The Chinese Computer: A Cold War History

Had everything gone to plan, President Dwight D. Eisenhower would have unveiled the “Ideographic Composing Machine” to the world in the Summer of 1959, revealing the successful completion of the first Chinese computer in history. In the wake of the Soviet success with Sputnik, the intensification of revolutionary Maoism during China's Great Leap Forward, and the overthrow of Cuban leader Fulgeneio Batista by the forces of Fidel Castro, a technological and cultural victory of this nature was precisely what the U.S. Cold War camp needed. Not only could such technology be presented as a “gift” from Capitalism to the Chinese people, but so too did it offer up the possibility of a powerful new infrastructure for the global dissemination of Chinese-language material. Whoever possessed such a device could flood the world with Chinese texts at a rate never before witnessed in human history.

            The machine did not prove ready by 1959, however, and Eisenhower never made any such announcement. The technological system at the heart of this optimistic plan nevertheless remains one of the most significant yet least understood chapters in the history of computing. Originating in the 1940s in the linguistic and mechanical work of author and cultural critic Lin Yutang, the Ideographic Composing Machine - alternately known as the Sinotype - carved a circuitous pathway between China, Taiwan, and the United States, becoming an enduring Cold War enterprise for post-War Chinese engineers; a network of American academic and military outfits that included MIT, the CIA, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, the Pentagon, the RAND Corporation, and the Graphics Arts Research Foundation; and finally a burgeoning network of Chinese computer scientists in post-Mao China. In this paper, Tom Mullaney will chart out the biography of this device, and its place within the broader history of computing.