Qian Xuesen and the 1990 Plan to Hack the Human Body
By Miriam Adler ·
Kept secret until 2003, a brochure shows how China's missile architect attempted to blend rocket science with ESP to create a "giant system" for human performance.
The human nervous system was the final frontier for a man who had already conquered the stratosphere. For the state and its subjects, the cost of this ambition was the erasure of the line between medical science and military optimization, turning the human body into just another piece of hardware to be engineered for maximum output.
In the spring of 1990, the Chinese Academy of Somatic Science emerged not as a medical clinic, but as a systems engineering project. According to a brochure obtained by the CIA and approved for release in 2003, the academy was the brainchild of Prof. Qian Xuesen, the primary architect of China's strategic missile program and a top-tier state asset who had spent decades turning the PRC into a nuclear power. Qian Xuesen, acting as the initiator and founding director, did not view the human body through the lens of biology, but as an "open complex giant system embeded in the supergiant system of comic world," as the record states.
This was not a study in wellness. It was an attempt to apply the same principles of feedback loops and trajectory analysis used in rocketry to the human consciousness. By designating the body as a "giant system," Qian Xuesen moved the goalposts from curing disease to "reforming nature," claiming that this new science would "fully change mankind's ability in understanding and reforming nature," and would potentially trigger a revolution greater than quantum mechanics or relativity.
The Four Strata of Control
To house this ambition, Qian Xuesen and Zhang Zhenhuan—the academy's council chairman and fellow founding director—constructed an organizational chart that avoided the rigidity of the standard Chinese academic hierarchy. The record describes an "organic principle" designed for "greater elasticity." This elasticity was manifested in four distinct strata.
At the top sat the advisory committee and board of directors. The second stratum handled the actual work: basic research, "talent collecting departments," and international cooperation. The third stratum consisted of the "grass-root units," while the fourth was a loose network of individuals and units with "close contacts." This structure allowed a small core of professionals to lead a vast, invisible army of personnel with "concurrent jobs."
The desk's reading is that this "organic principle" was a deliberate semantic shield. By avoiding the standard ministerial budget and the official bureaucratic oversight of the state’s health or education ministries, Qian Xuesen created a shadow institution. The "elasticity" the document touts was likely a mechanism to isolate the core research from the prying eyes of Party auditors while maintaining a direct, centralized line of control from the top. If you want to experiment with the "feedback of conscience on physiology" without the burden of medical ethics or bureaucratic friction, you build a system that officially doesn't exist in the government's org chart.
A Civic Shroud for State Assets
The brochure insists that the Chinese Academy of Somatic Science is a "self-funded civic-scientific research organization," claiming its money comes from donations and research allocations. This is the most glaring fiction in the record. The roster of scientists who "expressed their full concern and support" for the academy reads like a who's who of the PRC's most guarded strategic minds.
Among the backers was Zhao Zhongyao, the theoretical physicist who had pioneered the study of gamma rays and positrons in the 1930s. He was joined by Bei Shizhang, a biophysicist and academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Wang Dezhao, the physicist who founded China's national defense water acoustics after helping the French improve sonar during World War II. The record also lists Qian Weizhang, a scientist who provided his full support to the effort, though his specific role in the somatic project is not detailed in this file.
Connecting these names reveals the true nature of the operation. You do not gather the father of national defense sonar and a world-class theoretical physicist to support a "civic" hobby project. The presence of Wang Dezhao and Zhao Zhongyao links the academy directly to the PRC's military-industrial complex. These were men whose careers were spent managing the invisible—underwater sound waves, subatomic particles, and ballistic trajectories. In the context of the academy, they were not there to study "traditional culture," but to validate the application of high-physics to the human animal.
The American Exchange Hook
By July 1990, the project moved into the propaganda phase with the publication of the Chinese Journal of Somatic Science. The record describes the journal as having a "slick, color cover" with an index and preface in English. This was not a gesture of academic openness. The document explicitly states an intent to "circulate a copy of this Journal to pha thhy organizations in the United States" to negotiate an "exchange arrangement for professional journals and papers."
The journal's contents prove the academy's reach. It featured papers on "Spacial Obstacle Function," an investigation into the "force of Parapsychological Writing," and a translated digest on "Human Super Peroeptlon Function in Russia." It sought to blend qigong, ESP, and psychokinesis (PK) with the "anthropic principle" of Robert H. Dicke and Branden Carter, two American physicists known for their work in cosmology.
The pattern suggests that this "exchange arrangement" was a talent-spotting operation. By reaching out to US organizations under the guise of a multidisciplinary "civic" science, the academy could identify Western systems scientists and parapsychologists who were operating on the fringes of their own institutions. It was a low-risk way to map the Western landscape of consciousness research and recruit or influence individuals who believed they were participating in a global "second Renaissance."
The Human Giant System
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the "Somatic Science" project was the biological extension of China's missile program. Qian Xuesen had spent his life mastering the movement of metal through the air; he spent his final years trying to master the movement of intent through the body. The record’s obsession with "somatic Eigenstates"—the quasi-stable states of the body during waking, sleeping, or qigong—points toward a goal of human performance optimization.
The desk's reading is that the academy was designing a biological interface for the state. By treating the human as an "open complex giant system," the goal was to find the levers that could increase the efficiency, resilience, and cognitive output of the operator. The mention of "ESP and PK" was not pseudoscience for its own sake, but a search for any capability that could provide a strategic advantage in intelligence or warfare.
The missing pages of this CIA file likely contain the agency's actual assessment. It is probable that the analysts dismissed the brochure's claims of "Somatic Science" as delusional qigong-fantasy. But that dismissal would have been a failure of intelligence. The real story isn't whether ESP is real; it's that the man who built the PRC's nukes believed it was a tool for state power. The redacted portions of the record are protecting a legacy of state-sponsored biological hacking—a trajectory that leads directly from the "somatic states" of 1990 to the primate cloning of Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua at the Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai. The state didn't stop at the mind; it moved to the genome. The human was always just a system to be optimized, and the people who served as the test subjects paid for that optimization with their autonomy.