Shuting Li (she/her/hers)

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai: January 15 - March 1

“Jiqiren/robots” as a techno-scientific solution has become a keyword for the Chinese government, scientists, robotics entrepreneurs, elderly Chinese, and their families concerned with China’s aging issue and care crisis. Shuting Li’s research project aims to examine the entanglement of aging, care, family reconfiguration, and modernization in the development of robotic technology in post-reform China. It will document what changes the development of robots bring to elder care practices, investigate why these actors imagine care robots as a promising solution, and explore how transformations in the Chinese family shape understandings of aging and practices of elder care by deepening the understanding of the Confucian “family-state” structure. A twelve-month ethnography will be conducted to look into the human-robot entanglement from three lines of inquiry: (1) Why does the state imagine care robots as a promising solution to the aging issue in post-reform China, even if it might fail? (2) How do the urban Chinese react to interventions of robots in elder care practices, which are still dominated by the traditions and values of the Confucian family? (3) How does the popular imagination of care robots in China interact with transnational or global practices of modernization, technology development, and aging? Three interconnected themes will be examined – creation, application, and popularization – to understand how the imaginaries of elder care robots shape practices of care, aging, and gender differences in the Chinese family. As one of the four municipalities, Shanghai represents the diversity of social and cultural lives in contemporary China. The myriad of elders living in Shanghai will provide Li with a point to observe tensions between the traditional and the modern, between the urban and the countryside. Shanghai has become one of the pilot cities for the implementation of new elder care policies and for the testing of the innovative technology used to satisfy the needs of the increasing population of elders. The robotics company UBT Robotics (UBT) that Li works with has also chosen Shanghai as one of their pilot sites. Therefore, she looks forward to working in Shanghai as it will be useful for her doctoral dissertation research, where the enormous aging population and the development of robotics occur.