SMART AND NOVEL: A number of digital gadgets made at Makerspace in Beijing (MA PING)

"We basically attract people who are interested in making things," said Melva Lai, a 23-year-old employee at Makerspace. "You can call them inventors. Some of them didn't make things before or they only had experience at school making projects."

Meng Qi, a do-it-yourselfer at Makerspace, however, doesn't quite agree with the definition of "inventor." With a punkish hairstyle and tattoo of a passage of Taoist scripture on his right arm, the 28-year-old is crazy for making music with his homemade synthesizers. "I didn't invent it, I designed it, or redesigned it," he said.

Meng, with only a high-school education, now works as an instructor at the Beijing Contemporary Music Academy and specializes in synthesizers. His knowledge of electronic engineering is entirely self-taught.

Meng's cluttered apartment is covered with touch-sensitive planes and colored plugs. He made some instruments at home, including an optical theremin, which changes its pitch based on the brightness of the light shining on it and reacts best when played with a flashlight.

"It is hard to make a living by selling these homemade instruments," Meng said. "You need to buy a lot of components that you may not need later."

Continuing traditions

"The concept of do-it-yourself is not new in China at all," Wang said.

Years before Wang's Makerspace, China had seen a group of such tech enthusiasts from different walks of life. Wu Yulu, a farmer from Mawu Village in east Beijing's Tongzhou District, started making robots in 1986.

Wu has only elementary-school education but found himself fascinated by machinery and mechanical engineering. Now Wu has made more than 60 robots, some of which can pull carts, climb walls, write words and even serve tea. Some of them are on display all over the world, including Britain and Brazil. In 2010, Wu's robots participated in the opening ceremony of the World Expo in Shanghai.

"Initially I didn't have any intention of making a useful robot," Wu said. "I just found a feeling of accomplishment from having an idea and making it into something real."

The BBC featured Wu in a documentary in 2007, and he has been invited to give seminars on mechanics to college professors and students occasionally.

Tao Xiangli, a 35-year-old farmer from east China's Anhui Province, who also only finished elementary school, built his own submarine on the outer edges of Beijing.

"People like Wu and Tao can best define the spirit of Makerspace—as long as you have an idea, you should make it come true," Wang said.

Wu believes that emerging workshops like Makerspace will encourage creative development in China, since they bring people of similar interests together. There are more than 1,000 similar collectives around the world, according to Wang, and China has five in such cities as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen in Guangdong Province.

"I think China has great potential for cultivating more creators and it will become a paradise for such people as the country supplies almost all the cheap electric components and we see more and more young people having great passion in this field," Wang said. "What we are doing now is telling people, especially the young ones, that science is not mysterious or high up at all, it is something that everybody can engage in easily."

"It is an open community lab, where people gather together to share resources and knowledge to build and make things," said Wang Chunyan, a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts' design lab. "The American sitcom The Big Bang Theory exemplifies best who we are. Perhaps we all want to explore the complexities of being a nerd."

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