‘China’ as a ‘Black Box?’ Rethinking methods through a sociotechnical perspective

ABSTRACT

Amid the ongoing pandemic and the so-called ‘New Cold War,’ physical mobility dwindles and political paranoia surges. China has been increasingly portrayed as a ‘black box’ in anglophone discourse, scholarly and popular alike. More than ever, digital platforms serve as the sites and means to know ‘the Chinese reality.’ In this paper, we mobilize insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), especially its epistemological and ontological reflections on the ‘black box’ metaphor, to confront the ongoing ‘blackboxing’ of China and, in tandem, the embrace of digital platform data as ‘open source’ to penetrate China from afar. Foregrounding the role of technological infrastructures, research positionality, and power relations in knowledge production, we situate this phenomenon in broader shifts in geopolitics and academic ecology. We then suggest alternative routes for empirical investigation: (1) to reembed Chinese platform data in their sociotechnical contexts, (2) to approach a ‘networked China’ at and across different scales, and relatedly, (3) to attune to obscured positionalities in fieldwork and analysis. Ultimately, we urge communities of China researchers to attend to the politics and materiality of knowledge production and resist the pervading ‘New Cold War’ framing.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• science and technology studies
• digital data
• methodology
• knowledge production

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The configuration of Chinese-language academic and public discourse on related issues goes beyond the scope of this article.

2 Our intervention focuses on the epistemic and methodological issues in social scientific scholarly practice. It is thus different from the ‘postcolonial computing’ tradition (Irani et al., 2010; Dourish et al., 2012), which applies postcolonial theories to critique ICT4D, analyzing how their designs embed ideologies of development with colonial legacies and perpetuate unequal economic distribution. Also note that by drawing on postcolonial STS, we by no means consider China once a proper colony in the vein of India and the Middle East. Rather, we build on Rober Young’s (2003) call to see post- and de-colonialism as an assemblage of epistemologies, methods, and practices.

3 Notably, the ‘new Cold War’ framing results from bi-directional othering acts. For a detailed review, see Westad, O. A. (2019, September-October). The Sources of Chinese Conduct: Are Washington and Beijing Fighting a New Cold War? Foreign Affairs 98(5), 86.

4 The US and China share many commonalities, however. In both countries, IT corporations and government agencies alike approach AI and data science as major sites of investment in order to advance national interests in algorithmic warfare as well as profit from new mechanisms of surveillance and control. Policymakers from both countries consider technologies and platforms essential to secure national sovereignty and their respective political ideologies (Chen, 2019).

5 Recently, leaks from within, such as those by Facebook’s whistleblower Frances Haugen, reveal the tip of the iceberg that is platforms’ power in molding user behavior.

6 For an inspiring example from STS-informed fair-AI research that destabilizes ‘blackboxes’ by redrawing the social/technical boundaries, see Selbst et al. (2019).

7 For an example, see Yang (2022), especially its methodology and organization.

8 Our STS-informed approach strives for a distinct methodological intervention in conceptualizing fieldwork and is topically more capacious than the recent trend of ‘global China’ studies (Lee, 2022a; Franceschini & Loubere, 2022). Similarly urging to forgo a fixation on an essentialized, monolithic nation-state and to instead trace China/global entanglements, the ‘global China’ research agenda sees ‘China as a power project.’ It centers on Beijing’s pursuit of global expansion through initiatives such as BRI and seeks to investigate its actual accomplishments and ramifications overseas (Lee, 2022b, p. 316).

9 In this sense we build on, but extend, the notion of multi-sited ethnography, a method ‘designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations … with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection’ (Marcus, 1995, p. 105).

10 For example, the literature on Chinese technology is concentrated on Western categories of, say, democracy, AI ethics, and privacy (Ong & Chen, 2010; Lin & Chen, 2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yuchen Chen

Yuchen Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. Her research looks at the transnational and technologically-mediated flows of people, culture and capital between U.S. and China. [email: [email protected]].

Alex Jiahong Lu

Alex Jiahong Lu is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information. His research looks into individuals’ and communities’ everyday navigation and negotiation with surveillance infrastructures in both China and the city of Detroit, as well as the oft-invisible labor embedded in this process [email: [email protected]].

Angela Xiao Wu

Angela Xiao Wu is a faculty member in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She investigates the connections among media technologies, knowledge production, and politics. Her current book project examines how public culture takes shape when systems thinking informs its conception and governance [email: [email protected]].