This latest Editor’s Note is possibly the last I shall be writing in my seven years of service as editor-in-chief of this journal. While reading the papers in this issue, I was excited by the themes of “progress and uncertainty” that appear, explicitly or implicitly, in their analysis of cases from China, Korea, and Taiwan. The Denmark-based authors Hailing Zhao and Rachel Douglas-Jones’ “Weaving the Net: Making a Smart City through Data Workers in Shenzhen” draws upon the efforts of the “Weaving the Net” program (zhiwang gongcheng, 织网工程), which aims to transform Shenzhen, the first of China’s Special Economic Zones back in the 1980s, into a progressive, smart city for the twenty-first century. There have been several scholarly publications, notably the edited volume Learning from Shenzhen: China's Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City (O'Donnell, Wong, and Bach 2017), among the articles on its establishment and on a transformation that reflects that of China over the past four decades. Zhao and Douglas-Jones choose as their focus of analysis “grid data workers” (wangge xinxiyuan, 网格信息员)—those people who are primary builders both of the information this expanding city uses to control its residents and also a new type of street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky 1980) that turns uncertain urban conditions into accountable, collectable data for governance.
