Chinese Computing and Computing China as Global Knowledge Production [Special Section]

Abstract

As data-driven technologies and business models pervade on a global scale, China’s enormous digital economy often signals its dominating power by dint of data extraction. Complicating this view, this critical commentary focuses on knowledge production, an important dimension for examining the ways in which postsocialist China transpires in global political economy in the age of Big Data analytics. First, I show how Chinese commercial surveillance analytics profits from legitimation lent by the West-centric hierarchical academe. Then, I move to transnational academic repurposing of Big Data from China, which becomes increasingly common. Such social research tends to yield specters of China that are untethered to the lived realities of those whose data are taken. Drawing on decolonial thinking and feminist care ethics, this commentary concludes by urging social scientists to “stay with the trouble,” making China “legible” in their computing of Chinese Big Data.