‘ Innovate with China’ product label by Seeed Studio. 

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... of well-known brands ranging from retail such as Gucci bags to electronic products such as the iPhone. The literal translation into English is ‘mountain fortress’ and carries connotations of self- reliance and resourcefulness. In this formulation, copying, re-use, and innovation are not mutually exclusive. For example, shanzhai factories in Shenzhen not only produce cop- ies of the latest tablet or mobile phone. They also remix functional albeit discarded components with new parts in order to produce novel products, often tailored towards niche markets in China, India and Africa. Often-cited examples include mobile devices for Chinese migrant communities that allow users to send remittances easily or phones with built-in compasses that point users in the direction of Mecca. Makers referred to a second meaning of shanzhai when they described an efficient open manufacturing system that has formed around these small-scale factories in Shenzhen over the last 20 years. Open manufacturing means that many factories, and in particular shanzhai factories, have informally organized a peer-to-peer database for sharing hardware design schematics and their bill of materials, a list of materials used in manufacturing a particular product. Sharing these resources allowed the factories to lower production costs and to stay competitive in a global market. Bunnie Huang, an acclaimed member of the international maker movement and regular visitor to Shenzhen, described shanzhai in a blog post as China’s open source. Suggesting that the phenomenon has grown beyond the original shanzhai practice, he proposes the term gongkai ( 公开 ) to account for a ‘self-sustaining innovation ecosystem ... just as the Galapagos Islands are a unique biological ecosystem evolved in the absence of continental species, gongkai is a unique innovation ecosystem with little western influence, thanks to political, language, and cultural isolation’. 51 Many other makers have similarly highlighted shanzhai ’s workings through open sharing and remix-as-innovation. Many also believed that by focusing on this unique open source culture the image of Chinese manufacturing can be revamped from a site of cheap, copycat production to one that highlights the more creative connotations shanzhai shares with the international maker movement. Let us look at a specific example of a business model built on this idea of bringing together an international DIY maker culture with China’s open manufacturing system. In 2008, Eric Pan founded Seeed Studio, 52 a small-scale manufacturing and design house located in Shenzhen. Seeed Studio designs and manufactures products for an emerging niche market: DIY makers. Its products include open hardware platforms, hardware developer kits, hardware hacking tools, and custom-made printed circuit boards. Today, Seeed Studio is internationally renowned in maker circles and amongst design professionals, with 98 per cent of its revenue stemming from product sales and contracts with clients in the United States and Europe. According to Pan, Seeed Studio might not have survived if it was not for Shenzhen’s shanzhai production. Before Seeed was established, he discovered a copycat Arduino board during a stroll through Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei electronic markets. The Arduino board is essentially an easy- to-use microcontroller, a single-chip computer that supports the design of hardware- software-material interaction, and accompanying programming environment. Invented in 2005 in Italy at the Ivrea Design School, it has popularized the design of interactive systems and DIY making, by simplifying the process and greatly reducing costs. After Eric Pan had bought the shanzhai Arduino board, he turned to the Internet and discovered an international network of makers connecting hackerspaces across the world. It was then that the idea arose to partner with members of Shenzhen’s manufacturing ecosystem in order to invent new open hardware products and to cater to this growing international market of makers. One of the first products that Eric designed was a board that builds on the Arduino board – in the spirit of open source – by making it significantly better, which was made possible by the partnerships he had established within the infor- mal social network in and around Shenzhen’s shanzhai culture (see Figure 3). Seeed Studio is based on a business model that effectively merges maker ideals with China’s manufacturing expertise. It works because new ideas for products emerge from strong partnerships with both Shenzhen’s manufacturing world and DIY makers. For Pan, this notion of partnership is more than a business model; it is about shaking up and remaking our very idea of manufacturing, innovation, and copy. This is best exemplified by the label of Seeed Studio products. For instance, rather than the common ‘Made in China’ tag that adorns most of the products we use on a daily basis, Seeed Studio’s products are labelled ‘Innovate with China’ (see Figure 4). ‘Innovate with China’ illustrates the potential that lies in approaching China as a partner in the creation process rather than just a cheap producer. For Pan, as for many other makers, shanzhai and the process of copying is better seen as a productive force, rather than as something inherently negative, or in his words: Similarly, many other makers considered shanzhai not as something negative or to be avoided. On the contrary, they often described it as a form of creativity and resourcefulness. Shanzhai stood for a form of ingenuity many considered intrinsically Chinese: a do-it-yourself mentality, inventive ways of working with materials, and adaptability to local shortages and rapid changes to the physical and social environment. By forging connections between shanzhai and DIY maker culture, Seeed Studio repositions Chinese manufacturing, challenging dominant associations of ‘made in’ such as cheap and low quality. It promotes a version of creativity that differs drasti- cally from what the Chinese government has been promoting over the last years, as outlined at the beginning of this article; a move away from ‘made in’ and from China’s reliance on manufacturing. Seeed Studio’s products and processes demonstrate that the long-term manufacturing know-how with its unique open source spirit could be the very seed for China’s remake. In this article, I have shown how China’s DIY makers are remaking common understandings of innovation and creativity, and in doing so they craft a subject position beyond the common rhetoric that Chinese citizens lack creativity. I have also shown that makers believe that technological innovation and social change can be enabled by setting up physical spaces such as hackerspaces and/or starting hardware businesses as interfaces between a wider public, potential investors, like-minded makers, Chinese manufacturing and officials. What drives their open approach towards technology production is the belief that it will lead not only to new forms of innovation, but also to individual empowerment in a climate of rapid change on a global scale. Throughout this article, the analytical lens of ‘making subjectivities’ was employed to illustrate that the social meaning of technology in China is shaped by technology use and production. Makers are promoting the importance of a maker approach for China’s future development. However, being a maker was not seen as being distinct from other aspects of their lives. DIY making was not only a mode of technology production, but also a way of being and acting in the world through which other aspects of life were tackled. For instance, being a maker did not mean that one could not be a parent. Rather it meant being a parent differently, committed to teaching one’s child to act in the world in a hands-on and engaged manner. Similarly, being a maker was not perceived as being distinct from an entrepreneur, designer, programmer, engineer, artist, geek, blogger, citizen or netizen, and so on. Identifying as a maker meant constructing a multifaceted position in society that exists in relation to many other spheres of life. Entering into partnerships between diverse stakeholders, the makers I worked with positioned themselves in a world they perceived as being in flux. They refused to be caught up in urban, economic, technological and social transformation in China. DIY making as a mode of living and working remained central. As the site of individual empowerment within unstable and shifting worlds, DIY making enabled people to remake the very societal norms and material infrastructures that undergird their work and livelihood. Their technology productions and businesses were neither entirely countercultural nor pro-system. In order to account for these at times symbiotic, at other times parasitic practices, analytical categories such as tactics versus strategies, state (or corporation) versus netizen, or official versus counterculture are clearly insufficient. For instance, I have shown in this article how Seeed Studio simultaneously appropriates and remakes industrial production in China and international ideas of creativity and innovation. Members of hackerspaces in their formulations of creativity both align with and critique official discourse. The lens of making subjectivities allows us to see how people actively craft a position for themselves and others, and how this process is neither just resistance nor just accept- ance of the status quo, but a continuous interplay between both. What I wish to empha- size, finally, is the importance for researchers of the Chinese Internet and technology to reflect on their form of participation in both the use and design of technologies in China. Speaking of netizens as the other, ontological category while speaking for (or about) scholars and researchers separates us or the observer from the practices we study. Taking a position removed from the network we study is complicated by our position ...