Would you peer review manuscripts for a journal or press that politically censors its content? If your answer is no, then please join us in making your statement public by signing this petition.

Why the need for what seems like such an obvious defense of academic freedom? Several weeks ago, the People’s Republic of China pressured Cambridge University Press to restrict access in China to articles and book reviews in two major journals: China Quarterly and Journal of Asian Studies (the flagship journal of the US-based Association of Asian Studies). The Press agreed to censor content in China Quarterly, but then changed this decision after international scholarly protest.

The content to be censored was scholarship the Chinese government considered sensitive or dangerous, including works by anthropologists of China, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Content requested to be censored is extensive and dates back to 1952 as you can see on the censorship list for each journal (list of the 300 articles China Quarterly initially blocked, then reversed decision on, and list of content Journal of Asian Studies refused to block).

Not a scholar of this part of the world? Your support of this peer review boycott still matters. It matters for broad support of intellectual freedom and access to scholarship. Your expertise matters as a peer reviewer on manuscripts with topical and theoretical overlaps with your specialties.

Your free labor already supports the work of journals. It should not also support government censorship in exchange for market access.

Ironically, this week is “Peer Review Week” for publishers around the world. Cambridge University Press claims they are celebrating peer review and “the vital role it plays in helping us to publish the most rigorous and ground-breaking research across books and journals.” But what is the point of publishing “rigorous” or “ground-breaking research” if you are going to censor it for some readers?

This petition was spearheaded by anthropologist Charlene Makley (Reed College), with the help of Robbie Barnett (Tibetan studies, Columbia University), Kevin Carrico (international studies, Macquarie University), Ralph Litzinger (anthropology, Duke University), Carole McGranahan (anthropology, University of Colorado), and Emily Yeh (geography, University of Colorado). Please join us in signing. Strength in numbers is particularly important for this effort; it puts bottom-up pressure on academic publications and publishing companies to stand against Chinese government pressure to censor content. The petition currently has almost 600 signatories. It would be great to get to 1000 scholars signed on — thanks for standing with us, regardless of where you conduct research or work in the world!

I recently finished translating a book, Tsering Woeser’s Self-Immolation in Tibet (Immolation au Tibet, la honte du monde), in a project that combines the two main components of my career path thus far: translation and anthropology. Prior to my graduate work, I was a translator of Chinese and French documents in Shanghai. And now as an anthropologist, I still engage in the occasional translation of texts that I consider uniquely insightful. This brief essay is an attempt to think through the relationship between these two activities via my recent work on self-immolation in Tibet.

Prior to entering the translation industry, the distant and thus romanticized notion of translation conjured images of simultaneous interpreters at the United Nations, talking frantically into earpieces or banging away at keyboards to facilitate communication for a global community. Soon after entering the industry, however, I found that professional translators spend a considerable amount of time sitting at their desks and staring at screens as they translate one inane document after another. Now that I have finished this washing machine manual, should I get started on this blueprint for the annual city carnival’s layout, or just save that for tomorrow? I often found myself leaning towards the latter option.

I thus eventually made the transition to anthropology, a discipline which draws upon many of the same skills employed in translation, such as linguistic competence, familiarity with the sociocultural and political context, and the ability to read (or listen) between the lines… albeit in considerably more interesting settings. Despite my own admitted hesitation to draw a simple parallel between the two activities, there is indeed much that they share in common. Each takes difference and makes it comprehensible, finding commonality. The main difference is that anthropology should ideally employ these skills towards more contemplative ends than translation: an ideal that does not however always match the everyday reality of academic life.

Nowhere have I encountered greater challenges for my translation skills and analytical capabilities than in the study of self-immolation in Tibet. Since 2009, more than 135 Tibetans have chosen to set their bodies on fire in protest against the current situation in Tibet. As these events have unfolded, I have attempted to write on this topic, as well as translating some of Tibetan scholar Tsering Woeser’s thoughts on this phenomenon. Whether writing or translating, this is a topic that has brought me far away from the mundane world of washing machine manuals and blueprints, challenging me to think through and make sense of a most extreme experience.

Self-immolation would seem to be an absolute, even untranslatable form of difference: as I sit here before a computer screen on a November day in the middle of Oklahoma, there are few phenomena in life that could seem more remote than someone’s conscious decision to set their body alight and the unthinkable bodily experience that follows. This remoteness would seem to highlight the promise of both translation and anthropology, which can begin to bring us closer to other people’s worlds, whether through the translation of self-immolators’ final statements, or through the analytical attempt to answer the most pressing questions of why, and where to go from here. Yet alongside this seeming promise, I have found in the process of translating and writing that self-immolation creates fundamental challenges for the articulation of these events in words, which reliably fail in relation to the act under description.

This unique challenge of putting words to this act has however been uniquely productive for recalibrating my perspective on the relationship between writing and thinking. In contrast to the founding assumptions of both translation and anthropology, I have begun to think that sometimes what the world needs is not necessarily more words. After all, how many words have been spoken or written about Tibet over about the years? The discussion is far too often expressed through such abstract and even fundamentally alienated notions as historical sovereignty, economic development, territorial control, or even conspiratorial narratives about the “Dalai Lama clique.” Such concepts provide solace that we know what we are talking about and, one after another, are comfortingly very easy for me to translate back and forth between languages without much thought.

Parallel to the distance between my everyday life and the act of self-immolation, however, we must also note the fundamental distance between largely hollow and self-reproducing modes of communication and the concrete experience on the ground in Tibet producing the act of self-immolation. Self-immolation is an act that is impossible to translate because it requires no translation, taking us beyond words, so many of which have already been voiced on the topic of Tibet. Writings on Tibet often exist in a cycle of polarized and self-reinforcing opinions and accompanying identifications. Instead, self-immolation gives us a very visible and visceral experience of human suffering without vengeance against others, an inerasable image of fundamental humanity beyond language.

What self-immolation and other such extreme experiences require of us, then, is not necessarily more writing, but rather more thinking. Actual thinking, usually the source of initial interest in an academic career, can easily be lost in the realities of this career, with its daily deluge of emails, class preparation, job applications, revisions, and the rush to publish. Leaving the translation industry in search of more room for contemplation, I have ironically found that sometimes in academia there is even less time for thinking. The challenge of self-immolation, and the discovery that anything that one says or writes seems to never fully live up to this act, has produced a unique pause in this flurry of activity that has been strangely liberating, highlighting contemplation not only as an essential part of the writing process but also as a productive end in and of itself.

In his Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard proposes that contemplation and even the pursuit of knowledge itself originate from the human relationship to fire. This relationship between fire and thought, he argues, can be seen in the hypnotic and contemplative gaze directed towards the relatively mundane embers of a fireplace. The flames that have been ignited across Tibet have provoked and will continue to provoke observation, contemplation, and commentary from scholars and other concerned individuals around the world, to help us better understand the realities of Tibet today. But the challenge of thinking through these flames has taught me an equally important lesson: as scholars in a cut-throat academic industry wherein communication never rests, in the hurry to write or lecture or argue for our viewpoint, sometimes we lose sight of the importance of the fundamental act of contemplation. These remote and untranslatable events on the Tibetan plateau, then, have also helped me to rediscover, in and beyond the act of writing, the place of silent contemplation.

That Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview in Chinese was big news this week. You can see the start of the interview here:

http://youtu.be/n_168pH9GJk

As you can hear, Zuckerberg’s performance was greeted with “repeated cheers and applause by the assembled students and faculty members.” I don’t want to pick apart Zuckerberg’s Chinese – he only started learning a few years ago, but still did better than some people I know who have lived in Taiwan for over a decade. Nor do I want to focus on the mixed reactions he got on the internet later on. Rather, I want to engage in a thought experiment. Can you imagine a Western audience cheering and applauding a Chinese CEO for speaking in English?

Pierre Bourdieu uses the term “strategy of condescension”¹ to refer to the “act of symbolically negating” the power relationship between two languages. He argues that such a strategy ultimately serves to strengthen the hierarchy between the two languages in question. He compares the excessive praise given to a mayor speaking “good quality Béarnais” with much more fluent Béarnais coming from the mount of a peasant. Unlike the Mayor’s speech, that of the peasant would not only be “totally devoid of value” but “would be sociologically impossible in a formal situation.” Indeed, a Chinese CEO speaking English in public at the level displayed by Mark Zuckerberg in Chinese would be a source of considerable embarrassment to all around.

What is interesting about this, however, is that Chinese is not Béarnais. China’s economy is on the verge of surpassing the size of the US economy and the Chinese language is one of the most important world languages, with the number of Westerners studying Chinese as a second language rising fast. So what is happening? I think there are several factors at work here. One is China’s self-image as the underdog. Pointing out insults to China’s “national dignity” is a frequently used tactic in Chinese foreign policy. Another is the extent to which access to English-medium higher education in the UK or America is still a status marker for the Chinese elite. And a third is a legacy of thinking about Chinese language ability in racial terms. This last one is true in Taiwan as well, as I documented in my tongue-in-cheek post on “Seven Ways to Talk to a White Man.” I haven’t been in China recently, but from what I’ve heard, it is even more unusual for foreigners to speak Chinese well there than it is in Taiwan.

In this regard it is interesting to compare Chinese to French. French was once the language of international relations and the cosmopolitain elite. It still holds on to that status in certain realms, but not to the same extent it once did. French people still expect foreigners to at least make an effort to speak some French, and don’t bat an eye if they speak it well. They certainly don’t cheer and applause. French attitudes towards English may have changed over the years, but a rather blasé attitude towards foreigners speaking French still seems to be the norm. One comparison I like to make is between the Taipei and Paris metro systems. While both the Parisian and Taipei systems have multilingual announcements², with one of the languages being English, the English announcements in Taiwan are unusual, to say the least. Many of the stops have no official English name. Instead, the announcements deliberately mispronounce the Chinese name the way they guess a non-Chinese speaking foreigner might. I certainly can’t imagine the French mutilating their own language to make it easier for Americans who can’t be bothered to pronounce it correctly! Again, this is Taiwan, not China, but I think there is a shared insecurity about the status of Chinese in the two countries, especially with regard to English as a global language.

It is true that Chinese is a hard language for non-native speakers to learn, but it is also hard for Chinese speakers to learn English. I think we can imagine a day when Chinese-speakers expect foreigners to display competence in Chinese equivalent to that they are expected to display in English when abroad. A day when fluency in Chinese goes without cheers and applause. But, for all of the reasons I’ve listed above, it probably won’t happen anytime soon.

UPDATE: Completely re-wrote the section on the Paris metro to reflect the corrections in the comments. (I don’t recall hearing multilingual announcements in Paris this summer, but the sound system on the metro isn’t always working that well.)

UPDATE II: Added a link to an interview with Zheng Wang about his book Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations.

In his article, Sahlins argued that CIs function in a way that is antithetical to academic values because they are intended to spread the political influence of the PRC. CIs, he argued, differ from other cultural institutes — such as the Goethe-Institut and Alliance Française — because they are located on university premises and are completely governed by state officials. By giving a foreign government charge of instruction, he claimed, universities promote censorship and self-censorship that are too much like the government prohibitions on discussion of politically-charged topics in Chinese universities.

In particular, Sahlins’ grievance against the University of Chicago, his home institution, is that in establishing and maintaining a Confucius Institute it lends its good name to the global spread of a project that contradicts the intellectual principles and moral values on which it was founded.

One recent response to Sahlins’s piece was ”Confucius Institutes in the U.S.: Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom; Let a Thousand Schools of Thought Contend”, written by Edward A. McCord, Associate Professor of History and International Affairs, Director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, and Director of the Taiwan Education and Research Program at The George Washington University. In this post Sahlins, not known for his hesitancy to respond to his critics, gives us his rejoinder to McCord’s article.

You can find the complete piece, “The Defense of Confucius Institutes” for download here. What follows below is the complete text of Sahlins’s piece but it is missing the footnotes because, frankly, it is too late at night for me to figure out how to add them in WordPress. I’ll try to correct that in the morning. complete with footnotes -Rex)

This concerns certain arguments supporting the Confucius Institute at the University of Chicago that have been raised in connection with the proposed renewal of its contract in 2014; and more generally with the defense of The Confucius Institute project of the PRC by Professor Edward A. McCord of The George Washington University,¹ written in response to the article I published in November, 2013 in The Nation².

On Governance of the Confucius Institute

In The Nation article, I wrote: “Although official documents describe Hanban [The Office of the Chinese Language Council International] as ‘affiliated with the Ministry of Education,’ it is governed by a council of high state and party officials….Simply put, Hanban is an instrument of the Party State operating as an international pedagogical organization.”  (p.36) Likewise in another context I noted that the head of the CI Board of Directors at the University of Chicago, “thought, wrongly, that Hanban was ‘under the direction and auspices of the Ministry of Education’—an impression that Hanban officially conveys in English-language documents by its ‘affiliation’ with that ministry, instead of the council of government officials to which it in fact reports.” (p.43)

Professor McCord objects that: “This conflation of ‘affiliation’ with ‘governance’ suggests an attempt to hide actual state control behind a façade of claimed ‘affiliation’ with the Ministry of Education. Sahlins’ source for this expose, however, is the ‘Constitution and By-laws of the Confucius Institutes,’ a public document on the Hanban website.”(p.2) Moreover, Professor McCord finds this “suggestion of subterfuge puzzling,” arguing sophistically, as is his wont, that the Ministry of Education is also ”an instrument of the party state.”(Ibid.)

In fact, upon opening the official Hanban website in the Chinese version, one reads this anodyne description of the Confucius Institutes (in Google translation): “Hanban is directly under the Chinese Ministry of Education and Institutes around the world are committed to providing Chinese language and teaching resources to satisfy the needs of overseas Chinese learners, for the joint development of multiculturalism, to contribute to building a harmonious world together.”³ Likewise in the “About Us” link of the English version: “Hanban/Confucius Institute Headquarters, as a public institution affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education, is committed to providing Chinese language and cultural teaching resources and services world wide…” ⁴ Or else, Google will direct you to the Australian version: “Hanban is a non-profit organization affiliated to the Ministry of Education of China…,” etc. ⁵ This version also appears when one follows the link to the Confucius Institute Headquarters on the website of the Confucius Institute of the University of Chicago.⁶

Clearly it is this self-representation that has resulted in the near-universal presumption that Hanban is under the control of the Chinese Ministry of Education, and accordingly that it is fundamentally a pedagogical initiative, engaged generously (as a “non-profit organization”) in meeting the great demand abroad for Chinese language instruction. This description of its “affiliation,” hence implication of its mission, is general in press reports outside of China, and even in professional ethnographies.⁷ Nor was the head of the Board of Directors of the CI at the University of Chicago the only person of responsibility to so identify Hanban’s auspices. In March 2014, the Board appointed three faculty members associated with the CI to conduct faculty-wide public consultations with a view toward recommending whether or not the University’s contract with Hanban should be renewed. In their call to the faculty, the Committee described Hanban as “a non-profit agency affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education.”

(Parenthetically, the Ad-Hoc Committee was thus acting as judge and jury in its own case; indeed one prominent member was known to be an outspoken advocate of the Confucius Institute.)

The issue is not the conflation of “affiliation” with “governance,’ as Professor McCord says, but rather their distinction. The functions and interests of the Chinese State Council and the Politburo are not the creation through education of a harmonious multicultural world in partnership with all the other peoples. Yet it is the State Council that selects the Governing Council of the Confucius Institutes, appointing a member of the Politburo as its Chair, in the present instance, Vice-Premier Liu Yandong, and other high state officials as Vice-chairs and members of the Executive Council. This Governing Council sets the annual agenda of Hanban and receives its reports. The executive director of the Confucius Institutes, Madame Xu Lin, is a member of the third rank of this governing body, the last-named of thirteen Executive Council members. The CEO of Hanban is thus a lesser official of the State Party bureaucracy that governs its operations. Professor McCord is correct in saying this is all on the internet. With two or three links from Hanban’s home site, one comes upon this table of organization (with photos):

Chair
Madame Liu Yandong, Ph.D, State Councilor, People’s Republic of China

Vice Chairs
Mr. Yuan Guiren, Minister, Ministry of Education
Madame Li Haifong, Minister, Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council
Madame Jiang Xiaojuan, Ph.D, Deputy Secretary General of the State Council
Mr. Zhang Shaochun, Ph.D. Vice Minister, Ministry of Finance

Executive Council Members
13 members, most of them Vice Ministers, as of Foreign Affairs, National Development, Education, Culture, Finance, and Commerce, the last on the list being the Chief Executive of the Office of Chinese Language Council International Headquarters (Hanban), Madame Xu Lin, Ph.D.⁸

Hence the argument in The Nation piece that Hanban is an instrument of the Chinese Party State in the form of an educational enterprise. In apposition I cited an abbreviated notice of an article in the People’s Daily, organ of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, in which Confucius Institutes appeared as an integral part of Chinese global-political competition with “the West.” In full, it reads:

People’s Daily, overseas edition, published an article titled China’s Diplomacy, the Rise of an Awakening Lion. The article states, “The rise needs power and we have the power.” It cites the annual growth rate of 8%, the fact that China is the second largest economy in the world, its technology and military power, China’s regular presence at major international summits, and its 331 Confucius Institutes throughout the world. It asks, “Why is China receiving so much attention now? It is because of its ever-increasing power. … Today, we have a different relationship with the world and the West: we are no longer left to their tender mercies. Instead we have slowly risen are becoming their equal.”[^9]

Professor McCord objects to the reading of this text as proof that Confucius Institutes have a political propaganda function and that they are known to the CCP as important factors contributing to China’s rising power. This is illogical, he says, since the causality is clearly the other way around: “namely, that increased demand for the offerings of CIs around the world is the result of China’s rising global profile. Reflecting the commonly observed pleasure many Chinese take in the fact that foreigners take the time to learn their language,” he writes, “the article seems mainly to be feeding the national pride of its readers in China’s growing stature.” (p.4) Maybe, but this article was published in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily, thus for English speakers, to whom it is defiantly presented as a challenge.

The native Western distinction between real-politics and symbolic cultural forms which informs Professor McCord’s objection seems symptomatic of the working misunderstanding that is generally involved in the ready adoption of Confucius Institutes by American colleges and universities. I am no Sinologist, so correct me if I am wrong, but even a superficial knowledge of Chinese history suggests that to distinguish cultural transformation from political domination would be, in that context, a category mistake. Where there is Chinese culture, there is Chinese power—inasmuch as the culture is an emanation of the power. The acculturation of the other, assimilating the other into (Chinese) civilization, has long been a means and index of Chinese hegemony, as by all appearances it is in the People’s Daily article.  Accordingly, the resources and attention the Chinese government is giving to Confucius Institutes are best understood as an integral aspect of a global competition for political supremacy. Confucius Institutes are embedded functionally in Chinese world-political ambitions in the same way and to the same extent they are embedded structurally in the governmental apparatus of the Chinese Party State.

Teaching

Professor McCord and CI advocates at the University of Chicago question the assertion that Confucius Institutes are given autonomous control of courses in Chinese language and culture under their auspices. He writes: “China’s capacity to make effective use of CIs in this matter is attributed to the position of CIs as ‘autonomous’ entities in universities, which, as Sahlins notes, gives Hanban ‘the right to supply the teachers, textbooks, and curriculum of the courses in its charge.’ The clear implication is that American universities have willy-nilly handed over their China-related courses to Chinese party apparatchiks who transmit the party line in classes under their control using party-approved content. But can this ‘right’ (a very strong term!) be shown either in the documentation involving CIs or in actual practice?” (Ibid.)

While the Constitution and By-Laws of the Confucius Institutes as well as the model agreement with host schools specify that Hanban will supply the latter with trained teachers, textbooks, and other course materials, Professor McCord apparently objects that this doesn’t mean these teachers need teach Chinese language and culture in the way they were trained or use the texts provided for their courses. The host institutions are at liberty to defy in practice the stipulations and intentions on these matters in the agreements they sign with Hanban. Fair enough, although the possibilities and inclinations for doing so must decline precipitously in the smaller universities and colleges that are largely or wholly dependent Confucius Institutes for their Chinese language offerings, let alone the numerous “Confucius Classrooms” in secondary and primary schools—even in the US, not to mention what goes on in Tanzania and other countries. As for what is stipulated in the contracts with particular universities, consider the agreement to establish a Confucius Institute at the University of Chicago, signed on 29 September 2009 by the aforementioned Executive Director of Hanban, Madam Xu Lin, and a Vice President of the University, David Greene. According to Article 1, “the purpose of this agreement is to identify the rights and responsibilities of the [Hanban] Headquarters and the University of Chicago in the establishment and management of a Confucius Institute at The University of Chicago.”⁹

Among the relevant clauses are the following:

–In Article 4, “Scope of Activities”, the Confucius Institute at the University is charged with the following “according to the Governing Documents”:
“1. Teaching Chinese language and providing Chinese language teaching resources;
2. Training Chinese language instructors…
–In Article 6 “Obligations”, the Head Office of Hanban is charged,
2. “Upon launch of the [Chicago] Institute to provide the Institute 3000 volumes of Chinese books, teaching materials, and audio-visual materials on a one-time basis.
3. To provide teaching materials, courseware, and other books, and to authorize the use by the Institute of online courses depending on need and upon mutual consultation.
3 [sic]. To provide $200,000 in start-up funds to the University of Chicago …
4. “To send sufficient numbers of qualified instructors based on the Institute’s requirements of teaching and pay for their air fares and salaries.”

Of course, in practice at the University of Chicago these clauses are ignored, and assurances to that effect by responsible University authorities are meant to satisfy whomever it might concern that we are preserving our academic freedom and integrity. We are assured that the courses taught by teachers provided by Hanban, as included in the regular offerings of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, conform to standards of that department in matters of textbooks, curriculum, courseware, and all else. Hence a good part of the agreement signed with Hanban is null from the get-go, simply ignored by the University insofar as it does not comport with its own principles. Aside from treating a contract as not worth the paper is was written on, however, there are other issues of apparent bad faith, as well as questionable legal practices, entailed in the University’s contractual relations with Hanban. Further, there is the general problem of what hypocrisy in the service of academic integrity can mean for the character and reputation of the University.

One issue concerns the statutes of the University itself, which require that the establishment of any entity with teaching responsibilities be approved by the representatives of the faculty in the Council of the Senate. The Confucius Institute was never brought to the Council for a vote. The only vote was the unanimous approval by the China scholars of the Center for East Asian Studies on the project in proposal form, as presented by Professor Dali Yang, then head of the Center and initiator of the Chicago CI. Although the Japan and Korea scholars of the East Asia Center were excluded from the decision, along with the faculty at large, Professor McCord finds this appropriate because the China faculty would be “the very people one might assume most qualified to evaluate the agreement.” (p.5) Indeed, since the agreement would include funds for their own research in China, who could be better qualified to approve it on behalf of the entire University faculty?–not to mention how a negative vote might otherwise jeopardize their research opportunities. Leaving the decision exclusively to the China scholars was a precedent in administrative techniques of “faculty governance” for the present Ad Hoc Committee of CI-associated faculty, set up to make recommendations about the renewal of the contract—by consulting, this time, with the less-qualified faculty at large.¹⁰

Although the CI agreement gives Hanban the right to provide teachers for language courses, the University of Chicago, we have been told, fully controls the hiring process. According to Dali Yang, as reported in The Nation,  “The University is fully engaged in the hiring process for Chinese teachers, not just a right of refusal” (p.43). However, as also pointed out in The Nation, on the authority of the Chicago person in who manages the University’s role in the hiring, this is not true: “We don’t choose, “ she said. “They recommend and we accept.” (Ibid.) Further inquiry evoked the comment that we do have a right of refusal, although it has never been exercised. Professor McCord’s refutation of the significance of this intervention of Hanban in University instruction is exemplary of the default sophistry that runs through his critique: “Saying a university is ‘fully engaged in the hiring process’ is hardly an assertion that the university has an actual role in ‘choosing’ the teachers who will be offered to the CI. The statement that ‘they recommend, and we accept’ does not deny that the university has a right of refusal.” (p.7). Yes, but the Chicago claim is that that the University is “fully engaged in the hiring process for Chinese teachers, not just a right of refusal.”

Then there are certain disturbing legal issues raised by Hanban’s selection and training of CI teachers. By the standard terms of agreement, the Confucius Institutes are supposed to operate under the laws of both China and the US; but when it comes to questions of free speech and prohibitions on discrimination in hiring, this is an obvious impossibility, since the relevant laws of the two nations contradict one another. In such matters as advocating democratic reforms or adhering to Falun Gong, Chinese law criminalizes what American law protects. It follows that allowing Hanban to determine the selection of teachers in American classrooms can make the host US institutions complicit in discriminatory hiring. As is well known, this sort of thing did happen in Canada, in the case of Ms. Sonia Zhao, who in 2012 left her post at McMaster University because, she said, her employment forced her to hide her belief in Falun Gong. When she brought the complaint against McMaster to the Human Rights Tribunal, of Ontario for “giving legitimation to discrimination,” it thus put the Canadian University in the position of defending Chinese law.

Professor McCord offers three spurious objections to these implications of the legal dilemmas:

–Although the clauses regarding the laws of the two countries are indeed awkwardly worded, he allows, “the Chinese government in the end has no legal standing, and has in fact never attempted to enforce Chinese laws in regard to the activities of CIs ‘in the countries in which they are located.’ ”(p.6) Probably not, but the argument is irrelevant to the primary problem occasioned by the CI agreements: the problem is the selection and training of teachers by Hanban in China according to Chinese laws—which then makes the host university that hires them vulnerable to legal sanctions in its own country.

–If American universities were to be held responsible for the hiring practices of the universities of countries from which they accept visiting professors, Professor McCord says, it would have drastic effects on faculty exchange programs. For “it would present the unprecedented requirement that American universities reject any ‘visiting professors’ from other countries unless the hiring practices in these countries were fully congruent with all the requirements (federal and local) applicable to the host university.” (p.8) This is again off-target because visiting professors in American universities are uniquely selected and hired by these universities, not by institutions in their countries of origin (as in the CI case); hence only US laws and practices are pertinent.

–The Hanban-supplied teachers are not actually “hired” by their host schools, Professor McCord asserts, but continue to be members of faculty in their own Chinese universities.(p.6) Even University of Chicago administrators have dismissed that one—as in the claim to be “fully engaged in the hiring process”—inasmuch as the Chinese instructors are given standard lectureship titles together with all the privileges thereof, not to mention additions to their Hanban salaries and the usual faculty perquisites.

Censorship

When interviewed in connection with the McMaster case, Ms Zhao spoke about how she was trained to handle questions that are politically sensitive in China. “If my students asked me about Tibet or other sensitive subjects, I should have the right to express my opinion—I was not allowed to talk freely. During my training in Beijing they do tell us: ‘Don’t talk about that. If the student insists, you just try to change the topic or say something the Chinese Communist Party would prefer.”¹¹ Since the reference to that report in The Nation, I have been informed of a study by the anthropologist Jennifer Hubbert that echoes Ms Zhao’s statement in the actual practices of a Confucius Classroom¹². For purposes of confidentiality, Professor Hubbert identifies the ethnographic site by the pseudonym “Marymount,” and identifies it as a Catholic, co-educational secondary school on the West Coast of the US. Most pertinently here, she reports that the several teachers of Chinese at Marymount (she interviewed nine) have been trained by Hanban to divert discussions of sensitive political topics when they arise in the classroom, thus confirming Ms Zhao’s statement to that effect.¹³

Further, Professor Hubbert describes incidents of this kind that where the teacher’s response to a student’s queries on such topics range from a stony stare followed by silence (on Tibet) to an evasive changing of the subject (on Tiananmen). Regarding the latter, a “particularly telling example” came up in a conversation with two sophomores who complained about the lack of classroom discussion of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown on public dissent:

Carly:  When Tiananmen Square comes up in class, we all look at each other.  The teachers talk about it as this beautiful square, a nice place to visit.  But it’s like, “Wait, hold on, we’re missing some context.”

Lindsey:  If you ever get into these issues in the class, it gets steered away. “Wait, there’s no Tiananmen Square.  Let’s talk about fluffy bunnies.” (Hubbert, ms.)

Tiananmen often came up in similar ways in talks with students, but in this connection as in relation to other off-limits topics, the teachers’ trained avoidances had a blow-back effect rather the opposite of what the tactics were designed to achieve. Rather than helping promote the perception of a peaceful, beautiful, and harmonious China, the conspicuous silences and explicit evasions of the teachers, as also of the Hanban-supplied textbooks, reinforced the notions of a repressive Chinese political regime that for many of these American students antedated their experience of the Confucius Classroom.¹⁴ This reaction could be mitigated in particular instances of teachers’ open-mindedness and connection with the students’ interests: with the rather paradoxical effect, Professor Hubbert concludes, that the more the students’ ideas of the Chinese state are disaggregated by the teachers’ personable behavior, the better the PRC achieves its soft-power objectives. On the whole, however, the good news is that the CI project is not a very effective way of promoting the political influence of the People’s Republic. And that is partly a function of the bad news: that censorship with regard to controversial topics potentially embarrassing to the PRC regime is structurally inscribed in the Confucius Institute project, as a matter of teachers’ training and classroom performance.

So much for the frequently voiced argument, also rehearsed by Professor McCord, that after all a course on Chinese language and culture has little or no place for discussion of the status of Taiwan or the blood spilled at Tiananmen, the errors of the CCP or the jailing of dissident democracy advocates. In effect, the argument is: there is no censorship, because we never talk about such things.¹⁵ That is likewise the policy of Hanban and indeed of a recent Chinese government edict proscribing the discussion of a number of such subjects in Chinese universities. Apart from courses taught by Hanban instructors, it is also a guiding principle of the lectures, conferences, research projects, and performances sponsored by Confucius Institutes in their host universities—what the Deputy Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, Ted Foss, referred to as “a certain amount of self-censorship.”

In the end, Professor McCord, in a veritable tour de force of specious reasoning, manages to legitimate the censorship practices of Confucius Institutes on the grounds of academic freedom. His argument is that critics of CIs would deny the right of visiting Chinese professors to voice their opinions, hence deprive them of the privileges of free expression that are fundamental to the academic enterprise. Whereas these critics purportedly want to prevent the presentation of the PRC position on Tibet, for example, “Our willingness to allow a range of views to be expressed in the classroom,” Professor McCord perversely rejoins, “is ultimately connected to the belief that our students will have multiple sources of information that will allow them to draw their own conclusions.” (p.10) In other words, just what the Hanban-supplied teachers are trained not to do—specifically not to willingly allow a range of views to be expressed in the classroom—even as the same restraint inhabits Confucius Institute programs in general. Of course that censorship, whether self-imposed or externally required, is what the critics of CIs seek to exclude from the precincts of the university, precisely on the grounds of academic freedom. They are not objecting to visiting Chinese professors expressing their own views; they are objecting to them preventing the expression of other views.

Professor McCord could hardly have come up with more disingenuous examples of the supposed attacks on academic freedom by those who oppose the establishment of Confucius Institutes. For another one, his reading of the opponents’ objections to known attempts by Confucius Institute administrators to prevent the Dalai Lama from speaking on campus. By Professor McCord’s reading, the critics of the CI administrators are denying the right of free speech to the people who want to ban the Dalai Lama from speaking freely. Of these people who want to silence the Dalai Lama, he asks, “But should their right of free expression be denied?” (p.14) Of course, that is not the question at issue. The question is whether the right of the Dalai Lama to speak should be denied? And what kind of university is it where the Dalai Lama is prevented from speaking on political grounds?

Likewise for the incident at Waterloo University, where the Chinese co-director of the Confucius Institute mobilized her students to carry out a campaign of protest against the coverage in the local media of the Chinese suppression of a Tibetan uprising. Should we suppose these students were merely dupes of one charismatic professor, asks Professor McCord, or might some of them have actually agreed with her? (p.10) No doubt they might, but what was the alternative?

Then again, the same contradiction is explicitly built into the title of Professor McCord’s rejoinder: that is, in the relation between the main title, “Confucius Institutes in the U.S.”, and the old Maoist subtitle, “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom; Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend.”  Confucius Institutes are hardly intended to let a hundred schools of thought to contend. And one might well ask, Professor, where have all the flowers gone?

While it is sometimes admitted by advocates of Confucius Institutes that speakers such as the Dalai Lama and politically controversial topics such as the notorious “three Ts” (Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen) cannot be entertained in their CIs, they attempt to minimize the implications for academic integrity by pointing out there are other places on campus where these can be heard. At the University of Chicago we are told that what is not politically appropriate at the Confucius Institute can always be sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies. By that reasoning, there could be permissible censorship in every department, institute, and center in the University, so long as there was one where all viewpoints could be freely expressed. The problem with permissible censorship in a university is something like that of an unwanted pregnancy: you cannot have just a little of it.

The Confucius Institute and Academic integrity 

The kinds and number of compromises of its own intellectual and pedagogical principles entailed by the participation of the University of Chicago in Confucius Institutes must have regrettable effects on its academic integrity as an institution, let alone its general academic standing and reputation. Here by way of summary are several of the most evident of such breaches of principle, as manifest in the statements or actions of responsible University of Chicago parties:

–The University in 2009 committed itself to an agreement with the Confucius Institutes which included clauses on the teaching of Chinese language and culture. By these provisions, Hanban was contracted to train, supply, and pay the teachers, as well as provide textbooks and teaching materials, for courses within the University’s own Chinese language program. The University signed the agreement in bad faith, as it never intended to give Hanban control of the texts, teaching materials materials, and thereby the course curricula. This merely added an element of hypocrisy to the problematic provisions of the agreement with Hanban, several of which are noted in the following.

–The University violated its own statutes by not submitting this contract, inasmuch as it included teaching provisions, for approval by the representatives of the faculty in the Council of the Senate. Instead the University claimed that a vote by the China scholars of the Center for East Asian Studies constituted faculty approval.

–The University repeated this violation of faculty governance by appointing a Confucius Institute in-house Committee of three professors, all of whom are China specialists, to hold hearings and make recommendations on the renewal of the CI contract.

–The University falsely claimed to be “fully engaged” in the hiring process of teachers supplied by Hanban. At most it now claims a right of refusal it has never exercised.

–The University ignored the fact that Hanban is guided by Chinese law in selecting the teachers it sends, including laws that criminalize forms of belief and free speech protected in the US. As a result, the University becomes complicit in discriminatory hiring practices.

–The University ignored the fact that the teachers sent by Hanban to host institutions abroad are trained to avoid or divert discussions in class of subjects that are potentially politically embarrassing to the PRC .

–The University admitted that “ a certain amount of self-censorship” is involved in the activities of its Confucius Institute. It offered the compensation that politically controversial topics could be sponsored by other units of the University, thus sanctioning the principle that censorship is permissible in any academic unit so long as it does not apply somewhere else in the University.

–The University, affirming in official statements that its CI, like all others, was “affiliated” through Hanban with the Chinese Ministry of Education, thus failed to take or give notice that the Governing Council of the Confucius Institutes, which sets the agenda of Hanban and receives its reports, is chaired by a member of the Politburo and composed by high officials of the PRC, including members of the State Council and the Ministers or Vice-Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Education, National Development, Culture, Commerce, and Finance.

–The University accordingly considered it inconsequential that research projects on Chinese development proposed by Chicago faculty and students are submitted through its CI to Hanban, which makes the final decisions for approval and funding.

–Indeed, the University also ignored—perhaps because it was considered impractical and unenforceable–that according to its own Constitution and By-laws (Chapter 6, Article 36b), Hanban reserves the right to take punitive legal action for any activity sponsored by a local Confucius Institute without its approval.

These dubious aspects of Chicago’s Confucius Institute notwithstanding, many affiliated faculty as well as University officials are quite content with it, citing the freedom in practice from the contractual restraints on teaching Chinese, the quality of the Hanban teachers, the conferences on family economics undertaken with our Department of Economics, and the research opportunities the CI opens in China. This local satisfaction, however, involves the University in compromises of its own academic principles on a much greater scale. I noted this in The Nation article, but as the editing necessarily compressed it, I spell out the point here. For it needs to be considered that the interests of Hanban and particular American universities are different in scale and character. As an instrument of  Chinese government policy, Hanban’s interests are global and real-political. Its mission is to spread the influence of the Chinese state worldwide, particularly in strategically consequential regions, and above all the United States. Accordingly, with this larger objective in mind, the Beijing Head Office is ready to make case-by-case accommodations to American academic sensibilities: especially to prestigious universities–pour encourager les autres. The apparent loss Hanban takes in one local engagement may be an overall gain for the program world-wide. By contrast, the American universities for their part are concerned only with their own parochial welfare as academic institutions. Interested in the short-term economic, teaching, or research benefits, they are inclined to ignore or dismiss the unsavory political aspects of Confucius Institutes, which is to say the larger implication of their own participation, so long as they get a good deal. The larger implication is that their participation lends support to a project that is inimical to the academic integrity of other institutions even as it compromises their own.

When the establishment the CI at the University of Chicago was announced, one distinguished professor emeritus objected in a communication to the executive body (Committee of the Council) of the faculty legislature (Council of the Senate):

“I do not doubt that, regardless of its own statutes on these matters, the Confucius Institute has given broad assurances of academic integrity and freedom to the University of Chicago officials and teachers. I do not doubt it because the value of enlisting the prestige of the University of Chicago in the cause of the international success of the CI initiative would make any such concessions worthwhile, even if they were more than nominal. This, then, is the ultimate concern: that we are lending our good name to a political project that by its own by-laws infringes on our traditions of academic freedom at the same time it transgresses on our ideals of human rights, and in so doing we help spread these effects to other institutions that are less able to refuse the financial inducements that accompany them.”

The Dean who negotiated for a Confucius Institute at Professor McCord’s own institution, The George Washington University, pointed to the University of Chicago as an example. “I think we saw other top universities taking on Confucius Institutes,” she said, “and that increased our comfort level.”¹⁶ The moral is: no matter how liberal or beneficial the terms of its own participation, the University of Chicago, by hosting a Confucius Institute, becomes involved in a world-political struggle in a way that contradicts the intellectual and ethical values on which it is founded.¹⁷

In the event, there is a direct relationship between the global development of Confucius Institutes and the impairment of the University of Chicago’s good name. Judging from the adverse comments reported from many universities in the US and a number in other countries, the damages to the reputation of the University attendant on its establishment of a Confucius Institute are tracking the spread of the Hanban project. In the shadow of Hanban’s success come expressions of disappointment, dismay, and incredulity that an institution so well regarded for its intellectual quality and academic probity should become involved in such a dubious initiative of such an illiberal regime.

Coda

A significant development of note since the publication of “China U.” was the resolution passed by the governing council of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) “calling on universities and colleges in Canada which currently host Confucius Institutes on their campuses to cease doing so, and those contemplating such arrangements to pursue them no further.”¹⁸ In an accompanying statement, James Turk, the Executive Director of CAUT, observed: ““In agreeing to host Confucius Institutes, Canadian universities and colleges are compromising their own integrity by allowing the Chinese Language Council International to have a voice in a number of academic matters, such as curriculum, texts, and topics of class discussion. Such interference is a fundamental violation of academic freedom.”¹⁹ “Our interest in Confucius Institutes,” he explained in another communication, “comes from our concern about universities and colleges entering into arrangements with third parties—governments, industry, donor foundations—where the university agrees to abandon factors on which its uniqueness and credibility is based—academic freedom, academic control of academic decision-making (curriculum, hiring), etc.”²⁰ The Canadian Association of University Teachers represents some 68,000 faculty and staff in over 120 colleges and universities across the country.

SILVIA LINDTNER. DIY maker, hacker, and ethnographic design researcher.

ANTHROPOLOGY DESIGN.

Many disciplines and fields often work with competing notions of what counts as design, claiming authority over the term, practice, and definition. Think for instance about efforts in critical design (e.g., Dunne & Raby 2007) and the strong oppositions its practitioners often make to product design. Critical design is aimed at engaging people in critical ways with commonly used products. As Jeff and Shaowen Bardzell illuminate, critical design is positioned in opposition to affirmative design—the latter considered as “the common practice, and this practice is amoral and ultimately a dupe for capitalist ideology, while critical designers are described as moral agents who seek to change society for the better” (Bardzell & Bardzell 2013).

It is important to not shy away from the politics of design, or to brash aside such heated debates over definitions, terms, and authentic practices–many of which are legitimizing efforts of new approaches in an overly competitive market (both industry and the academy). The question is how to engage the politics of design in a way that remains open to multiple viewpoints and approaches. At numerous times in my research, I have heard people argue that the process of making and designing itself is apolitical. There is much that refutes such statements–think for instance of questions of labor when we turn towards sites of production that manufacture the technological products we use on a daily basis, or listen to debates of hackerspace members over what counts as hacking versus making versus product design. What is important here is to consider the differences that lie in designing as a mode of inquiry, a leisure practice, or central to one’s profession and livelihood.

Returning to the topic of critical design, then, we might ask: can making and designing for a living also be critical? In which ways? How does critical design in production differ from the kind of critical design we know today? (i.e., shown off to a fairly exclusive audience in a contemporary art museum?) In that sense, for me processes of designing and making have always been more interesting than design with a capital D. There is a tendency in the social sciences to focus on studying the designed artifact—the thing out there and imbued with values and meaning by its creators. In my work, I have been focusing on the processes that goes into making a thing: all the way from tinkering, prototyping, sketching, printing, over writing, talking, pitching, to manufacturing, bargaining, testing, selling,… I consider many of the makers I have encountered in this research critical designers in that sense that they challenge a particular status quo, intervene in existing structures of power, and engage critically with societal and technological questions. Their process of designing is simultaneously affirmative and critical. They are simultaneously driven by (1) making a profit, intervening in the world, and making it a better place, as well as (2) participating in a global market economy of tech innovation and disrupting it (I have written about this in greater detail here: Lindtner 2014).

WHY NOW.

What we might need today is a contemporary version of participatory design (PD). Originating in Scandinavia, the collection of methods known as participatory design aim to engage workers in co-determining the computational systems that might be introduced into their workplaces (Kensing & Blomberg 1998). This approach to engage the user into the design process has found broader uptake in corporate design methods, such as human-centered design, that are often based on methods borrowed from fields such as anthropology. The original political agenda to empower workers has turned into what Tom Boellstorff (2008) calls “creationist capitalism”—a form of “user participation” that gets people to adopt and spend money on a technology by being involved in creating content, writing code, and sharing information. The most notorious example of this is social media platforms, such as Facebook and Second Life.

So taken together, the fields of anthropology and design have already “met.” Ethnographic methods are used to better target product designs towards user needs (and increased sales), and design methods are used in anthropological research and training (e.g., The Ethnography Center at UC Irvine “Ethnocharrette” project). Not all of this has gone so smoothly as Boellstorff reminds us with his notion of creationist capitalism. In neither field of anthropology nor design do we find much of an in-depth engagement with the more critical and reflective approaches that the other discipline offers. Simply put: design draws upon participant observation, but not the writings after anthropology’s critical turn. And anthropology is interested in what design fields have to offer in terms of creativity, rapid ideation, and material engagement, but not in terms of critical reflection on the politics of design.

I propose a turn towards reflexive and critical approaches in both anthropology and design. It might be worthwhile to bring into conversation and develop a shared methodological frame based on efforts such as critical technical practice (Agre 1997), critical making (Ratto 2011), reflective design (Sengers et al. 2005), and ongoing reflections on authority and collaboration in anthropology (Marcus 2000, Kelty 2009).

WHAT I DO.

Both design and anthropology are an art of inquiry. They set up a relationship with the world, rather than a distanced view from an academic position. Working with makers, hackers, and tinkerers provides me with the opportunity to explore, on an even deeper level, productive processes (i.e., what goes into making or manufacturing a thing) as forms of inquiry and knowledge production.

I research cultures of technology production, with a particular focus on contemporary DIY (do it yourself) maker and hacker cultures. Over the last four years, I have explored, for instance, the proliferation of the maker movement and its intersections with manufacturing and industry development in China. I have conducted multi-sited ethnographic research as well as DIY maker workshops, maker conferences, and media productions, mostly in different cities in China, but also (although with less intensity) in the United States. I pay particular attention to the ways in which local maker cultures are tied into a global reorientation towards digital fabrication, hardware production, and physical materials. DIY makers in China, for instance, situate their work in relation to a history of open manufacturing (shanzhai 山寨) common to the Southern regions of China as well as in relation to a global maker movement and start-up culture (e.g. Lindtner 2014).

With a background in digital media and interaction design, an essential aspect of my ethnographic research has always been a deep engagement with people’s technology practices. This means that as part of my fieldwork, I also participate in the making of things, which has included the production of a short film about an open innovation and co-working model XinDanWei in China, the co-organization of conferences and research projects as well as co-authorship with makers and artists (e.g. Lindtner & Li 2012; Hertz & Lindtner 2014).

METHODOLOGY
Both anthropology and design provide me with toolkits to “study with,” in Anthropologist Tom Ingold’s sense of the term (2013). By “study with,” Ingold emphasizes the difference that lies in “study about” versus “study with,” the former being primarily transformational and the latter largely documentary. The kind of anthropology I feel aligned with and the kind of ethnographic research I conduct have always entailed a process of “making with:” studying with, working with, writing with, and learning with, rather than studying or writing about.

Let me elaborate on what I mean by “making with” here. In early 2013, I had a several months long ethnographic engagement with a growing start-up scene in and around Shenzhen, a city in the Southern regions of China. The last years have seen a rise in hardware accelerator and incubator programs that invest in hardware start-ups and bring them to China in order to turn DIY maker ideas into end-consumer products (see more on this here: Lindtner et al. 2014). The vision that many of the start-ups share, from both China and abroad, is a commitment to empower others who are less familiar with the inner workings of technology and hacking (i.e., their own appropriation and modification of the products they own). They share this vision with the makers and hackers of earlier generations working on human-computer interaction, invisible computing, and tangible interfaces, who began by building prototypes of wearable computers, embedded systems, and Internet of Things. The visions of seamless computing by Mark Weiser (1999) or Ishii and Ullmers’ early work in tangible computing (1997) come to mind here. Many of the hardware start-ups that spin out of hackerspaces, universities, and maker initiatives today are implementing these earlier visions and prototypes of invisible computing, turning them into actual products by partnering with small- to large-scale manufacturers.

By “making with,” I wish to highlight the collaborative process central to design, something that I have found to be rarely taken up in anthropology Despite anthropology’s interest in design methods and cultures of design, the focus often remains on things like engagement with materials, brainstorming, fast data generation, etcetera. Designing is fundamentally a collaborative practice that frequently involves a multitude of stakeholders. For instance, the start-ups I worked with as part of my fieldwork in Shenzhen did not simply hire a factory that made products for them. Rather, designing a product entailed visits to the factory on a weekly basis where the start-ups and the factory workers together explored different materials, the affordances of different machines, and electronic circuitry for a given product. These collaborations on the factory floor slightly altered the original design, often improving it. When people talk about design, they rarely talk about these interactions fundamental to production, a process often considered as post-design. By “making with,” I wish to highlight first, that production and industrial fabrication is an essential aspect of design, and second, that it is accomplished through partnerships and collaborations.

ON COLLABORATION.
An essential aspect for me in this approach of “making with” is also the collaboration on writing and media productions. Much of my writing (academic and otherwise) is collaborative, a practice common to many technology research and design fields. Two of my recent projects are:

1. A handmade zine that Garnet Hertz and I produced in collaboration with the members of the New York City-based hackerspace NYCResistor:

2.    An article David Li from the hackerspace in Shanghai and I wrote together in 2012 that got published in the ACM Interactions magazine on China’s maker movement:

Both publications involved processes of crafting, theorizing, and researching. The production of each was a way of understanding cultures of technology production on a deeper level (i.e., active participation in production). For instance, the making of the NYC Resistor Zine gave us the rare opportunity to learn about the hackerspace by working with the resistors. The article allowed David and myself to express more clearly themes that I had identified in the field before, but that had remained somewhat vague—such as the relationship between copy and open-source, or between hacking and making. The making of both publications also opened up conversations and interactions with others who are less likely to read traditional academic pieces. For instance, because the ACM article was translated into Chinese, it became accessible to a new readership amongst a group of elderly inventors in China.

HOW I SHARE.
When I began my fieldwork with makers in China in 2010, I was struck by the amount of writing that makers produced–on blogs, public talks, in books, and in articles. Many think of geeks, hackers, and makers as concerned foremost with things like circuit diagrams or the kinks of a piece of software code. And while such things are of course essential to makers, they are not divorced from reflecting and thinking about the very process of hacking, coding, and making. I was driven to understand this material-semiotic mode of co-production better and began to work with David Li, the co-founder of China’s first hackerspace, and others in China’s growing maker scene on a series of workshops and events based on making and critical reflection.

In 2011, we put together a workshop in Budapest that brought together scholars, makers, designers, and hackers from China, Iran, Eastern Europe, and North America. We worked with the local FabLab (Fabrication Laboratory, small-scale workshops offering digital fabrications, tools, and machines for digital-physical production), who provided us with the space and tools to make things. Over the course of the workshop, practitioners and scholars worked together on writing software code, cutting wood, formatting hardware boards, etcetera, while also critically debating and reflecting on the designs and process as a whole. One of the things we made was a functioning prototype, a little box that can record messages and then play that message on a radio receiver. Imagine recording your own slogan and transmitting it in a public space to be heard by others. The motivation was to disrupt state media coverage that doesn’t allow for a multitude of voices–hence the prototype’s name, “Silenced Voices.” The making of the device brought up heated discussions about censorship and Internet freedom and control, especially with an eye towards participants’ experiences in their respective regions of work in the US, China, Iran, and Europe.

In 2013, based on the success of these informal events, David Li (XinCheJian), Anna Greenspan (NYU Shanghai), and I kicked off a Shanghai-based research hub, called Hacked Matter. What began as a series of workshops and conversations has now turned into a long-term collaboration between makers and researchers in China using an interdisciplinary set of methods ranging from designing over making to writing and ethnographic fieldwork, with the goal to understand deeply contemporary transformations in industrial production, hacking, and innovation.

Our most recent event in Shanghai brought together makers and hackers, journalists, industry partners, and scholars through conversations and hands-on making sessions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKQXXlV9Mds

RESOURCES.

Agre, P. 1997. Towards a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI. In Bowker, Gasser, Star, and Turner, eds, Bridging the Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems and Collaborative Work. Laurence Erlbaum.

Bardzell, J. and Bardzell, S. 2013. What is “Critical” about Critical Design? Proc. of ACM Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI’13 (Paris, France), 3297-3306.

Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2007). Critical Design FAQ. Last retrieved February 21, 2014.

Ingold, T. 2013. Making. Anthropology, archeology, art and architecture. Routlege, New York.

Ishii, H. and Ullmer, B. Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between people, bits, and atoms. . In Proc. of ACM Conf. CHI’97, 234-241.

Kay, A., C. 1972. A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages. Proc. of ACM ’72, Vol. 1, No. 1.

Kensing, F. and Blomberg, J. 1998. Participatory Design: Issues and Concerns. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 7, 3-4 (Jan. 1998), 167-185.

Kelty, C. et al. 2009 Collaboration, Coordination, and Composition: Fieldwork after the Internet. In Fieldwork is not what it used to be, eds. Faubion, J.D. and Marcus, G. E., NY: Cornell University Press.

Lindtner, S. and Li, D. 2012. Created in China. The Makings of China’s Hackerspace Community. ACM Interactions, XIX. 6 November December.

Lindtner, S., Hertz, G., and Dourish, P. 2014. Emerging Sites of HCI Innovation: Hackerspaces, Hardware Start-ups & Incubators. Proc. of ACM Conference CHI’14, Toronto, Canada.

Lindtner, S. 2014. Making Subjectivities. How China’s DIY Makers remake industrial production, innovation & the self. In: Special issue on Polititical Contestation in Chinese Digital Spaces” (ed. Guobin Yang) of the Journal of China Information.

Marcus, G. 2000. Para-sites. A Casebook against Cynical Reason. Late Editions: Cultural Studies for the End of the Century. University of Chicago Press.

Ratto, M. 2011. Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life, The Information Society: An International Journal, 27:4.

Sengers, P., Boehner, K., David, S., and Kaye, J. 2005. Reflective design. In Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing: between Sense and Sensibility (Aarhus, Denmark), 49-58.
Weiser, M. 1999. The Computer of the 21st century. ACM SIGMOBILE, Mobile Computing and Communications Review, Vol. 3, Issue 3, 3-11.

ME.

Silvia Lindtner is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the ISTC-Social (the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing) at UC Irvine and at Fudan University, Shanghai. She is also an incoming faculty member at the University of Michigan in the School of Information. She researches, writes, and teaches about DIY (do-it-yourself) maker culture, with a particular focus on its intersections with manufacturing and industry development in China. Drawing on her background in interaction design and media studies, she merges ethnographic methods with approaches in design and making. This approach allows her to provide deep insights into emerging cultures of technology production and use from a sociological and technological perspective. Her work is published across the fields of human-computer interaction, media and communication studies, science and technology studies, cultural anthropology, and China studies. Silvia is the recipient of a NSF grant, a Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, a Chinese Government Scholarship 2012, and two Intel Research Grants. Together with Anna Greenspan (NYU Shanghai) and David Li (XinCheJian), she is also the co-founder of Hacked Matter, a Shanghai-based Research Initiative.

A few years ago we already did some very modest research on the absence of development: why a road is not being built to link China and Russia across the Altai, despite all economic rationality. Now Pal wants to do some more substantial fieldwork in one of the numerous places — from Laos to Peru — that are being changed by Chinese-built roads or dams,Chinese traders, casinos, clinics, or factories. Despite all the hype that surrounds China’s “development export,” there is very little understanding of how it is actually impacts people’s lives and ways of thinking. Yet, as we wrote in an earlier post, both the capital and the faith in development that Chinese migrants bring to these places is already changing aspirations in ways that both agencies like the World Bank (whose lending portfolio is already smaller than that of China’s Eximbank) and participatory-development NGOs find hard to ignore. In one of the first ethnographies of the subject, Antonella Diana has shown how highland farmers in northern Laos, whose lives have long revolved around the German development organization GTZ, have converted to the prosperity gospel of Chinese rubber planters.

The subject is so interesting because it connects shifting local understandings of “the good life” in African villages to changes in World Bank decisions as well as to changing modes of sovereignty, as evidenced by the rise of modern-day concessions — large rented territories run by foreign (Chinese or other) investors who promise the local government to build model zones of development in exchange for a degree of what in essence is extraterritoriality. And while Chinese “development export” has a lot to do with the state, of no smaller interest is the sudden emergence of private donors and volunteers in China — people who adopt form of action familiar from Western “civil society” but who may have quite different (or, on the other hand, similar) ideas of what kind of lives their help should facilitate.

This is, of course, where Joana’s interests come in. Our next joint project is comparing Chinese reactions to the uses of aid after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to Western debates about the efficiency of aid to Haiti these days. We hope to use the analysis of these (mostly online) discussions to uncover to what extent ideas of aid and of individual-state interaction differ, but if we find Chinese donors for betterplace.org in the process, Joana won’t mind.