India China Institute at The New School

In this talk, Silvia Lindtner, Associate Professor in the School of Information and Penny W Stamps School of Art and Design at the Univesrity of Michigan will draw from ethnographic research she has conducted over the last 14 months across two sites in China: 1) small-scale businesses that center on alternative food and spiritual practices via life in nature and the countryside and 2) large-scale, data-driven agricultural experiments at the outskirts of major urban centers. Prof. Lindtner will discuss how these two sites interact for the implementation of two recent state policies on “rural revitalization” and “national strengthening.” These policies are aimed at reinvesting into China’s “hinterlands:” from rural farmland to people’s most inner selves. They position data-driven techniques of automation, surveillance technology, and smart systems as key to the state’s ability to manage life that has partially escaped the state’s reach. And they call upon China’s youths who have turned away from the city to live and work in China’s countryside to co-produce what she calls “data engines,” i.e. a participatory form of techno-governance driven by an engineering mindset that aims to cultivate citizens as productive selves who operate on behalf of the party state and its ambition to build a “strong China” by turning inwards—China’s history, soil, and agriculture. Data engines, she shows, simultaneously enable, and slow down the automation of China’s soil and soul.

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