The story of setting
up a hackerspace in
China is not about the
linear transfer of
knowledge and tools
from the West to
the East. On the
contrary, the story of
China’s hackerspace
community critiques

making of things (e.g., the work that goes into setting up a physical hackerspace, the acquisition and making of tools and digital and electronic objects) and the making of meaning (e.g., reflecting on what it means to make these things in the first place). Reflective engagement with things such as DARPA or Shanghai government funding show that—contrary to common perceptions—maker culture is all but apolitical. Maker culture in China’s hackerspaces, similar to hackerspaces elsewhere, possesses a strong engagement with contemporary politics and debates over both societal and technological issues, such as freedom of expression, innovation, and what counts as post-industrial.

such a view and
highlights how
technologies and
values are sites of
negotiation, remaking,
and constant
appropriation as

November + December 2012

they are translated
into particular
local settings.

interactions

Remaking Innovation

While China’s hackerspaces participate in the global maker culture, commitments to working beyond existing institutional frames and a DIY approach toward technology production take on unique forms.

Maker culture is often associated with a critical, hands-on approach toward challenging the status quo. This includes projects that subvert the use of copyright law that favors an ever-expanding corporate monopoly over products, even after they have been sold to consumers. Other projects repurpose old and discarded products in order to provide alternatives to our contemporary throwaway consumer culture. Inspiration for these projects often stems from the European avant-garde movement or the 1970s Internet counterculture movement from the U.S. West Coast [ 10]. Building on these earlier social movements, making and remaking are held up as tactics to subvert contemporary forms of domination.

Similarly, hackerspaces in China
draw upon the past in order to situ-
ate their work today. Rather than
focusing on a European or American
history of counterculture, however,
they leverage China’s past and its
current role in global manufactur-
ing. In particular, they propose that
many factories in China have long
sustained their low-cost production
through the open source sharing of
resources and ideas within a net-
work of hardware manufacturers.
For members of hackerspaces in
China, this means that open source
production has been around all
along, albeit out of economic neces-
sity rather than motivated by coun-
tercultural sentiment.