Reviewer: A

1) Is the subject matter relevant?

2) Is the treatment of the subject matter intellectually interesting? Are there citations or bodies of literature you think are essential to which the author has not referred?

3) Are there any noticeable problems with the author’s means of validating assumptions or making judgments?

4) Is the article well written?

5) Are there portions of the article that you recommend be shortened, excised or expanded?

This is a strong and interesting contribution to the fields of citizen science and peer production; I cannot judge the degree that it engages meaningfully with Chinese Studies. Overall the paper is an excellent portrayal of a critical moment in a very significant and complicated historical moment. I found all the discussions clear and on point, and the central specific context of citizen science/ engagement is covered very well. I do think there are a few spaces for improvement, and I will focus on those in this review.

1. While the specific actors and engagements are well described, I miss some context. I feel that a small review of other responses (not citizen science) would have helped the paper. Surely this work wasn’t happening in a vacuum, and if anyone else has written about other (or larger) types of responses to the pollution problem, a summary of of these would be a worthwhile addition in the initial framing.
2. As the paper sets up a sort of dialectic between the citizen scientists and the government, I feel like some symmetry in the resolution of this portrayal would be helpful. For the most, or second most, entity being described in the paper, it comes off as ethereal and god-like. While that may be an easy way to feel, I lacked some sense of the concrete ways it exercised its effects on the citizen scientists. Similarly, I wonder if industry actors are never addressed during this period, itself worth noting as it is a significant difference from Western discourse around citizen science and environmental degradation.
3. It seems that a central tenet of the paper is that, around 2012, a mistrust of government data decreased or sublimated into other forms of engagement. I’m not sure I fully understand that turn, and if it’s important I’d like to see some more explicit discussion and analysis.
4. I suggest adding a timeline chart with key moments in the national and NGO/citizen narrative described in the paper.

The author outlines a robust civic engagement with air pollution during the decade during and following the Beijing Olympics. In the framing of various approaches to science, activism, civic engagement, facts, and popularization, they show a diversity of approaches, and how those approaches changed over time. The paper is framed around a sort of dialectic between citizen scientists (or technologists) and the Chinese government, with the US Embassy making a brief cameo. This framing is appropriate, but led me to wonder what is left out. For example, there is little attention to other people or groups framing the question during this period. Were health scientists, Chinese physicians, or the media completely uninvolved? The author shows how citizens adopted a ‘civic’ approach to technologies, but a few sentences describing their alternatives would have helped. What other forms of practice arose? The section describing an expat doctor who formed a company was a very interesting contrast to the NGO work, for example. This showed a similarly technological approach, but with a very different way of situating the work. Also left out, perhaps, is the role of industry. The relationships between government and industry in China are very different than in the US, but in in Wylie and other analyses of citizen science, industry is central and prominent. Was there absolutely no interaction between these groups and polluters, even in the space of rhetoric? If not, that in itself seems worth a note

The government looms over the paper like a homogeneous, amorphous, almost naturalized force. While it may seem to be as ever-present and encompassing as the Beijing smog, we know that it is not, and a missed a better sense of the particulars of how it exercised power, symmetrical with the photos of citizen science campaigns and equipment. The government reactions are described in broad strokes, but I feel that the inclusion of a few direct quotes from press releases, if interviews were not possible, would have helped illustrate the dialectic a bit better. As it is the section describing government reactions and legislation is clear and informative; I wouldn’t remove anything, but rather try to ground the discussion in a bit of the government’s voice.

Two examples where the vagueness of the government detracted from the overall clarity of the paper: First, the author describes “pushback that government displays against this type of participation,” but that pushback isn’t very detailed past the US embassy example and the drafting of new regulations and new forms of information dissemination. That isn’t so much “pushback” as whataboutism, or actually a response (even if partial or imperfect). Was there more specific pushback that can be addressed? Or is the vagueness because details of pushback might compromise research subjects? If so, this should be stated. Second, later in the paper: “The cases presented in this article portray unsettled issues: citizens demanding more transparent and reliable information, and a government that prioritises political control, centralising knowledge management.” Yes, but there aren’t many governments where that isn’t the model. As the US experience around NOAA and the infamous sharpie demonstrates — governments are in the business of “official” data, that is the expectation. This situation seems less unsettled than very settled, unless I’m missing something.

Working back from the discussion section, the author is hypothesizing that a change occurred around 2012: “After 2012, mistrust has vanished in different degrees, and confronting data was no longer so important.” I know that this is discussed, but I feel that, if indeed many unaffiliated actors expressed this same transition, it would be great to have a sense of why this shift happened. From the examples, it seemed to me that this might be a case where the initial NGOs who quickly entered around 2008, already with a particular framing and relationship to the government, were the significant early actors. But other methods (e.g. Saint Cyr or Wang) gradually joined the discourse. These later actors took longer to arrive, and brought medical and commercial approaches. But I can’t really judge if this was the case. Also, could this non-confrontational shift have been the result of constant advice and concern about the costs? It’s a significant claim, and while I don’t doubt it, I don’t think it’s painted fully.

This question about confrontation seems to tie to another important conclusion in the discussion: in “the context of limited rights participation, it was more important to legitimise [citizen’s] action in the eyes of possible censorship.” This is an interesting and important point. Again, while the paper isn’t framed as a cross-cultural comparison, where Western scholarly discourse is invoked, it brings with it a very different set of assumptions about the mechanisms or repertoires of activist or engagement, with respect to both positive change and to dangers. I think the author introduces some rich material that would help analysts on both sides of the Pacific to understand peer production of citizen data. Not to reframe this work in the Western context, heaven forbid, but rather to point to Western assumptions in analysis. Too much for this paper, of course. But for this paper, I wonder if legitimizing [citizen’s] action in the eyes of possible censorship is more tied to the 2012 point above than it currently is in the paper? Are these two points correlated, and if so, how?

This is a very strong paper, clearly written and covering quite a few cases in a very large and complicated space. I think a less ambitious author might have made it more narrow, weaving a ribbon rather than a bolt of cloth. I gravitate toward this sort of paper, which encapsulates a set of work, referring at the same time to broader (zeitgeist) forces and phenomena. The downside is that a lot of threads have to be tied down. I tried to point out the ones I felt were dangling; I acknowledge that some of these may be idiosyncratic choices. Nonetheless, I do believe that might benefit by some attention to some or all of the four key points I outlined earlier. I am very excited to see this work developed further, and know that my own work would benefit from further attention to the challenges and possibilities of citizen science in the context of China. Thank you for this contribution!

Reviewer: B

1) Is the subject matter relevant?

Yes, because it explores community side of the ‘infrastructuring’ of environmental governance in China – in this case how local environmental facilities and their concerns are mainstreamed in civil society.

2) Is the treatment of the subject matter intellectually interesting? Are there citations or bodies of literature you think are essential to which the author has not referred?

I am not an expert on the topic of air pollution, nor citizen science – so I leave these kinds of suggestions to the discretion of the editors. This being said, the authors have clearly been informed by, and they have also clearly referenced, readings on environmental topics that appear to be central to their arguments. I will discuss this further in the next questions, but there are some areas in the paper where the authors need to back up their own assumptions with relevant texts, data, etc.

3) Are there any noticeable problems with the author’s means of validating assumptions or making judgments?

The authors make various claims about ‘citizens/organisations’ involved in the topic of air pollution in China without providing a citation for these claims (see p.3 paragraph 3 for example). Simply stating that people believe something “in general” is not a sufficient argument and needs to be backed up, either by interview data or by secondary readings. Please see below for other suggestions on how to better verify the claims made in the article.

4) Is the article well written?

The authors make it clear what bodies of data and case studies they are working with, and they do use this data effectively to back up their central arguments with regards to citizen science in particular. However, there are several key areas of improvement that are required to make the paper more readable.

First, it would be helpful if the paper included a short summary of how exactly the core data used in the article was gathered. For example, exactly what kinds of people were interviewed, for how long, and in what contexts? It is also unclear when an interviewee the authors spoke to is being referenced, and when the authors are instead referencing secondary data that they themselves did not gather.

Second, the headings of the paper are not very clear. Numbering these, making them more descriptive to their contents, sorting the sections according to the authors’ core argument, and clearly identifying what each section will entail in the introduction, will make it easier for readers to follow the paper’s arguments.

Third, there are several sentences in the article which have slight, yet pervasive, grammatical errors. The reviewer suggests the authors hire a professional editor to proofread the article before it is published.

Lastly, the figures in the article also need to be edited before publishing – some (such as Fig.2) are very low-resolution, all need to be properly cited/referenced, the summaries are inconsistently organised (and appear both before and after the figures), and a few figures are missing a summary altogether.

5) Are there portions of the article that you recommend be shortened, excised or expanded?

The section which summarises what is actually going to happen in the paper – eg its contents, its core arguments, the theories the authors will be working with, needs to be much clearer, with better signposting. I would also suggest combining the ‘discussion’ and ‘conclusion’ sections, as these sections together provide the paper with a strong conclusion. The ‘conclusion’ section on its own, however, seems partial and too-short – and it will likely be unconvincing for those readers who skip ahead to read it alone.