Prototype Nation: Silvia Lindtner on what drives Chinese tech innovation, and how tech drives Chinese statecraft
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2022
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Silvia Lindtner of the University of Michigan about her book Prototype Nation. In a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss how China's maker movement inspired the Party leadership to encourage tech entrepreneurship, how Shenzhen rose to such prominence in technology production, the fetishization of the shanzhai movement, and much more.
5:29 How narratives on Chinese tech innovation have shifted
14:10 What made China's technological innovation possible?
20:37 State support for the maker movement and mass innovation
29:52 The technocratic and entrepreneurial mindset of the CCP
38:45 Techno-optimism in China versus the West
45:57 Shenzhen's "hacker paradise" as a transnational project
50:02 Orientalism in the West's fascination with shanzhai, or copycat, culture
A complete transcript of this podcast is available at SupChina.com.
Recommendations
Silvia: In This Moment, We Are Happy by Chen Qiufan and Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures by Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski
Kaiser: Sarmat Archery based in Kiev, Ukraine
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Transcript
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| 0:45.7 | That's audible.com slash Wondery UK. Welcome to the cynical podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China produced in partnership with SubChina. |
| 1:05.0 | Subscribe to SubChina's daily, newly designed China Access Newsletter to keep on top of all the latest news from China from |
| 1:11.4 | hundreds of different news sources. Or check out all the original writing on our website at |
| 1:16.1 | subchina.com. We've got reported stories, essays, and editorials, create explainers and trackers, |
| 1:22.1 | regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, |
| 1:31.4 | from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China's Xinjiang region, |
| 1:36.8 | to Beijing's ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. |
| 1:43.0 | It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news |
| 1:46.2 | about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor. |
| 1:52.4 | I'm Kaiser Guo coming to today from Chandler, Arizona. Today on Seneca, I am delighted to |
| 1:58.2 | welcome Sylvia Lintner, Associate Professor of Information at the |
| 2:01.7 | University of Michigan School of Information. She's also Associate Professor of Art and Design at the |
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