Ccru Cybernetic culture research unit
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Fei Ch'ien Rinse Out: sino-futurist under-currency

1. [11011] The Death of a Thousand Cuts is an encryption system for 'cleansing' professed traitors of the Hung-Triads.2 'Cleansing' involves draining every-drop of blood from the victims body through an intricately timed numerical system of one thousand incisions. "In Chinese they say: 'Only the mighty 7 (which is Death) keeps 3 (which is Creation) pure!' "3

2. [11010] The global war machine sets "its sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but the 'unspecified enemy'. . .multiform, manoeuvring and omnipresent. . .the unassignable material Saboteur or human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms."4

3. [11001] "All war is based on deception."5

4. [11000] Sinofuturism is a darkside cartography of the turbulent rise of East Asia. It connects seemingly heterogeneous elements onto the topology of planetary capitalism. On digital maps sent back from Shaolin (a satellite entity orbiting somewhere outside history) the modern Occident appears as irrigated through a modernity of thermodynamic industrialist aggression. When the modern nation-state bought its war machines, splitting a constitutive power into a double articulation between political aims and militarised means, it adopted a state-centred martial mode. But the regulation/prohibition of means has, for a long time, been known as the best recipe for turbulence- control as a catalyst of non-linearity. It was not surprising, therefore, when the means (through unprecedented investment in constant and variable capital), in a flash, emerged from the depths of the strata, dragging with it the intestines that had held it in place, pulling the inside of the State onto the outside. Thereby Clausewitz's formula was reversed, relegating component States into mere conduits for a planetary military-cybernetic machine. Phase change. Programmed catastrophe surfing on pure war. Turbulence simulation. A war against positive feedback "quantizing it as amplification within an unvariable metric. . .[and] . . .establishing a cybernetics of stability fortified against the future."6 Postmodern control is based on the undecidable proposition because, after the Absolute Peace of the Cold war, the enemy to the human security system is a polytendrilled abomination (into which the state is always becoming) of transnational trade, warlords, narco-syndicates and millenial death cults. At this precise point, Sun Tzu rushes in from Shaolin, with tactical cuts on the CNS of the Occidental megamachine as it mutates into informational ice.7

5. [10111] "The modern Human Security System might even have appeared with Wiener's subliminal insight that everything cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind. Evolving out of a work on weaponry guidance systems, his was an attempt to enslave cybernetics to a general defence technology against alien invasion. Cybernetics was itself to be kept under control, under a control that was itself not cybernetic. It was as if his thinking were guided by a blind tropism of evasion, away from another, deeper, runaway process: from a technics losing control and a communication with the outside of man."8

6. [10110] Cut. When Wiener sanctifies Leibniz as the don of cybernetics for animating the triadic geometricism of Spinoza's Ethics, he wages war on the outside. Wiener's Cybernetics consisted of on-off electrical switches, a Boolean algebra of classes based on the yes-no of inside or outside a class. The crucial point of convergence was Leibniz's elucidation of the binary counting system. When Leibniz had developed this he sent some transcripts to his Jesuit correspondent in China, Bouvet. In return, Bouvet sent Leibniz a copy of the I Ching thinking he would be amazed to see that his binary system had been circulating for millennia. Leibniz was so affected. So affected as to hallucinate it as evidence as some kind of universalist triumph. He re-routes Creation through a neo-Confucianist I Ching of binary arithmetic. "I think the substance of the ancient theology of the Chinese is intact and, purged of additional errors, can be harnessed to the great truths of Christian religion."9 It would seem therefore that Leibniz organizes Spinoza's substance as Confucius codes the tao. Neo-Confucianism becomes the mega-organism of the monadology, with God as the binary machine of the yin-yang, while hiding a darkside cosmic cartography of the matrix, Spinoza's substance or the machinic phylum. (It should be noted that Deleuze's Leibniz is more resilient, a organicism taken to such psychedelic extremes that it takes merely a nudge to open it out onto a topology of morals; the monadology unfolds into the nomadology)

7. [10101] Shaolin takes the I Ching for software assigning the number 3 as the immobile motor of the encryption system. In the I Ching, the hexagramic production process involves a chaotic flow of numbers. A trigram involves 2 machinic components; rigid, unbroken lines; supple, broken lines. The rigid and broken lines correspond to yang and yin respectively. Either of these lines can be lines of becoming in that period of transition which makes it impossible to speak of the yin-yan as dialectic. Trigrams or gua are composed of three lines stacked upon each other. In piles of 3, the possible configurations are 23=8. Around these lines function a 64 (82) piece system comprised of all the possible permutations. A hexagram cartography maps the non-linear dynamics of exteriority; self-organization in smooth space, the onset of turbulence and the folding of stratification.10 As with a computer, the I Ching samples the actual and runs it through a binary system- in materialist hyper-reality, simulation is not a loss of the real (a postmodern idealist nihilism) but the intervention of the virtual (reality) into the actual (reality). Reality is always a machinic production.

8. [10100] Oriental and Occidental stratification meet on the plane of organisation. According to Wiener, Leibniz "replaces the pair of corresponding elements, mind and matter, by a continuum of corresponding elements, the monads. While these are conceived after the pattern of the soul, they include many instances which do not rise to the degree of self-consciousness of full souls, and which form part of that world which Descartes would have attributed to matter. Each of them lives in its own closed universe, with a perfect causal chain from the creation or from minus infinity in time to the indefinitely remote future; but closed though they are, they correspond one to the other through the pre-established harmony of God. Leibniz compares them to clocks which have which have been wound up as to keep time together from the creation for all eternity. Unlike humanly made clocks, they do not drift into asynchronism; but this is due to the miraculously perfect workmanship of the creator."11 Like Hobbes' Leviathan, where the Man-State is an organism (with the embryonic bourgeois monetary capillary system as irrigated network of blood), Wiener points out how in Leibniz's fractal monadology his "treatment of the living organism [as]. . . really a plenum, wherein other living organisms, such as the blood corpuscles, have their life" runs along that same plane; "scarcely more than a philosophical anticipation of the cell theory, according to which most of the animals and plants of moderate size and all those of large dimensions are made up of units, cells, which have many if not all the attributes of independent living organism. . .building bricks of organisms of a higher stage."12

9. [10011] East-West co-stratification. Twined. Organisms on every scale. For non-organic or machinic desire, exterior to any system of transgression, law or lack, "PODS= Politically Organized Defensive Systems. Modelled upon the polis, pods hierarchically delegate authority through public institutions, family and self, seeking metaphorical sustenance in the corpuscular fortifications of organisms and cells. The global human security allergy to cyberrevolution consolidates itself in the New World Order, or consummate macropod, inheriting all the resources of repression as concrete collective history."13

10. [10010] "The last organs fall off leper earth revealing sockets of mangled circuitry and coagulated blood dispersing out through transcarcerative planomenal veins- drug rush, energy rush, artillery through the arteries."14 "Heroin goes triadic, the veins ice over and crack."15 Carried along by the breakbeats of a cosmic secret numeracy, a whole darkside network of trade and relays from the Orient infiltrate the Occident. An intricate system of cuts, sinofuturism is the acupuncture of the West into planetary schizophrenia. "The transfer from Empire of China to Empire of the Self is never ending."16

11. [10001] "Five hundred years of modernity fades when the weaving of bamboo mats converges with the manufacture of computer games in the streets of Bangkok, Taipei, and Shanghai. The silicon links were already there."17 Cybernetics is not just about technical machines. Information warfare is not just about cyberspace. Its fundamental element is virtual reality, but an array of practical religions have been surfing it for many millenia. This is perhaps why so much of the 'new science' of complexity is ceaselessly converging with the cosmic materialism of Voodoo, Tantrism, Zen and the Chinese martial arts, pointing to non-Western influences on cybernetics, and the emergent lines of a future, beyond the pale.18 Situated on this continuum, information warfare is stripped down to a war of perceptions, hacking, jamming and stealth tactics in the nervous system, whether it be planetary telecommercial networks or the human organism. As Virilio puts it, "[w]eapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception- that is to say, stimulants that make themselves felt through chemical, neurological processes in the sense organs and the central nervous system, affecting human reactions and even the perceptual identification and differentiation of objects."19 It is in this respect that narcotics can be considered as "a soft plague infecting the nervous system of commodity cybernetics. . .A global capitalism fighting its own drugs markets is a horror auto-toxicus, an auto-immune disease. Drug control is the attempt by the human species to control the uncontrollable; control escalation itself, tropisms programmed by the aliens. The human security apparatuses experiment with drugs as weapons and tools, their soldiers are stoned, energised, and anaesthetised on a range of prescribed and proscribed pharmaceuticals. Their irregular forces are subsidised by narcotics revenue. The war against drugs is a war on drugs."20 For Paul Virilio, Sun Tzu is a rumbling undercurrent. In fact it is Sun Tzu who invents his notion of Pure war, meditating in Shaolin for two and a half millenia waiting for its actualisation in military cybernetics. The reason why The Art of War by Sun Tzu is a tool-box for the 'cutting edge' of cybernetic capitalism, from business to military strategists, is that it contains an abstract flow chart or a fluid physics for survival 'far from equilibrium,' a tactics for turbulence. Camouflage. Imperceptibility. Speed. "Be so subtle that you are invisible. Be so Mysterious that you are intangible. Then you will control your rivals' fate."21

12. [10000] "Neo China arrives from the future."22 Or has been arriving ever since it was by-passed by European militarized capital, despite a much stronger degree of technological development. As Manuel Da Landa puts it, "the Europe of 1494 was in a process of 'solidification," as if the different political entities that comprise Europe had existed in a fluid form and were now crystallizing into a solid shape. In contrast with rival empires (Chinese, Ottoman), which for reasons of geography and religion had developed a mostly uniform 'crystal,' Europe never solidified into one piece, but rather into a broken conglomerate with shifting boundaries. As 'stress' built up along those cracks and fissures, it was relieved in the form of armed conflict following the lines of least resistance. And it was indeed the dynamical nature of the 'broken crystal' that allowed Western Societies to surpass China and Islam in the competition to conquer the world."23

13. [1111] Slow release protracted war run from Shaolin; Shaolin is swarm catalyser, programming Triad syndicated film production in Hong Kong, golden triangle poppy production, Kowloon chemical distillation and encrypted planetary distribution networks rinsing out global finance in San Franciscan Laundromats. Shaolin orchestration of the golden triangle turns the Opium War against itself through those intricate incisions, routes opened by numeric rhythms in continuous variation. Chinese narcotic syndicates operate on the darkside of the guanxi rhizome of Chinese informal trading markets. Secret cartography. Secret money. Secret composition. Unknown chemicals to rewire the nervous systems for the 21st century. When all the instruments of spying, deception are put in place and functioning smoothly, the Lords of the Rim shall run the celestial web. As Sterling Seagrave points out, sino-futurism is less an issue of the Chinese state in future core conflict (not that this is not of massive importance to the trajectory of the world system) but the vast overseas population which runs South East Asia and produces internal souths in Occidental megalopian jungles. 24

14. [1110] Moebius. The encrypted plane is folded into a plane of organisation, a twin-headed (69) multi-scalar capture complex generating closed circuits or laminar turfs extorted by the state and micro-despotic syndicate protection rackets. States, clans and gangs plugged together under the dark sun of total annihilation. A symbiotics of markets and anti-markets, narco-capital twists prohibition against itself through escalative waves of mass addiction beyond control. What brings states into complementary relation with crime syndicates is those kleptocratic elements which operate as an anti-market- territorial protectionism and the exortion of rent. Protection is a mini-despotic service, a vernacular welfarism founded on micro-monopolies of martial potential. Turkish, Sicilian, Russian Mafia. Jamaican Gangstas. Mexican and Colombian Cartels. Japanese Yakuza. Chinese Triads. "It all mixes in the blood of the junky." 25

15. [1101] Deleuze & Guattari's non-linear social 'evolution' attempts a radical break from evolution itself. "All we need to do is combine these abstract evolutions to make all evolutionism crumble."26 Running a tendential system from the territorialized and coded earth to the decoding and deterritorializing planet, capitalism is seen to retro-chronically rework the whole of history which is composed of a co-existing continuum of rigid lines, broken lines and line of becoming, with their corresponding modes of social segmentarity, regimes of signs, modes of numeracy, and relation to speed (space-time). It constitutes not historical resolution but a descent into the maelstrom, down the spiralling slopes into the matrix. But neither does the New World Disorder become the substitute telos of social transformation. "From the standpoint of a whimsical evolutionism according to which packs are lower on the scale and are superseded by the State or familial societies. On the contrary there is a difference in nature. The organization of packs is entirely different from that of families and states: they continually work them within and trouble them from without, with other forms of content, other forms of expression."27

16. [1100] The onset of turbulence. From molecular streams seeping from the damms of Occidental ice to high bandwidth cables plugged straight into the heart of the jungle, pumping alternating currents of cocaine, opium, guns, cash and information into the warped strataplex of the core. A planomenal jungle topology traced as a tropical geometry of golden crescents and triangles feeding the internal south. "Narcotic trade as guerrilla swarmachine. Becoming imperceptible, Becoming flea. . .but territorial fleas. Dog fleas. Subterranean networks of molecular distribution, deterritorializing the apparatus of statist commodity control, but reterritorializing as micro-statist oedipal organized crime syndicates. Statist and micro-statist Drug Enforcement Agencies in ostensible opposition, White economies vs. Black markets, poles of mutually legitimately cybernetic interaction operating territorial protectionism."28 The internal south is not neo-primitive but does breed modes of collectivity of the band, pack or gang type. In Capitalism & Schizophrenia, the primitive machine is coded and territorialized on the earth. But its supple segmentarity, its mechanisms put in place to ward off tendencies of stratification are not confined to hunter-gathering societies. That is to say, its abstract machine is not underdeveloped, disorganized or tied to the infancy of history. The permutations of segmentarity are stretched out on a virtual continuum of coexistence. The BWO is the sample bank out of which history extracts its flows. It is the engine which makes the social flee all over the place. And this is why Paul Virilio, in Speed & Politics, describes the function of the police as 'highway patrol'29 , the regulation of escape velocities, a tendential calculus manufacturing homeostasis. Axiomatics. The Unspecified Enemy. Propositions Undecidable. On this continuum, banditry, piracy, gangs, police and State war machines are merely differences in consistency, composition and speed. This topology twists the traditional theory of organized crime upside down. Instead of the pyramidal Mafia hierarchy run by the mini-despot who orchestrates the tendrils of the black market with political corruption and the threat of violence, the abstract machine of (dis)organised crime works bottom up along the lines of viral contagion and auto-immune response. Markets resonate in anti-markets. Rhizomes arborified by rhizomaniacs.

17. [1011] Chinese crime syndicates are not nomad war machines. There is too much engagement in micro-fascism for that. But its blade politics generate accidental effects crucially in distinction from the fascist morality of the scalpel. Instead of the lancing of cancerous growths on the social body, their incisions into the Occident accelerates trade through the protective shell of the Western Bodily Organization. (WBO)30 But even in Shaolin the mission was always ambivalent, assisting the Empire in fighting off the invading Eleuth Mongols (and after World War II, against the Mao's guerrilla swarmachine), while maintaining a secret organization always in tension with the imperial bureaucracy.

18. [1010] An entwined composition oscillating between mega and war machinic modes. Undoubtedly, it is the war machinic threads that prove educational to sinofuturism. For Deleuze & Guattari, the war machine is diagrammed by an occult numeracy which forges secret pathways, imperceptible to the eye of power. Between the nomad war machine and the apparatus of capture, "[t]he issue is not at all anarchy versus organization, not even centralism versus decentralisation, but a calculus or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets."31 In opposition to the numbered number which measures the movement of bodies in space, the numbering number lubricates collective vectors through layers of social sedimentation. Nomad numeracy is an abstract engine giving a distributed population a dynamic consistency- swarmachinic encryption. For illegal syndicates and guerrilla groups morphological fluidity are essential. In the "war machine and nomadic existence, the number is no longer numbered, but becomes a Cipher, and it is this capacity that it constitutes the 'esprit de corps' and invents the secret and its outgrowths (strategy, espionage, war ruses, ambush, diplomacy etc."32

19. [1001] Triad organisation engages a coding system at odds with that of the state, even though this informal network can still be seen to criss-cross through the higher echelons of an array of corrupt political elites. "The Numbering Number, in other words, autonomous arithmetic organization. . .appear as soon as one distributes something in space, instead of dividing up space or distributing space itself. The number becomes a subject. The independence of the number in relation to space is a result not of abstraction but of the concrete nature of smooth space, which is occupied without being counted. The number is no longer a means of counting but of moving."33 Cosmic secrecy requires a multi-scalar encryption system, side-stepping Occidental evolution to hot-link into the matrix.

20. [1000] Another economy of violence, another cruelty, an encrypted mnemotechnics. Members are coded through initiation ceremonies which draw new components of the collective assemblage into the consistency of the Triad machinery. A secret semiotics of the body allows undetected transfers of information, fluid lines of escape under the camouflage of officialdom or legality. The secret handshake is a transversal interlock, disengaging professional masks to conduct a darkside flow of cash, information, software, electronics hardware, narcotics and weaponry. "When the lodge father had accepted Piet's tea and Yung's salute, he stood to attention placing his left hand slightly below his chest with thumb, third and little fingers out- stretched. His index and fourth fingers were bent under his palm. It was the secret sign which only a lodge father may use. Yung Ming replied by putting his own hand on the identical portion of his body, the thumb and the little finger outstretched and the other three fingers kept tucked beneath the palm. He thereby returned the secret sign of a branch leader. Then they bowed deeply to each other." 34

21. [111] "To the Triads the number 3 is of central significance, both mathematically and mystically: 3 multiplied by 3 (3 squared) equals 9; and any number that adds up to 9 is divisible by 9. For example: 1,804,563, which reduces to 9 by adding all the digits together (27) and then adding the result together (2+7=9). To the Chinese, 3 is the mystical number denoting the balance between Heaven, Earth and Man. . ."35 Triadic machine coding attributes to each officer-rank a numerical code which begins with a four. Basic members are known as SzeKau or 49s. Shan Chu is 489; the Fu Shan Chu, Heung Chu, Sin Fung and Sheung Fa officers (all equal in rank) are 438; the Hung Kwan is 426; Pak Tsz Sin is 415; Cho Hai is 432. Lodge leaders are termed 489s and also 21s (4+8+9). 21 is also 3(number of creation) multiplied by 7 (both the number of death and lucky number); the coding encrypted into the leader therefore inscribes the abstract machine or phase space of the whole system in actuality. Also significant, the incense Master, 438, is 15 (4+3+8); 3 multiplied by 5, or creation and longevity/preservation maps onto his function in lodge ritual as conductor of future-history. The internal consistency of this numeracy is significant in that it offers a mode of composition lubricating the movement of bodies in space, through jungles to covert chemical/software factories to towering mega-corporations as accountants, lawyers, stockbrokers, and most notably the police itself. For as Martin Booth points out, "a Triad lodge rarely has a permanent location."36 Interpol once described the Triad structure as a several storied building in which the inhabitants of one floor don't know where the stairs are to the next floor."37 Despite global reach, the Triads vary from other syndicates in that, while Hong Kong, especially after return to China, serves as catalytic HQ, there is no overreaching administration. Globally, the three most powerful factions are the 14K, the Sun Yee On and the Wo Hop To. Each lodge is for the most part autonomous even from other 14K lodges for example. Difficult to penetrate, subterranean imperceptibility has a long history for gangs associated with the ancient martial arts.

22. [110] Opium was not a problem for China until Occidental infiltration in the late 18th and 19th centuries38 . China had much that the West desired (tea, silk, cotton, spices and rice). England, the major mercantile force of the period had to pay for goods in silver bullion which fluctuated wildly in terms of price and supply. Through East India Company opium injected through the skin, the direction of trade reversed as the drug seeped into every pore. Meanwhile in Hong Kong, all the major financial institutions which persist today were instituted on the loot- Dent & Co., Butterfield & Swire, Hutchison & Co. and Jardine, Mathesons & Co. As Martin Booth tells us, "all these firms were founded on opium."39 The taxation on opium trade imposed by the Chinese government generated the underground network subsequently ploughed by the Triads who made almost as much money as the English did40 . "When in 1915, the British ceased importing opium into China, the French continued to traffic and began cultivating their own sources of supply in north-western Vietnam and eastern Laos. French advisors made contact with the Meo and Yao hill tribes, teaching them to grow harvest and market opium and thus was the Golden Triangle born. . .The basis for all of this was of course silver. During 1837, for example, the British sent 2.4 million kilograms of opium to China. Each kilo of opium was worth five taels of silver thus, approximately 10 million taels of silver were transmitted abroad in a single year."41

23. [101] "In the latter half of the T'ang dynasty a growing tea commerce between the south and the imperial capital began to underscore the necessity for convenience to exchange. In response, a medium poetically named 'flying money' (fei-ch'ien) evolved. Provincial governors maintained 'memorial offering courts' at the capital. Southern merchants paid the money they made from the sale of goods at the capital to these courts, which then used it to pay the tax quotas due from the Southern provinces to the central government. In return, the courts issued the merchant with a certificate. When the merchant returned home, he presented this certificate to the provincial government and was paid an equivalent sum of money. Thus did both the merchant and the local government avoid the risk and inconvenience of carrying quantities of copper or silk." 42

24. [100] Fei ch'ien rinse out. Extensive underground banking networks running through gold shops, trading companies and money changers, where record keeping procedures are virtually non-existant, and trade takes on the camouflage of coded chit messages, simple telephone transfers and nested systems of coding encrypted for travel in cyberspace. "One Hong Kong police official has stated that he once seized a piece of paper with the picture of an elephant on it that represented the collection receipt for $3 million at a Hong Kong gold shop."43 Hong Kong has neither central bank nor currency exchange controls thus virtually eliminating the possibility of tracing funds entering or leaving Hong Kong. It is a financial secrecy jurisdiction whereby disclosure of data is illegal44 . Drug traffickers, like all good investors prefer to diversify their assets and invest in legit business, concealing the hot link between globetrotting funds and source crimes. A petri dish for breeding commercial war machines. For example: "First cash generated from importations to the US was moved back to Honk Kong, where it was held in a number of bank accounts under false names of individuals or businesses. The bank was BCCI. The approach appears simple. Cash, usually in amounts of approximately US$1million, was taken to a money transmission company in the US. The most often used was a company called Piano, which is known for its Colombian cocaine connections. These amounts were then transferred to Bankers Trust and simply transferred telegraphically to the various Hong Kong BCCI accounts, one of which was sarcastically called Launderland." 45 "Overseas banks, left with piles of small bills, then ship them back to the US in exchange for larger bills. . .[the] consistent increase in US currency repatriated from Hong Kong to the US from 1982 to the first half of 1984 strikingly correlated with the steady increase in Southeast Asian heroin marketed in the US from 1981 to 1983. This volume of smaller-denomination bills exceeds the total volume of all currency transactions with any European country. . .and the flow of US currency from the US to HK is minimal when compared to the reverse flow of US currency from Hong Kong. . ."46

25. [11] When the battleground is in cyberspace, deception is not merely about masks, but functions in numerical operations flat with the terrain. Money laundering and secret crime societies were always waiting for the vast encryption system that constitutes the Internet. Planetary electronic networks compress space-time into vectors of pure speed, emanating a protean geography traversed by torrents of electron flow coded into zeros and ones. From the darkside of the military-cybernetics complex, cyberspace is a vast digital capital Laundromat facilitating short-circuits through the ice of the world banking system of the New World Order. "Money communicates with the primary process because of what it can melt, not what it can obtain."47 Welcome to the jungle.

26. [10] Euro-dread for the End of Man. As the CIA hacked into the jungle, cutting its share of Golden Triangle opium (re-routing it into US ghettos in the first hits of programmed catastrophe48 ), William Burroughs simulates the meltdown of White Man Face as his colonial damms collapse and floods wash away his entrenched encampment. "When I closed my eyes I saw an Oriental face, the lips and mouth eaten away by disease. The disease spread, melting the face into an ameboid mass in which the eyes floated, dull, crustacean eyes. Slowly, a new face formed around the eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place where the human road ends, where the human form can non longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it."49 Meltdown in your face.

27. [1] "He breathed in deeply and whispered, 'Finish it. Please.' As if by response to his request, the executioner took the largest knife from its case and with one swift stroke cut Lee's throat just below the strap. The Death of a Thousand Cuts had taken exactly twenty-seven minutes."50

[0] White out.


1. See Cassidy, W. (1994) 'Fei- Ch'ien (flying money)- A Study of Chinese Underground Banking', www.deltanet.com/users/wcassidy/index.html and Rider, B. (1992) 'Fei Ch'ien Laundries- the Pursuit of Flying Money- Pt.1', Journal of International Planning, August.
2. On the Chinese Criminal Syndicates, the Triads see Boocock, J. (1991) 'Chasing the Other Dragon', in Police Review, 21/6, 1260-61. Cheung, T-S. & Lau, C-C. (1981) 'A Profile of Syndicate Corruption in the Police Force' in D.P.C. Lee(ed) Corruption & Its Control in Hong Kong, HK: Chinese Uni. Of HK. Chin, Ko-Lin. (1995) 'Triad Societies in Hong Kong', in Transnational Organized Crime, Vol.1, No.1, Spring 47-64. Chu, Y.K. (1995) 'The Triad Threat to Europe,' in Policing. Lee, G. (1996) 'Troubled By Triads', 12/1 in Police Review, 16-17. Merritt, B. (1991) 'How the Hong Kong Police Fights the Triads', 19/7, Vol.99, 1480-81. (1991) 'Beyond the Triad Myth', 26/7, Vol.99, 1532-1533. Nevin, C. 'Sharks In Chinatown', The Observer Magazine, 5/3, 37. Posner, G. (1989) 'Chasing the Triad Dragon', in The Observer Magazine, 5/3, 30.
3. 121 in H. Arvay (1977) Triad 21 London: NEL.
4. 422 in Deleuze, G. & F. Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus, London: Athlone.
5. [I 17] in Sun Tzu (1963) The Art of War (trans. S. Griffith) Oxford: Oxford University Press.
6. Plant, S. & N. Land, 'Cyberpositive' in (1994) M. Fuller(ed) Unnatural, London: Underground.
8. "After many centuries of inspiring kingmakers, generals and spies, Sun's message was lost on the nineteenth century's Clausewitz, Moltke, and the iron generals of Total War, who were too fascinated by industrial technology, military hardware, logistics, and sheer destructive power. . . Nevertheless, much of what Clausewitz admired about Napoleon's use of paramilitary units, surprise and evasion, probably came from the Corsican's early reading of the first Western translation of Sun Tzu by JJ Amiot, a French Jesuit scholar in China, which was in circulation in Paris when Napoleon was a young officer. This preference for cleverness over brute force has earned Sun Tzu a prominent place ever since on the bookshelves of diplomats, generals and corporate planners. Filled with terse and provocative aphorisms, The Art of War is as closely studied by Asian investors and businessmen today as it was earlier by Mao Tse-tung Ho Chi-minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. The Japanese say 'Politics is business, business is war.' If the market place is a battleground, requiring strategy and tactics, Sun Tzu wrote the Bible." 45-46 in Seagrave, S. (1995) Lords of the Rim, London: Bantam.
9. op cit. Plant & Land (1994).
10. 73 in Leibniz, G.W. (1994) Writings on China, D.J. Cook & H. Rosemont Jr.(eds) Illinois: Open Court Publishing.
11. In What Is Philosophy, Deleuze & Guattari (perhaps spuriously) point to the limit of the I Ching's relation to the plane of consistency by differentiating the philosophical concept from the figure (which they argue lapses into a tracing of Nature) "Hexagrams are combinations of continuous and discontinuous features deriving from one another according to the levels of a spiral that figures the set of moments through which a transcendent descends. . .In a sort of to-ing and fro-ing, Chinese thought inscribes the diagrammatic movements of a Nature-thought on the plane, intensive ordinates of these infinite movements, with their components in continuous and discontinuous features. But correspondences like these do not rule out there being a boundary, however difficult it is to make out. This is because figures are projections on the plane, which implies something vertical or transcendent. Concepts, on the other hand, imply only neighbourhoods and connections on the horizon. Certainly, as Francois Jullien has already shown in the case of Chinese thought, the transcendent produces an 'absolutization of immanence' through projection." 89-93 (1993) London: Verso. This seems valid against Confucianism but highly questionable in relation to a yin-positive Taoism and its sinofuturist guerrilla offshoots.
12. 41 in Wiener, N. (1965) Cybernetics, Camb. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
13 ibid. 155.
14. 471 in Land, N. (1993) 'Machinic Desire', in Textual Practice 7(3): 471-82.
15. 11 in Switch (1998) Flee Control, abstract culture, swarm 3, Ccru.
16. ibid.
17. Victor Segalin quoted in Dean, K. & B. Massumi (1992) First & Last Emperors, 153.
18. 253 in Plant, S. (1997) Zeros & Ones. London: Fourth Estate.
19. See for example, 675 Fernandez-Armesto, F. (1995) Millennium, London: BCA, Capra, F. (1975) The Tao of Physics, London: Fontana, and Briggs, J. & F.D. Peat (1989) Turbulent Mirror, New York: Harper & Row. Breakbeat culture, Greg Tate, Ron Eglash, William Gibson, Samuel Delany, Kodwo Eshun, Erik Davis and the Ccru have already begun to map elements of an Afro-futurism. (see particularly the unpublished thesis 'Mapping the Liminal', (1997) Jessica Edwards, Roehampton Institute of London). Marshall McLuhan (eg. In War & Peace in the Global Village, The Global Village and The Gutenburg Galaxy) also often alludes to the Orientalising of the West through electronic circuitry but it remains unclear whether this involves anything more than a crude superimposition of a digital-analogue distinction onto west-east.
20. 6 in Virilio, P. (1989) War and Cinema, London: Verso.
21. Op cit., S. Plant & N. Land (1994).
22. Op cit., (1963) Sun Tzu [VI 9].
23. 1 in Land, N. (1997) Meltdown, abstract culture swarm 1, issue 1, Ccru.
24. 22 in Da Landa, M. (1991) War In the Age of Intelligent Machines, NY: Zone.
25. Op cit., S. Seagrave (1995).
26. op cit., Switch 1998 4.
27. Op cit., Deleuze & Guattari 1988 430.
28. Ibid. 242.
29. Op cit., Switch 1998 4.
30 14 in Virilio, P. (1986) Speed & Politics, NY: Semiotexte.
31. see Carlyle, A. (1997) Amortal Kombat, abstract culture, swarm 2, issue 7.
32. Op cit., Deleuze & Guattari 1988 471.
33. Ibid. 390.
34. Ibid. 389.
35. Op cit., Arvay 1978 32.
36. 8 in Booth, M. (1993) The Triads, London: Harper Collins. On the schizotectonics of digital reduction, geo-cosmic encryption and Plutonism see D.C. Barker (1997) What Counts As Human, Kingsport (Mass): Kingsport College Press.
37. Op cit., Booth 1993 35.
38. 45 in Sterling, C. (1994) Thieves' World, London: .
39. see The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes, (1960) A. Waley, London: Unwin Bros. Ltd. Karl Marx, in his articles for the New York Daily Tribune from 1853-1860 describes how the second opium war was the decisive event which opened up China to Western civilization, ending with the capture of Peking, the legalization of the opium traffic and the imposition of conditions which laid the foundations of later imperialism. In this important journalism, Marx (despite the Hegelian entrapment into a dialectical vision of the unfolding of European history) stakes his claim as early prophet of sinofuturism; "It may seem a very strange, and a very paradoxical assertion that the next uprising of the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican freedom and economy of Government, may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire- the very opposite of Europe- than on any other political cause that now exists- more even than on the menaces of Russia and the consequent likelihood of a general European war. But yet it is no paradox, as all may understand by attentively considering the circumstances of the case." N.Y.D.T., June 14, 1853, 1 in Marx on China, (1951) Lawrence & Wishart.
40. Op cit., Booth 1990 47.
41. Overthrow the Ch'ing and Restore the M'ing. "While the Imperial army was occupied with the Taiping rebels, the Triads were busy massing an army in the south. They captured the port of Amoy and the important regional centre of Shanghai. They also laid siege to Canton and Kweilin: but surprisingly they did not consolidate these gains and in spite of their successes failed to pose a serious threat to the Ch'ing throne. Why the Triads did not take advantage of the situation and press home their gains remains a puzzle. Perhaps they had lost the political will to do so, because by this time their criminal interests had become extensive, involving the cultivation and sale of opium outside the registered- and taxed- government network." Ibid. 12.
42. Op cit., Cassidy 1994 7-8.
43. ibid. 5.
44. 29 in Gaylord, M.S. (1990) 'The Chinese Laundry: International Drug Trafficking & Hong Kong's Banking Industry' in Contemporary Crises 14: 23-37. Contrary to popular opinion, the chit system does not originate through Chinese trading. "Chits are a colonial invention. The word 'chit' is itself the diminutive of 'chitty', a word of Anglo-Indian origin borrowed from the Hindi Chitthi, meaning a mark. From about the late seventeenth century the word crept into English usage as meaning a note, pass or certificate given to a servant. The chitty came to China in the 19th century by way of British custom. Foreign residents in the treaty ports found handling strings of Chinese cash or silver ingots a major inconvenience. In order to eliminate this inconvenience a system was devised whereby; 'the salary of foreign employees was paid by check drawn on the Chinese compradore, who then held the funds against which the employees wrote 'chits'. . .memoranda acknowledged debts for retail transactions. These were accepted by the shopkeeper and passed for collection to the firms compradore." Op cit., Cassidy.
45. Ibid.
46. 381 in Dobinson, I. (1993) 'Pinning a Tail on the Dragon: The Chinese & the International Heroin Trade.' Crime & Delinquency, Vol. 39, No.3, July 373-381.
47. Op cit., Gaylord 1990 27.
48. Op cit., Land 1993 480.
49. McCoy, A. (1991) The Politics of Heroin, NY: Lawrence Hill Books. Here, McCoy gives a massive and comprehensive chronicle of CIA complicity in the global drug trade.
50. 133 in W. Burroughs, Junky.
51. Op.cit. Arvay 1977 123.