What I Learned from China's "Industrial Party"

How a time-travel epic and a generation of engineers built China's cult of industrialization—and what it reveals about Washington's factory dreams

If someone were to ask me to name a novel that captures the zeitgeist of modern China, my immediate answer would be The Morning Star of Lingao (临高启明). In this online novel, a group of 21st-century Chinese individuals travel back to the late Ming Dynasty, armed with modern industrial technology, scientific knowledge, and organizational skills, as they attempt to build an industrial civilization from scratch. What makes the story even more compelling is that its characters are modeled after the most active users of China’s BBS-era internet. It was through these decentralized online spaces that a loosely connected community, known as the “Industrial Party” (工业党), gradually took shape.

The “Industrial Party” is less an organization than a shared script from the grassroots. Its adherents are united by one core belief: that a nation’s path is forged in its factories and labs. They see a direct line from industrial power to social structure, and this conviction shapes their view on every major challenge the country faces.

Any political current is rooted in its historical narrative. Like mainstream contemporary Chinese historical views, the intellectual lineage of the Industrial Party can be traced back to the Opium War of 1840 and the defeat in the Sino-Japanese War. Modern China’s “century of humiliation” has become a form of collective trauma. However, unlike ordinary nationalists, the Industrial Party’s interpretation is more profound: it was not merely a failure of Chinese civilization in the face of Western civilization, but essentially the comprehensive collapse of an agricultural civilization before an industrial one. It is based on this understanding that any regime that achieved something in promoting industrial capacity-building—whether warlords of the Republic of China or enlightened feudal rulers—can be regarded, in the historical view of the Industrial Party, as a kind of “primary practitioner.”

In a sense, this current transcends traditional ideological disputes, also connecting the industrial accumulation of Mao’s era together with the economic miracle of the reform period into a continuous industrial epic.

This foundation in pragmatism makes the “Industrial Party” a unique phenomenon in China’s public discourse: it is difficult to simply categorize it within the traditional “left-right” ideological spectrum, as its essence is thoroughgoing developmentalism.

Understanding this current also requires a Sino-Western comparative perspective: in the West, cultural criticism of developmentalism and post-modern reflection became mainstream social currents after industrialization was completed, whereas in China, the narrative sequence is precisely the opposite. China first experienced the rise of 1980s humanistic intellectuals and their overly romantic yearning for neoliberal models, which subsequently gave birth to the “Industrial Party”—a group aimed at criticizing excessive humanistic spirit and calling for a return to the material base.

This also shaped the Industrial Party’s distinct generational characteristics and intellectual posture. As scholar Lu Nanfeng卢南峰 observed, if we use Freud’s “Oedipus complex” as a generational metaphor, then the intricate humanistic discourse of the 1980s became the very object upon which the next generation reflected and sought to surpass.

Thus, it is easy to understand another clear stance of the Industrial Party—”anti-sentiment.”（反”情怀党“） This is not an opposition to humanistic value itself, but a firm opposition to discussing abstract concepts detached from material reality. In their view, without a powerful industrial backbone to construct a developed society, all fancy concepts have nothing to which they can attach themselves. In my view, this has also, in another form, completed a “reflection on the reflection”—using an engineer-like substance and utility to critique traditional literati idealism.

The ideas of the Industrial Party broke into the mainstream when works like The Morning Star of Lingao, the universally praised The Three-Body Problem, and the blockbuster The Wandering Earth captured the public’s imagination. These stories share a common DNA: they are not about individual heroes, but about humanity as a collective. When faced with extinction-level threats, survival comes not from personal genius, but from science, massive engineering, and organized human effort.

When the audience feels their hearts surge as the “planetary engines” ignite, what they resonate with is precisely that confidence in mastering destiny through technological power. This deep-seated cultural faith in engineering created a grassroots foundation for national strategies like “technological self-reliance and self-improvement” (科技自立自强), which is far deeper and more spontaneous than any political mobilization. Understanding this, it is not difficult to discern the unique “Industrial Party” undertone behind many of contemporary China’s behaviors—viewing national governance as the ultimate systems engineering project.

Just as the Industrial Party’s cultural narrative reached its zenith, it began to show signs of decline starting in 2018. A landmark event was when business leader Jack Ma publicly declared that it’s a blessing to work “996” (working from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week), only to be met with almost unanimous criticism from the public. A deeper reason: Chinese society is transitioning from a stage of rapid industrialization into an era dominated by service and digital technology. In this transition, the traditional Industrial Party’s grand narrative revolving around the “state-industry” axis finds it increasingly difficult to explain the specific circumstances of ordinary people in real life.

The Industrial Party focuses on strategic planning, and its narratives revolve around steel and chips. These industries are undoubtedly the cornerstone of the nation. However, when faced with the increasingly vast gig economy laborers, internet employees trapped in the “996” work system, and social issues related to distributive justice, the grand discourse focusing only on collective efficacy and national competitiveness struggles to attract the public. When the endless pursuit of “productive forces” clashes with the well-being of individual “producers,” the Industrial Party’s technological rationality exposes its blind spot on humanistic care.

This predicament has prompted the Industrial Party to begin introspection. The most typical representative is the well-known opinion leader “Ma Qianzu” (马前卒) with 2.11 million followers on Bilibili, the Chinese equivalent of YouTube. His past focus was on how technology shapes society, but in recent years, his topics have increasingly shifted to “superstructure” issues, such as local government debt problems, birth support, and adjusting central-local relations.

Coincidentally, across the ocean, a cross-party obsession with “reindustrialization” in the US is also encountering deeper dilemmas. Whether it is the Democrats’ “Abundance Liberalism” or the “Dark Enlightenment” of Republicans, neither can answer the most fundamental question: the simple, repetitive labor that traditional manufacturing relies on is almost universally undesirable in contemporary society.

The Democratic Party’s “Abundance Agenda” simplistically attributes the problem to “artificial scarcity,” believing that systemic reforms and strategic investment alone can revitalize American manufacturing. However, this seemingly sophisticated technocratic solution avoids a fundamental contradiction: Are they trying to bring back traditional factories that create many jobs but are totally unattractive to modern workers seeking personal fulfillment, or highly automated “dark factories” that, while aligning with technological trends, cannot fulfill the political promise of “benefiting the masses”? This makes the “Abundance Agenda” seem more like a theoretical fantasy that cannot be implemented.

Meanwhile, adherents of the “Dark Enlightenment” swing to the other extreme. Their dissatisfaction with American inefficiency transforms into a worship of tech idols, as they fantasize that a CEO-style leader can “govern” the country like running a company and forcibly push the return of manufacturing. This line of thinking seems to resonate somewhat with the Industrial Party’s “efficiency first” principle, but it underestimates the complexity of the modern industrial system—manufacturing is never a lone battle fought by a single enterprise, but an ecosystem built on upstream and downstream industrial chains, efficient logistics, and stable energy coordination. Without the coordination of all these factors, a forceful push relying on individual will cannot translate into industrial advantage at scale.

Industrialization is far more than a transformation of the economic structure; it is also a matching cultural form and state of civilization. This system can coalesce spontaneously in a society rushing towards modernization, but it is difficult to be “summoned” anew in a post-industrial era where values have already fragmented.

Whether it is the criticism of labor protection encountered by China’s Industrial Party or the manufacturing predicament faced by both the American “Abundance Agenda” and “Dark Enlightenment,” they all point to the same core reality: in the soil of post-industrial society, that pure cultural worship of industrialization that once drove the wheels of history can no longer be revived.

The time travelers in The Morning Star of Lingao can bring a complete set of technical data back to the past, but we cannot bring a simple faith in industrialization into the future. Industrialization provides a set of tools for solving problems, but it does not automatically provide answers regarding social justice and sustainable development. This inherent limitation helps explain why, in contemporary China, the concept of “investing in people”—through advancements in social welfare, education, and healthcare—is increasingly articulated as an integral component of national strength, one meant to complement and ground technological prowess. What the AI era requires is a new narrative capable of merging technological power and institutional wisdom—and this will be a civilizational project even more daunting than igniting ten thousand planetary engines.

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