Hailing Zhao’s research while affiliated with Aalborg University and other places

The COVID-19 pandemic returned the politics of ‘access’ to the forefront of anthropological discussion. This article offers a multimodal, autoethnographic account of ‘access’ across axes, foregrounding the biomedical, digital, bureaucratic and citizenship contingencies of arriving in China, a process which was for two of the authors, a process also of returning ‘home’. We employ the metaphor of the ‘blind box’, colloquially and commercially meaning a box containing mysterious toys, to unfold questions of power and uncertainty over one’s fate during pandemic travel. The article’s co-created comics, read alongside written narratives, convey affective environments, and aid our analysis of the changed and charged conditions of access. We therefore frame access through shifts in technological affordances, the affects they produce, and the risks and responsibilities that fieldworkers carry. We argue that in these stories, access becomes an experience to be lived through, saturated with the contingencies of technology as researchers find themselves subject to the fluid landscape of policy, shifting perceptions of ‘home’ and newly resonant parallels with earlier eras of ethnographic research in China.

This article focuses on data workers in Shenzhen, who, since 2013, have been recruited to fill positions in the city’s Weaving the Net program (zhiwang gongcheng, 織網工程). The program, furthering both the expansion of city gridding management techniques and local experiments with China’s Social Credit system, is designed to generate a daily set of data to inform the city’s “Smart Brain”, and is a core way of managing the city’s “floating population”. In this article, we approach the grid management of Shenzhen and its connection with histories of Chinese social control through data workers themselves. We argue that data workers expand our understanding both the integration of human-technological assemblages into smart city initiatives and the labor of data generation for programs of state social control. Extending STS approaches to smart city infrastructure, we use the figure of the data worker to the present both familiar and distinctive characteristics of Chinese Smart City initiatives.