computers nowadays, but I have vivid memories of how thoroughly novel they still were in the early and mid-1980s, when I purchased my first desktop from Kaypro, a soon-to-be-defunct manufacturer, for use as a young freelance reporter in Africa. When I was subsequently hired by The New York Times, they had not yet been introduced into the newsroom.

Toffler foresaw the spread of fiber optic cables and other digital transmission networks and the enormous changes they would usher in. These included the instantaneous distribution of market information and the ability to comparison shop and make purchases online, as well as the introduction of Alexa- or Siri-like devices in the home that one could ask for news or information about practically anything. He also spoke of a future in which artificial intelligence and big data would become omnipresent tools. The rudimentary video games of his era—crude simulations of Ping-Pong, for example—were harbingers of complex virtual worlds to come. In the meantime, they also played an important if unsuspected part in “a premonitory training, as it were, for life in the electronic environment of tomorrow,” one that we all experience today via our ever-present screens. Decades before the Covid-19 epidemic, he said that changes like these would enable most people to work from home.

More remarkable than Toffler’s visions about what were then barely conceivable technologies was his ability to imagine many of the profound social effects that this new information economy would create. There was no way he could have anticipated today’s vocabulary for many of the new modes and platforms for communications and public discourse, but the connections are clear, from Internet publications to blogs to social media feeds like Twitter and Facebook. Conjuring something uncannily like Facebook four years before the birth of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, Toffler wrote:

One can, for example, easily imagine a new computerized service—call it “Pers-Sched” or “Friend-Sched”—that not only reminds you of your own appointments but stores the schedules of various friends and family members so that each person in the social network can, by pushing a button, find out where and when his or her friends and acquaintances will be, and can make arrangements accordingly.

He foresaw transformations in broadcasting as well, predicting the shrinking of radio audiences and the remaking of television, during which American society went from three dominant networks to cable and then to today’s streaming and subscription models.

In the end, Toffler’s book is a profoundly political one. He anticipated that long-standing and relatively stable patterns of national politics in a country like the US would be exploded by the rapid demise of widely held trust in common sources of information. “Consensus shatters,” he stated bluntly, warning that people “yearning for the ready-to-weal moral and ideological certainties of the past [will be] annoyed and disoriented by the information blitz.” In the coming universe of à la carte news, or countless sources of information dominated by instant takes—“blips,” as Toffler called them—bodies politic will readily splinter into self-reinforcing tribes.

As a reader of Toffler back in his day and now again in the present, I am particularly fascinated by his early experience on the industrial shop floor. Seeing up close how hard it was to live by one’s hands, operating heavy machinery in hot, dirty, deafening foundries and factories, drove him to envision an approaching postindustrial world. Toffler’s techno-optimism is best captured in a passage in The Third Wave in which he described the science of chemistry almost as a sunset field of knowledge that was about to be replaced by biology, which we should understand as things like genetic engineering and biomedicine. This did not mean that chemistry would no longer be important, only that along with other fields that had been instrumental to the rise of industrial society and the great human discoveries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—electrical and mechanical engineering, for instance, and even nuclear science—it would become less central to technological progress than newer fields, such as semiconductors, information science, quantum physics, ecological science, and the mastery of space and the oceans.

It was well beyond even Toffler’s powers of anticipation to imagine just how thoroughly these intuitions would captivate Chinese thinkers. After all, even as they absorbed many of his main ideas, China’s economic policymakers were then doubling and tripling down on industrial strategies developed by the great economic powers of the twentieth century. Today, though, reflections of Toffler’s vision abound.

In 2018, twenty-two years after scientists in Scotland created the first cloned mammal, a sheep they named Dolly, a Chinese scientist working in southern China, He Jiankui, ignited a bioethical firestorm by using newly invented CRISPR technology to create the first genetically edited humans, twin girls who were given the names Lulu and Nana. He was eventually sanctioned for undertaking the experiment without state approval, but what this dramatic episode best illustrates is the across-the-board enthusiasm for the kinds of advanced scientific research supercharged by Zhao Ziyang in the early 1980s.

China’s achievements in space have been even more remarkable than those in biological sciences, and almost entirely uncontroversial. Late in the last century the country still lagged distantly behind the US, Russia, and even some lesser powers in the field. Over the past two decades, though, China has risen swiftly, now rivaling the United States and by some measures even surpassing it in space exploration. As it built new generations of high-performance rockets, Beijing rapidly deployed its own satellite navigation system, built an advanced space station, developed a lunar program that deposited a lander and an exploratory robot on the far side of the moon, and operated a wheeled rover on Mars. Meanwhile, as with much else, China has also become the leading competitor of the US both in the mining of big data and in artificial intelligence, as recently demonstrated by the Chinese company DeepSeek, which claims to produce AI search results on par with leading Western companies but far more cheaply.

But if Toffler deserves credit for any acuity of vision, it only seems right to point out where his expectations have fallen furthest from the mark. And as it happens, China is the ideal place for this as well. In conjuring today’s world of ever more densely networked devices, he asked, “Will Big Brother some day be able to tap not merely our telephones but our toasters and television sets, keeping tabs on our every move and mood?” His answer was deeply skeptical:

When intelligence is distributed widely throughout the entire environment, when it can be activated by users in a thousand places at once, when computer users can communicate with one another without going through the central computer,…can Big Brother still control things? Rather than enhancing the power of the totalitarian state, the decentralization of intelligence may, in fact, weaken it.

In the conclusion to The Third Wave, Toffler waxes with wide-eyed optimism about the possibility that the world was on the verge of a “great democratic leap forward.” The extraordinary advances in communications technology and our ability to lead lives that were networked to an extent that humans had never before experienced or even anticipated were about to enable the

building [of] a new civilization on the wreckage of the old…. In all likelihood [this] will require a protracted battle to radically overhaul—or even scrap—the United States Congress, the Central Committees and Politburos of the Communist industrial states, the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the French Chamber of Deputies, the Bundestag, the Diet, the giant ministries and entrenched civil services of many nations, the constitutions and court systems—in short much of the unwieldy and increasingly unworkable apparatus of supposedly representative governments.

Wisely Toffler presented no fixed formula for all this but rather a series of musings about the liberating potential of more direct or semidirect democracy, which could allow more equal representation for women as well as for minorities of all kinds, and for the myriad fragmentary constituents of the “de-massified” societies that the new infosphere (a term that encompassed the as-yet-uninvented Internet) was making possible. Toffler’s ideas included such things as randomly selecting members of society to participate in rolling referendums on the questions of the day and allowing their votes to factor into congressional legislation. Experiments of this sort, he said, were the best hope of heading off what he called the “totalitarian thrust.”

If Toffler, who died in 2016, had had the opportunity to see the documentary Total Trust (2023) by the Chinese journalist Jialing Zhang, it would be hard to imagine him not coming to the opposite conclusion. The film is made up of two interwoven parts. The first involves the deeply disheartening narratives of three women. Two of them, Wenzu Li and Zijuan Chen, are shown fighting determinedly but futilely for the freedom of their husbands, civil rights lawyers who were arrested in 2015 and 2020, respectively. The third, Sophia Xueqin Huang, is a journalist whose courageous coverage of these cases and of the broad clampdown on political expression in the country eventually resulted in her own arrest and incarceration.

All of this, disturbing enough, floats above one of the most dystopian depictions of contemporary China I have seen anywhere. Using footage from Chinese state broadcasting and from an anonymous film crew, Total Trust traces the contours of a communications and surveillance infrastructure of a power that even Toffler failed to imagine. Inside a huge commercial expo where the latest in Orwellian gear is being promoted by Chinese manufacturers, one government-run program offers something it calls a Smart City platform that deploys high-speed cameras along streets and intersections. It boasts that these can capture photos of pedestrians jaywalking, with images of the scofflaws instantly displayed on large LED screens to shame them. “In the future,” a voice says, “fare evasion, soliciting, eating and drinking on the subway, all will be recorded in personal social credit histories.”

Another vendor offers a program called Emotibot that claims to perform real-time analysis of people’s moods, producing graphic, moment-by-moment representations of their purported sadness, happiness, anger, confusion, surprise, disgust, fear, or contempt. “If an employee is looking stressed our facial recognition feature can pick up on that and alert their supervisor to get ahead of the problem,” a company spokesman boasts.

A chilling scene with the title “Security Management” shows what appears to be one of China’s new train stations. As cameras track people streaming through the great hall, a voice-over announces, “Danger doesn’t only come from enemies overseas, it also comes from within our nation. We must mobilize the public to actively participate in security matters.”

Much of the rest of this portion of the film details how that is accomplished. The nation, another voice-over says, is being monitored by the Skynet Project, which it calls “the world’s largest surveillance network.” Skynet comprises over 170 million interconnected video cameras, with another 400 million expected to be installed in the next three years. Moments later, another speaker touts the Sharp Eyes Project, which raises the possibility of enlisting the public in monitoring others, as well as potentially reaching into people’s homes. “With upgraded TV cable, public surveillance footage is now only a click away at home,” he says. “Everybody can be vigilant.”

How competent or thorough these emerging online means for surveillance and political control will prove to be is still an open question. What is certain is that the enlistment of citizens in the policing of the population has venerable roots in China, dating at least as far back as the Mao period. At that time even family members were notoriously encouraged to inform on one another, and neighborhoods had their own resident inspection committees that reported on every aspect of people’s behavior, including whether or not women were missing their menstrual periods, a possible sign of evasion of strict birth control measures.

The ambition of the current efforts, though, is beyond doubt. The embattled lawyers in Total Trust lay out its scope. “The system uses big data and human surveillance. It divides every community into grids and assigns an officer to each one,” one says. “Each grid officer is in charge of about four hundred households, or one thousand residents,” explains an officer. Equally clear is that the system under construction is not placing all its bets on technology. Total Trust shows scene after scene where its characters are besieged by their human monitors, who check up on them constantly, seek to force their way into their apartments, and hinder their movements as they attempt to help imprisoned family members or simply get on with their lives.

The film reaches a sort of emotional crescendo with scenes that show authorities in China’s largest city, Shanghai, pushing methods of surveillance and control to their limits during the Covid-19 epidemic in a draconian effort to curb transmission of the virus. Attempts to implement a blanket quarantine that lasted for two months involved a strictly enforced lockdown of entire neighborhoods, and we see the invasion of people’s homes by teams of men in white hazmat suits forcibly carrying away supposed violators. Thousands of people are shown screaming in anguished protest against lockdowns from the balconies of high-rises, and crowds fight off the inspectors in shoving matches at building entrances.

This strong, spontaneous-seeming pushback by Shanghai residents was widely credited with getting the government of China’s all-powerful leader, Xi Jinping, to make a rare about-face and suddenly abandon his government’s so-called Zero Covid policy. But is it a harbinger of the kind of future that Toffler foretold, in which highly networked citizens somehow manage to stay a step or two ahead of the states or of powerful corporations that seek to dominate them? Nothing could seem further from reality. And the challenge of this dawning future is not limited only to highly authoritarian states like China. Rather, it is one where we all risk being watched constantly, where no one can control the use or sale of personal data, where records are kept for every imaginable thing, and where what we only recently understood to be privacy ceases to exist.