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Speculative Authorship in the City of Fakes

In this paper I examine, on the one hand, an urban rumor about the city of Shenzhen, China, circulated within Hong Kong and American public and popular media, and, on the other, rumors within European and American scientific communities about scientific authorship at the world’s largest genomics sequencing firm, which also happens to be located in that same city. I describe two sets of rumors connected to each other by themes of surveillance, science, technology, bodily leisure, and intellectual labor and simply locate them at the site that is their subject. In so doing, I aim not only to falsify cultural imaginaries about this Chinese city and its dystopian reputation as the “city of fakes” in global public culture but also to examine how and why this site so productively spawns gradations of the truth-value and illicitness, attending to the particular configurations of “fact” and human capital that this city, as a site of technologized bioproduction, inaugurates.