The Salt Merchants of Tianjin: State Making and Civil Society in Late Imperial China.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For nearly four hundred years the Changlu salt merchants played a leading role in the urbanization, commercial development, and social change of the city of Tianjin. As early as the fifteenth century, this small yet important group of citizens negotiated with the state as revenue-farmers, developing and defending their businesses and customs while evolving their own urban culture. In this the first detailed study in English of the mercantile activities and social role of Tianjin's salt merchants, Kwan Man Bun reveals how they helped stabilize the city and assumed many civic responsibilities, providing relief, charities, and other services to their fellow citizenry. Although these developments resemble the emergence of an idealized "public sphere" as in Europe, Kwan makes clear that Tianjin's social changes were not grounded on "rational discourse" but rather drew their strength and continuity from merchant networks based on exclusivity, wealth, education, and kinship
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".