Unused Powers: Contestation over Autonomy Legislation in the Prc
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The most important power granted to autonomous areas in China’s system of Nationalities Regional Autonomy should allow them to modify higher-level laws and policies through autonomy legislation. This is one of the two principal methods for the exercise of autonomy, with the other being the holding of key government posts by minority members. Yet efforts by the five autonomous regions to exercise their powers to enact autonomy legislation have been repeatedly blocked. The granting of autonomy powers in the PRC has been half-hearted, and few powers commonly associated with autonomy systems are available to autonomous areas. Even so, in China as elsewhere, giving autonomy legal expression, however vague, has made the law a field for contention over its proper meaning and scope. Based primarily on Chinese documentary sources, this article focuses on contestation over the meaning of autonomy in the terrain of law. In their explorations of the modifi cation power and the relative status of autonomy legislation, legal scholars and minority activists articulate a vision of autonomy under a future constitutionally governed state. Such an “extensive” autonomy, defined by its historical roots to allow for different “systems,” could potentially provide some space for real self-government. In contrast, some powerful central government institutions block development of this fi eld of law, implicitly supporting the view that autonomy is history and economic development holds the key to the future. Even given the necessary political will, in the absence of the key components of autonomy systems, divisions within the Chinese state could create barriers to the realization of “genuine autonomy.”
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".