China: Making as National Transformation? – British Council Living Research 2018

Abstract

In China, a series of strategic policy shifts around makerspaces is setting the scene for widespread social change — but who are these changes really affecting? From inventing the abacus to working with the world’s first hot air balloons (Dinke 2005), China has always experimented with new technologies — but as we learned from the many creatives, makers and innovators we spoke to as delegates of the British Council Living Research project which explored local maker and craft ecosystems in Chengdu and Xi’an this spring, China is experiencing an especially transformative moment in its history — and making is its focus.

Full text

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MakingasNationalTransformation?
Living Research delegates Kat Braybrooke, Jon Flint and Ingrid Murphy
explore the relationships between makerspaces and government policy in
China.
A series of strategic policy shifts is setting the scene for
widespread social change in China — but who is it really aecting?
In China, makerspaces are not just building new things. They are also
building a new world in their image. From inventing the abacus to
working with the world’s rst hot air balloons (Dinke 2005), China has
always experimented with new technologies — but as we learned from
the many creatives, makers and innovators we spoke to in our tour of
sites for making and craft in Chengdu and Xi’an, China is experiencing
an especially transformative moment in its history — and making is the
focus.
Government strategies to enable mass making
ChaihuoMakerspaceinChengdu|PhotoKatBraybrooke

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The making and innovation policies that lead to the creation of today’s
government-supported makerspaces started to emerge around 1988,
when the Ministry of Science and Technology launched its rst ‘Torch
Programme’ to help foster new R&D spaces across the nation such as
software parks and science and technology industrial parks — a
prioritisation of new kinds of research sites that was also occurring in
the UK around this period (for more on this, see Massey et al 1991).
This was the beginning of a national focus on the importance of spatial
form and function in fostering creative sociotechnical development. For
the Chinese government’s Five-Year Plan from 2001–2005, R&D
funding was then raised to 1.5% of GDP, with Premier Hu Jintao’s state
address in 2004 postmarking increased government investments in
design and innovation (Justice 2002). This led to the creation of many
new art enclaves, innovation parks and university design programmes
in universities, especially in second-tier cities like Chengdu. By 2006, a
longer-term plan had been unveiled to build an ‘innovation-oriented’
China, with cities competing to reach the new targets by opening
creative clusters and technology parks to foster further innovations
(Wang 2016, p.6).
It was not until 2015, however, that a series of strategic government
policy shifts toward enabling design thinking and entrepreneurship,
typically referred to as (mass entrepreneurship and
mass innovation), lead to the ‘makerspace’ (or a site for making and
learning with digital tools) becoming a central priority, with the aim to
transform the next generation of Chinese youth not only into doers but
also into entrepreneurial, business-minded innovators, or makers.
Premier Li Keqiang visited the Chaihuo Makerspace and Seeed Studio
in Shenzhen for the rst time in this year on a heavily publicised public
relations tour aimed at “giving a boost to China’s innovators”, citing the
space as one of the frontiers of a maker revolution in China, and
propelling terms like ‘maker’ and ‘design thinking’ into formal
government discourse. In a speech to students of Tsinghua University
(what David Wang has referred to as the “Chinese MIT”), for example,
Keqiang famously stated that “making and creating is no longer a
privilege reserved for the elites, but an opportunity aorded to the
greater majority of people”.
From made in China to designed in China

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With this statement, Keqiang signied the government’s new focus on
creative industries that would no longer be top-down but instead
focused on ‘mass’ activities, built from creative grassroots eorts based
on open innovation practices, where ‘Made in China’ becomes
‘Designed in China’. “The ‘mass’ in mass maker space, in other words,
stands for the goal of cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset and
mobilising many — if not masses of — people in China to start-up their
own businesses” (Wang 2016). This approach to maker culture helps
address government fears of future unemployment for the many
students who are currently graduating from higher level education
across the China, as making skills are seen as useful for other
occupations beyond technical and creative industries, while helping
shift responsibility for that employment from the government onto the
individual.
This was evidenced by our experience at North West Polytechnic,
where we met with engineering students who identied themselves as
makers. They presented work to us that was in equal part scientic
research and entrepreneurial project, and were keen to join the wall of
alumni who succeeded through the university’s renowned Accelerator
programme. In this, they were clearly being educated not only to seek
employment, but also to make employment.
China’s 13th Five Year Plan of 2016 further reinforced this
prioritisation towards a maker mindset — along with generous
subsidies for new making-focused spaces to go alongside it — by stating
its aim for China to become an “innovation nation” by 2020. Very little
time has been wasted since then. Last year, the government reported it
had helped over 7,500 makerspaces and incubators open — more than
anywhere else in the world. It aims to ensure over 10,000 such sites
have been opened by 2020.
Makerspace imaginaries versus realities
This prioritisation does not mean there necessarily is a corresponding
amount of demand for such a widespread proliferation of new spaces,
however, or that the data matches up with realities.
In our tours of sites across both Chengdu and Xi’an, for example, we
encountered many sites that were either completely empty or under-
used, despite reportage of very high membership statistics. This is

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consistent with reports of too much competition between makerspaces
and makerspaces that lie empty for most of the day (other than during
delegate tours, of course) in other cities like Beijing and Shenzhen. The
site managers we spoke to also cited high turnover amongst sites,
saying that real community engagement was a struggle to sustain in
such a money-focused and fast-paced environment. They also said
many people still did not have an understanding of what becoming a
‘maker’ even meant, and that this caused challenges for actually
building a grassroots movement.
As we learned in our time with makers in China, and as our colleagues
Gemma Latham and Ingrid Murphy will discuss in a future piece of this
series, the term chuangke or ‘maker’ has many dierent meanings
depending on which culture you happen to be situated within — and
this results in unique circumstances for makers in each nation. These
evolving linguistic and regional diversities have exposed Western
technomyths about making as a seemingly homogenous and universal
phenomenon originating from the likes of Chris Anderson to be
increasingly inaccurate (Braybrooke and Jordan 2017). In China, we
learned, the term ‘maker’ had been invented not by the government,
but by makers themselves, in an eort to distinguish their work from
the more negative or hacker. Made to be deliberately exible,
chuangke brings together words used for , or creativity; , or
business mindset and entrepreneurship; and , or innovation
(Lindtner 2015).
Making with Chinese characteristics
Thesiteswesawrangedfrommessyandworkshop-styletocleanandvery,veryempty|Photo
JonFlint

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In her ve year study of Chinese makers Silvia Lindtner found that the
essential elements of Chinese making and hacking that had emerged in
the 2000s at spaces like XinCheJian, China’s rst hackspace, were
centered not on casual activities done for fun as had typically happened
in the West, but instead on “making-do, mass production and re-use”
(2015, p. 855), choosing not to adopt Western maker logics except
where applicable. These initiatives merged the professional making
traditions of large-scale Chinese manufacturing in cities like Shanghai
and Shenzhen with the hobbyist-style making of Western hackers,
challenging dominant visions of making that saw manufacturing and
innovation practices as unrelated (Lindtner 2015, p. 855). This kind of
technology expertise, Lindtner explains, is dependent on “historically,
socially, and economically specic processes” situated in China,
allowing its makers to “hack dominant ideologies of hacking” by linking
manufacturing to creative innovation as bets Chinese history (2015,
p. 871).
To better understand the implications of Chinese government policies
and their eects on this maker mindset, we interviewed several makers
we met in Chengdu and Xi’an about their experiences. As Lorraine
Justice (2012) explains, unlike the previous generations who lived
through the Revolution and the Cultural Revolution, this generation,
who are mostly in their 20s and 30s, have more freedom to consume
(and create) than those who came before them, and are inuenced by a
diverse combination of inspirations, from Confucius to Mao, from
communism to capitalism and from nationalism to cosmopolitanism.
Kevin Lau is a former VP at Seeed Studio, CEO at Chaihuo Makerspace
in Shenzhen and founder of the MakerNet platform. He is also the
founding producer of Maker Faire Shenzhen and Maker Faire Xi’an, and
was central to Premiere Keqiang getting involved in China’s maker
culture, having invited him to visit Chaihuo Makerspace at the
beginning of 2015. “The original plan,” he explains, “was that the
government could get involved in makerspaces to help individual
innovations interact more with those of giant companies and
government-owned research labs.” It is here, he feels, that relationships
between makers and governments are at their strongest.
Makerspaces that need to be good for business
Zhu Chunwang is an education manager at the (Finger
Maker) makerspace in Xi’an whose work has benetted from this new

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relationship. Finger Maker was founded in 2013, and now has about 30
employees who serve more than 300 users across Xi’an, ancient city of
the Terra Cotta Army and capital of the Shaanxi Province that Kevin
points out has been increasingly active player in the Chinese maker
community since the planning of Maker Faire Xi’an started in 2016.
Like many other education-focused makerspaces, Finger Maker’s
primary revenue comes from its student trainings, which are viewed as
‘good business’. Being an education-focused makerspace is also deemed
good business, and sites of this kind are typically given priority for
government support. This has lead to many sites modifying their casual
community focus to instead use their spaces to provide targeted
trainings and other oerings for learners. In a model common to
makerspaces in Xi’an, Finger Maker gets a generous government rent
subsidy to operate from a mixed-use building that also rents spaces to
other technology and education-focused start-ups and other initiatives.
Zhu feels the maker ethos in China is still a new tendency. “Here”, she
said, “there have been many engineers, but very few artists… people
haven’t learned how to be creative. Students have not been encouraged
to follow their own ideas.” Zhu explained to us that although she is a
maker-educator in Finger Maker makerspace, she does not self-identify
as a maker yet, because she feels she only has basic skills. In her heart,
she said, she would love to follow the career life of the “artist maker”.
But rst, she explains, it is important to earn money. “This period is a
great one, and in time, China may not be the same,” she said. “It is
developing very fast at the moment, so you cannot know what is going
to happen… but [what we do know] is you need to build your country.
“FingerMaker”makerspaceinXi’an|PhotoJonFlint

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And I am proud of this country. So there is no time right now to be
creative… no time for that kind of life… not yet. Financial support is
needed rst for people involved in the maker career. We need to make
people [in China] feel more comfortable, because more of them would
like to be more creative, but here [they] need to worry about life rst.”
Practical funding for practical making
Kevin, meanwhile, has been a maker since his childhood, when he rst
hacked a clock to make its alarm more convenient. He rst became
aware of a maker community in 2008, however, when he was studying
in Germany, and joined maker-related workshops with titles like “How
to hack a toy?”. These events and related books and magazines like
Makezine got him involved not only in making itself, but also in the
conversations that surrounded it. “I think this is not a typical
experience yet,” he says. “But I believe it can be something that our
education system employs to inspire more people. This is a big reason
why I am facilitating maker culture in China now.” Kevin explains that
Maker Faire Xi’an got a great deal of support from the government to
run in 2017. “If you have experience running events in China,” he adds,
“you would know how dicult it can be. So with government support,
we could make things happen much more smoothly. The maker
ecosystem in China is still in its developing stage, so support from
businesses is still not very positive. This makes the role of the
government very important — and not just for nancial support.”
Perhaps, as Zhu has observed, China’s high tech industry is doing so
well right now because the government gives it that power. This has
lead to a situation where it is deemed practical to continue funding it.
After all, she points out, “Money always grows where you can produce
money”. Zhu was born in the Hunan province, where every day she
needed to study at 5am in order to keep up with her studies. China is
very competitive in some regions, she explains, because of its
burgeoning population. “The reason I am grateful to this country,” she
said, “is because opportunities are increasing.” She has seen herself
how supporting makerspaces helps build these opportunities.
A creative future for Chinese makerspaces
What is next for China’s makerspaces? “I think makerspaces of the
future will be dierent,” Zhu feels. “Maybe more like small companies

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that make prot, or transfer intangible cultural heritage into
products… China is big, so they can have many dierent uses.” Kevin
has expressed similar thoughts regarding the future of China’s
makerspaces. “Perhaps the makerspace will play more diverse roles in
society,” he says, “and this can [allow] the support of the government
to become more case-by-case, with deeper support [for business,
educational or grassroots sites] than we see now.” Kevin looks forward
to seeing makerspace collaborations between cities like Xi’an,
Shenzhen and Chengdu. In this nal stage of makerspaces, Zhu thinks
that maybe people will be able to “enjoy their life more, do it for fun”
like this. But for now, she feels, the makerspace scene needs to rst be
more business-oriented. “We need to make money rst… then it can be
fun. Everything needs a nancial foundation. I think the shift [to more
creative making for fun] will happen in 20 years. But rst, the economy
will need to change. And second, the education system will need to
change.”
We witnessed the seeds of this change on our visit. Chinese higher
education has typically been highly competitive, subject specialised and
hierarchical. In this, it has not necessarily been conductive to the ‘play
of creativity’ long associated with maker culture. A 2017 study cited
that the “current maker education in China universities [still] has the
limitations of closed innovation, eciency-driven, focal product [and]
specialized organization.” We saw the eects of China’s closed history
in our visits — especially evident in the struggle of many spaces to
integrate elements of traditional craft or cultural heritage into making
practices. However, in our encounters with students and educators in
both Xi’an and Chengdu, we also witnessed the emergence of new
pedagogies and methods that were deeply engaged with more
interdisciplinary and maker-focused thinking.
Makerspaces that break the mould?
CombiningancientChinesetoolsliketheabacuswithnewtechnologiesatDMTmakerspace|Photo
JonFlint

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At the Makerfun space in Chengdu, for example, the team is proud to
organise workshops that not only focus on incubating new businesses,
but also on having fun. Makerfun started out as a purely public-focused
community space, but like many other sites it has turned into a
educational business, providing workshops aimed at instilling design
thinking in its students rather than teaching them advanced technical
skills. “If people do want to incubate we will help,” Makerfun
educational manager Hongmei Leio explains, “but if they don’t want
this, we let them be. At the beginning, when we were still new, we had
to achieve many goals and push them. Now, we can deepen the focus of
our initiative on quality.” Upstairs in a nondescript oce block in Xi’an,
meanwhile, we viewed the DMT makerspace, which started in 2013 as
a private venture and receives no government support. Here,
traditional practices and ancient tools like abacuses were being cleverly
integrated with new methods like 3D printing and laser cutting. Yet
DMT told us they suered from the same challenges faced by other
kinds of makerspaces, such as a lack of footfall and public engagement.
We also discussed interdisciplinary futures with students and sta at
maker-related programmes aliated with universities like the new
Southwest Jiaotong University makerspace. We spoke to the founders
of Burns Interactive, who are leading the development of a new Art &
Technology degree at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music. At the Burns
Interactive studio, we saw many creative and innovative projects that
linked strong physical making skills and material knowledge together
with new technologies. In Xi’an, meanwhile, we met the rst
graduating cohort of a new Interactive Arts course at the Xi’an
Academy of Art, and saw their presentations of a series of imaginative
year-end projects that merged ancient crafts, stories and superstitions
with new sensors and technologies. When we asked them to raise their
hands if they engaged with a local makerspace, only a few did. They
told us they “didn’t feel welcome in places like that”, not yet, despite
their obvious skills.
Conclusion

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It may well be the graduates of these new maker-inspired courses that
end up occupying China’s 10,000 makerspaces once they feel ready.
The ethos of creativity and risk-taking cultivated by their experiments
will certainly help foster China’s desired transition from its economic
model of ‘Made in China’ to one of ‘Designed in China’. This pathway,
however, also requires a new kind of makerspace that is not only a
gateway to accessing new technologies, startup culture and an
entrepreneurial mindset, but is also an open and truly collaborative
hub of creativity — where subversion, remix, exploration and freedom
of expression are fostered instead of mere obedience. He Renke, Dean
at Hunan University, has expressed the belief, shared by many we spoke
to in the eld, that the future of design in China will be “more diverse,
more green, more open, more condent, and more global […] and
when this happens, the rest of the world will recognize China’s design
renaissance” (Justice 2012, p.97). By learning how to pioneer these
qualities, the new generation of makers we met in China may play
central roles in the renaissance. Only then can the echelons of empty
makerspaces we saw come alive as the centres of grassroots innovation
they hope to be.
Works cited
Braybrooke, K & Jordan, T 2017, ‘Genealogy, culture and technomyth:
Decolonizing Western information technologies, from Open Source to
the maker movement’, Digital Culture & Society, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 25–46.
Aparticipantofournetwork-mappingworkshoplinksmakerspacesacrossChina|Photo
SteveCoombs

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Dinke, Y 2005, Ancient Chinese Inventions. China Intercontinental Press,
Beijing.
Justice, L 2012, China’s Design Revolution. MIT Press, Cambridge.
Lindtner, S 2015, ‘Hacking with Chinese characteristics: The promises
of the maker movement against China’s manufacturing culture’,
Science, Technology, & Human Values, vol. 40, no. 5, pp. 854–879.
Massey, D, Quintas, P, & Wield, D 1991, High tech fantasies: Science
parks in society, science and space. Routledge, London.
The People’s Republic of China 2017, ‘China tops the world in
incubators, makerspaces’, The State Council, The People’s Republic of
China. Available from:
http://english.gov.cn/state_council/ministries/2017/09/19/content_
281475870146634.htm. [1 June 2018].
The People’s Republic of China 2015, ‘Premier Li Keqiang visits
makerspace in Shenzhen’, The State Council, The People’s Republic of
China. Available from:
http://english.gov.cn/premier/photos/2015/01/04/content_2814750
34064167.htm. [1 June 2018].
Wang, J 2016,‘The makers are coming! China’s long tail revolution’, in
M Keane (ed), Handbook of Cultural and Creative Industries in China.
Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham.
The Living Research programme is a partnership between the British
Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
In China, the British Council has partnered with MakerNet to co-develop
the project in Chengdu and Xi’an.

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