Journals

China’s growing economic, political, and cultural power is an important global issue; Chinese people are increasingly interested in thinking about their country’s future as a world power. This article introduces the special issue ‘China’s futures – and the world’s future’ by discussing how futurology works in China. It argues that Chinese futures studies exhibit two general trends: (1) a shift from locating the future outside China to see China itself as the future, and (2) a shift from officials centrally planning the future to many different people dreaming about many different futures. The battle for the future thus is not necessarily between China and the West, but also takes place within the People’s Republic of China amongst different groups of Chinese intellectuals. This Introduction examines themes that unite the special issue’s diverse set of articles, especially the interplay between technical and cultural innovation. Studying the future here is important not because the forecasts are ‘true’; more importantly, Chinese discussions of the future can tell us about how people in the PRC interact with their own past-present-future, and how they interact with people in other countries in the present.