Inscrutable futures: biotechnology, architecture, and planetary ecology in late industrial China

The future is becoming inscrutable in Shenzhen, a city in southern China, despite efforts by biotechnologists to make life predictable and subject to control. Bubbles of speculation burst in 2018, as scandals disrupted local biotech ventures and as buildings were ripped apart by hostile atmospheric conditions. This article places the controversial CRISPR gene editing experiment conducted by Dr. He Jiankui, that resulted in the birth of the world’s first genetically modified children, in the context of Typhoon Mangkhut, the strongest storm to hit the region in nearly half a century. This superstorm destroyed architectural monuments to the exuberance of market capitalism, disrupted Dr. He’s plans at a critical moment in his entrepreneurial ventures, and surrounded dreams about creating synthetic life with accumulating rubble. Even as the elite envision spectacular futures in the storm’s aftermath—with architectural renderings, new biotech schemes, and state policies like the China Dream—we show that the future has become inscrutable for people working in marginalized economic sectors. A fish farmer, whose lifeworld was reduced to rubble by the typhoon, offers a clear vision of chaotic planetary futures from a perspective that is attuned to the heterogeneous temporalities of wild life.