This book review, part of a featured piece in our thematic issue, titled "Challenging and Reinvigorating China § 'Mr. Science' should have been published in Volume 16.3 but has been omitted due to an editorial misunderstanding. Readers who enjoy this review can also browse this issue for a critical assessment, from an STS perspective, on how science and innovation are debated and practiced in China in the twentieth century.
EASTS Editorial Office
Studies of science and technology that adopt a national frame are often blind to the complex and surprising ways that technoscientific knowledge is shaped through its global movements. The development of digital manufacturing technologies, from 3D printers to CNC mills, inspired a new vision of technological democratization, in which the means of production are distributed widely, and citizens are empowered to participate in the making of their physical world. Perhaps even more astounding than this imaginary is the fact that it was shared by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Chinese Communist Party (CC) cadres. As Silvia Lindtner's Prototype Nation:
Ching and the Contested Promise of Innovation argues, however, the global reach of this technological promise was not driven by the technologies themselves, but was constructed and maintained through a process of discursive movement, in which locations of technological opportunity were co-produced with the identities of participants. Maintaining this promise of decentralized manufacturing required the effort of policy makers, entrepreneurs, and factory workers, each of whom articulated a distinet vision of the future. Lindtner's ethnographic analysis moves across many scales and evaluates these "displacements of technological promise" (page
5) in terms of the nations, regions, institutions, and individual lives that are reshaped by this process.
