Silvia Lindtner (University of Michigan)

How did China’s mass manufacturing and “copycat” production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? This talk, based on Professor Lindtner’s most recent publication "Prototype Nation" (Princeton University Press, 2020), offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China’s governance and global image. With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Professor Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–08, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation.