Cross‐border rubber cultivation between <scp>C</scp>hina and <scp>L</scp>aos: Regionalization by <scp>A</scp>kha and <scp>T</scp>ai rubber farmers
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is a multi‐sited ethnography of cross‐border rubber cultivation between C hina and L aos. Smallholder minority rubber farmers from X ishuangbanna ( C hina) have forged successful informal share‐cropping arrangements to grow rubber trees on the land of relatives and friends in neighbouring L aos. By becoming rich and entrepreneurial rural citizens, A kha and T ai farmers have also, in their own eyes, raised their own ‘quality’ ( suzhi ) and see themselves as ‘modern’. By examining various meanings of ‘modern’ in C hina, and contrasting the rubber farmers' experience with J acob E yferth's notion of rural ‘deskilling’, this paper shows how through learning to plant, cultivate and tap rubber, these farmers have taken on the discipline and technical knowledge of ‘modern’ workers and become ‘skilled’. By rising in ‘quality’, minority farmers on C hina's periphery challenge the entrenched binaries of urban/rural, modern/backward, prosperous/poor and Han/minority nationality. X ishuangbanna minority farmers acknowledge that they are also ‘backward’ in the C hinese social hierarchy, but their extension of rubber cultivation to kin and others in L aos has confirmed their modernity as dispensers of development, technical know‐how and ‘superior’ C hinese culture to Lao farmers who are ‘backward and poor’. In contrast to large state rubber farms that have failed to establish rubber plantations in northern L aos, minority farmers have created regionalization.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it