During the 1960’s, China was at a crossroads when it came to envisioning the future. On the one hand, the country was recovering from the shock’s of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” – a program of rapid industrialization and collectivization that led to widespread famine and millions of deaths. On the other, the country was still looking ahead to a future where modernization and better living was possible through technological progress. And with the USSR withdrawing support for various programs and its technical experts from the country, China needed to look inward to find its way forward.

And as it turns out, China’s predictions of what the future might look like were quite similar to how people in other nations were imagining it. Nowhere is this more clear than with a series of futuristic magazine covers from Popular Science, China’s own version of the American publication Popular Mechanics. In fact…