In 1934, a British scientist argued that the road to peace was to make war more efficient. A generation later, an American strategist turned “modernization” into a manual for bombing rice fields into surrender. And a mathematician dreamt of steering society by controlling the flow of its information.

In this lecture, delivered at the Fudan University Summer School on the Global South, Fudan professor Yin Zhiguang lines up three stories from the 1930s — Julian Huxley’s “scientific approach to peace,” Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, and a Chinese revolutionary base area’s vision of mass agency — to expose a single design: the modern world order was engineered, top-down, as an ingeniously efficient machine in which most of humanity is assigned a role and told to play it.

Yin Zhiguang is a professor at Fudan University’s School of International Relations. His work focuses on world order, China and the Global South, and the politics of shared development.