Fei Ch’ien Rinse Out: Sino-Futurist Under-Currency

An authored object, not a collective doctrine

“Sinofuturism” first appears in this archive as the organizing term of Steve Goodman’s individually bylined essay “Fei Ch’ien Rinse Out: Sino-Futurist Under-Currency.” The strongest witness prints Goodman’s name on its first page, identifies the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in a title note, and carries the journal pagination 155–171; the archive filename identifies it as Pli 7 (1998) (Steve Goodman/Texts/Essays/Goodman - Fei Ch’ien Rinse Out_ Sino-Futurist Under-Currency (Pli v.7) (1998).pdf, PDF pp. 1, 13–17). The separate file stored under Texts/Essays/CCRU- is a later A5 reflow: it preserves the numbered sequence but suppresses the visible title and byline. It is useful as evidence of circulation, not as grounds for turning the essay into unsigned Ccru authorship (Texts/Essays/CCRU- Fei Ch-ien Rinse Out_ sino-futurist under-currency.pdf, pp. 1–23).

Goodman’s own definition is narrow enough to preserve: “Sinofuturism is a darkside cartography of the turbulent rise of East Asia.” The essay connects military cybernetics, East–West trade, informal finance, narcotics, secret societies, numerical systems, and telecommunications on the “topology of planetary capitalism” (Goodman, Fei Ch’ien Rinse Out, PDF pp. 1–2). “Cartography” matters: the text maps heterogeneous circuits through speculative montage. It does not offer a sociology of China, a program for Chinese modernization, or a single prediction about the Chinese state.

Twenty-seven encrypted cuts

The essay’s form performs its argument. Twenty-seven numbered fragments count backward in binary-like labels from [11011] to [1], followed by [0] White out. Its opening and closing return to the “Death of a Thousand Cuts,” enclosing the sequence inside an execution measured to exactly twenty-seven minutes (Goodman, Fei Ch’ien Rinse Out, PDF pp. 1, 12–13). Between those limits, quotation, theory, journalism, crime reporting, fiction, and speculative narration are spliced without becoming one stable speaker.

The numerical construction passes through Leibniz, Wiener, Bouvet, the I Ching, yin and yang, trigrams, hexagrams, and Triad codes. Goodman reads the broken and unbroken lines of the I Ching not as a dialectic but as changing components in a combinatorial production system; binary arithmetic becomes a contested relay between Chinese and European intellectual histories rather than a purely Western invention (Goodman, Fei Ch’ien Rinse Out, PDF pp. 2–4). Later sections contrast the state’s “numbered number,” which measures and positions bodies, with a “numbering number” that gives dispersed groups tactical consistency through ciphers, signals, and codes (same essay, PDF pp. 8–9). Encryption is therefore both topic and compositional method.

This method also sets a source rule. Lines attributed to Sun Tzu, Deleuze and Guattari, William Burroughs, Nick Land, Sadie Plant, and other cited writers remain sampled voices inside Goodman’s construction. Their presence does not make them coauthors, and Goodman’s Ccru affiliation does not dissolve his byline.

War machine, capture, and the unspecified enemy

The opening cuts place Sun Tzu’s deception beside a “global war machine” whose enemy is no longer another state but an unspecified, mobile, multiform threat. In this account, states become conduits within a planetary military-cybernetic system, while a Human Security System tries to stabilize positive feedback and hold an exterior technics under human control (Goodman, Fei Ch’ien Rinse Out, PDF pp. 1–2). Sun Tzu enters this informational terrain as a figure for indirect, asymmetrical operations rather than as proof of an unchanging national character.

Goodman does not simply celebrate decentralization. His sections on informal trading networks, narcotics distribution, gangs, police, and states repeatedly show markets folding into anti-markets: protection, monopoly, rent, prohibition, and corruption make state and syndicate partially complementary (Goodman, Fei Ch’ien Rinse Out, PDF pp. 6–8). The text explicitly says that Chinese crime syndicates are not nomad war machines because they are too involved in microfascist capture; secret organizations can resist one empire while supporting it against another enemy (same essay, PDF p. 8). This is the essay’s strongest limit on any equation of swarm organization with liberation.

Flying money and under-currency

“Fei ch’ien” means “flying money.” Goodman traces the term to a Tang-era remittance arrangement: merchants deposited proceeds at the imperial capital, carried certificates rather than copper or silk, and redeemed an equivalent sum after returning to their province (Goodman, Fei Ch’ien Rinse Out, PDF p. 11). The historical device supplies a diagram for moving value without moving the same physical money.

The essay then cuts from the Opium Wars and colonial firms in Hong Kong to late-twentieth-century underground banking. Gold shops, trading companies, money changers, coded chits, telephone instructions, telegraphic transfers, shell businesses, and bank accounts move value through records that are difficult for investigators to connect to source transactions (Goodman, Fei Ch’ien Rinse Out, PDF pp. 10–12). The internet appears as an intensification of this under-currency: encryption and instantaneous electronic transfer compress distance and help money route around the visible architecture of the banking system (same essay, PDF p. 12).

The result is a media-economic circuit, not a story in which technology replaces commerce. Certificates, telephone calls, chits, bank ledgers, digital bits, films, narcotics, people, and cash become differently visible layers of the same logistical problem: how to relay value and commands while obscuring their route. hyperstition is adjacent because the prose turns data into a speculative map, but “under-currency” names a materially specific traffic in money and information, not every fiction that affects reality.

Hong Kong, diaspora, and Ccru’s later relay

The essay belongs to a post-1997 horizon. Hong Kong is treated as a financial and media relay within networks extending through Southeast Asia and overseas Chinese populations; the emphasis falls less on a future interstate conflict with the PRC than on commercial, familial, and illicit connections operating across state borders (Goodman, Fei Ch’ien Rinse Out, PDF pp. 6, 11–12). Yet much of its empirical scaffolding comes from 1990s policing, organized-crime reporting, and sensational accounts of “Triads.” Its compressed references to an “Oriental face,” disease, secrecy, and civilizational difference reproduce racializing and Orientalist materials as well as attempting to reverse them (same essay, PDF pp. 12, 14–17). The essay should be read as a dated speculative object whose factual claims require independent checking, not as neutral ethnography.

Ccru later returned to some of these circuits in “Cyberhype-4: Chinese Whisper Markets.” Written after Beijing won the 2008 Olympics and while it still had seven years to prepare, the text is datable to 2001. It shifts attention from the central state to Shenzhen, the southern coastal periphery, overseas Chinese commerce, guanxi, small and medium firms, foreign investment, and export-oriented growth (Texts/Cyberhype/Ccru - Cyberhype 4 Chinese Whisper Markets (Mute 20).pdf, pp. 1–2). This unsigned Ccru relay overlaps Goodman’s interest in diasporic and peripheral commerce but drops the Fei Ch’ien essay’s numbered execution, underground-bank focus, and Goodman byline. It is reception and recomposition, not a second edition.

The 2015 Ccru: Writings 1997–2003 contents do not list either “Fei Ch’ien Rinse Out” or “Chinese Whisper Markets” (Texts/Books/Author/Time Spiral Press/ccru-ccru-writings-19972003.pdf, pp. 431–432). Their absence matters editorially: the later book is not the complete boundary of the surviving archive, and Goodman's bylined Pli essay should not be silently inserted into its collective corpus.

Shanghai and later Sinofuturisms

Anna Greenspan’s Shanghai Future (2014) offers a related but independent account of Chinese urban futurity. Its “absolute future” is not a state located later on a linear timeline; the book asks how unrealized pasts, planned spectacle, informal street life, and present construction recur in a spiral (Anna Greenspan/Texts/Books/Author/Anna Greenspan - Shanghai future _ modernity remade-Oxford University Press (2014).pdf, pp. 15–19, 239). In the later “Sinofuturities and Automation” symposium, Greenspan makes the distinction explicit: Sinofuturism is a concept of time, not a theory that China straightforwardly “occupies the future”; her Shanghai spiral looks backward in order to look forward (Anna Greenspan, “Sinofuturities and Automation”, 53:09–54:15). This develops Greenspan’s own work and should not be retroactively attributed to Goodman’s 1998 object.

Lawrence Lek’s video essay Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) supplies another authored use. In a 2017 conversation with Goodman, Lek describes his version as a “conspiracy theory” that reverses stereotypes of gambling, gaming, copying, relentless work, and technological impersonality into an aesthetic organized around survival (Lawrence Lek in conversation with Steve Goodman, 20:34–23:18). The discussion directly asks how that move relates to Orientalism and later warns against a naive celebration of the stereotypes it attempts to transvalue (same conversation, 41:42–42:27). Lek’s AI, automation, imitation, and survival are not merely updated names for Goodman’s flying money. Shared vocabulary marks a contested afterlife, not a unified Sino-futurist doctrine.

[!CONTRADICTION] Goodman’s 1998 “darkside cartography” tries to scramble Western ownership of cybernetics and locate agency in peripheral, diasporic, and encrypted circuits. At the same time, it assembles those circuits through crime reportage, civilizational binaries, and racialized imagery that can reinstall the exoticized “East” it means to weaponize. Lek and Greenspan later make this representational problem explicit in different ways: Lek tests stereotype reversal against Orientalism, while Greenspan refuses the simple proposition that China is the future. The archive therefore contains several Sinofuturisms in tension, not stages of one settled system.