Andrew

Feng had threatened the guanxi ritual by trying to open the black box in which public health projects took place. For any given project, the procedures by which collaborating partners obtained the numbers they did were purposefully obscured. In fact, the nontransparency of the guanxi web was helpful in reaching campaign goals, because if city CDC leaders could not see how the numbers were produced, they could not verify that anything was not “true.” Latour (1999) argues that black boxes are at the heart of scientific production; they reflect “the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity” (304). To my young informants, however, the black boxes that guanxi produced were not the essence of science but the antithesis. Black boxes were precisely what needed to be broken down to reveal the “reality” within: a neutral reality that existed independently of human actions, a denetworked reality that science studies scholars would say does not exist but in which Tianmai’s young public health professionals firmly believed.