This latest Editor’s Note is possibly the last I shall be writing in my seven years of service as editor-in-chief of this journal. While reading the papers in this issue, I was excited by the themes of “progress and uncertainty” that appear, explicitly or implicitly, in their analysis of cases from China, Korea, and Taiwan. The Denmark-based authors Hailing Zhao and Rachel Douglas-Jones’ “Weaving the Net: Making a Smart City through Data Workers in Shenzhen” draws upon the efforts of the “Weaving the Net” program (zhiwang gongcheng, 织网工程), which aims to transform Shenzhen, the first of China’s Special Economic Zones back in the 1980s, into a progressive, smart city for the twenty-first century. There have been several scholarly publications, notably the edited volume Learning from Shenzhen: China's Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City (O'Donnell, Wong, and Bach 2017), among the articles on its establishment and on a transformation that reflects that of China over the past four decades. Zhao and Douglas-Jones choose as their focus of analysis “grid data workers” (wangge xinxiyuan, 网格信息员)—those people who are primary builders both of the information this expanding city uses to control its residents and also a new type of street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky 1980) that turns uncertain urban conditions into accountable, collectable data for governance.
From Korea, Hyomin Kim and Woochang Lee’s research article on “The Politics and Sub-Politics of Mad Cow Disease in South Korea” presents the longstanding ambiguity concerning the uncertain risks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in US beef, whose importation resumed in 2008. In their cross-sectional analysis of media representation of BSE in the US and Korea in 2008, Hee-Je Bak and Daniel Lee Kleinman (2017) offered a powerful account of the disparities in media culture between the exporting and importing countries that would have shaped public perception of BSE risks. In this paper, by contrast, Kim and Lee turn our attention to its longitudinal effect as seen in 2019, showing the aftermath of dynamics revolving around uncertain risks that have changed the ways in which BSE controversies are remembered, debated, and expected as the trigger for further political actions. Expertise has passed into the separate spheres of science and politics; as the authors point out,
[t]he recognition of science being intertwined with cultural, political, or ethical concerns is not a common condition in late-modern society. If ‘science becomes political only when actors conceive it as such’ [quote from Brown 2015], it is possible for actors to change their conception.
Ling-Ming Huang’s paper “The Hybrid Metro: The Brown Line of Taipei Metro and Technological Hybridity” presents the author’s observations of this progressive symbol of Taipei City over the past two decades. Readers familiar with Bruno Latour’s 1996 classic of technology studies, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, will be delighted to find that Matra’s “stillborn” automated guideway transit system of the late 1980s has finally been realized in East Asia. The story of the Brown Line is neither that of the simple (re)incarnation of an abandoned technology nor an updated version of it; as Huang carefully explains, it is a hybrid sociotechnical system which collapses into one the contractual negotiations and conflicts between Matra and Taipei City Government, the intervention of the US via its technical consultations, and the integration of the CITYFLO system by the Canadian company Bombardier when the Brown Line’s service was extended to Neihu. Departing from Thomas Hughes’ notion of the technological system, technological hybridity as shown in this case was not just a matter of how to keep it working through the remediation of the technical uncertainties created by Matra’s VAL256 and as it integrated into CITYFLO650. The cultural aspect of the innovations, as the author demonstrates, is seen in Taiwan’s need to catch-up and its lack of ability regarding metro technology; it wakens and urges local technocrats and engineers to find solutions.
In addition to the three research articles in this issue, the intersection of progress and its cultural notion is well reflected by two essays on three East Asian Science, Technology and Society (EASTS) cover images that feature trains. EASTS editors Hyungsub Choi, an excellent historian of technology working in Korea, and Leandro Rodriguez Medina, former editor-in-chief of Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, were invited to share their thoughts on this iconic presence of progress and modernity. As the latest product of the EASTS–Tapuya collaboration since 2018, their reflections are a testimony to technology as universal culture as well as inspiring pieces that encourage those interdisciplinary, interregional conversations that are necessary for global STS.
Last, but not least, we are pleased to have our associate editor Jia-Shin Chen offer us a review essay on situational analysis (SA), an interdisciplinary research method developed and promoted by our advisory editor Adele Clarke. It aims not just to summarize how a modernist method such as SA creates its role and character in the post-modern, interdisciplinary landscape of scholarship via engagement with STS; with this essay we hope to pay homage to such leading scholars who devote their intellectual careers to the methods they commit and so generously offer their knowledge and insights to EASTS as it grows. Homage must also go to our late advisory editor Bruno Latour, the master of Actor Network Theory, who chose Taiwan for his most ambitious project that bridged STS and art in the Taipei Biennial of 2020. His untimely death is a huge loss to the world and to EASTS. Adopting his distinctive humor and wit, we hope we can carry on his legacy of making East Asian STS accessible, constructive, and artfully entertaining.
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