China Cracks Down on “Western Values” in Textbooks, but Embraces Hollywood's “Captain America”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
hollywood -The Federalist Papers may be out, but "Captain America" is in.China's top education authorities have recently launched a campaign to curb the teaching of "Western values" in universities through primary texts that promote individual liberty, rule of law, an independent civil society and distrust of political authority.Yet Chinese audiences flock unbothered to such Hollywood films as Captain America, Transformers, Hunger Games or Spider Man which, in their essential message, impart, even if only incidentally, the very Western values censorious authorities are trying to purge from the official curriculum.Can it be lost on these Communist Party stalwarts that the subversive memes of individual liberty, self-organized "civil society" groups and antiauthoritarianism are spread far more by Hollywood movies than scholarly texts?If a picture is worth a thousand words, a blockbuster film is surely worth quite a few textbooks.And so are all the American TV shows so popular in China, from House of Cards to NCIS and the legal drama The Good Wife.Those who remember the Cultural Revolution and the ubiquitous propaganda that built-up Mao's cult of personality certainly know that whoever controls the narrative sways the society.As Plato noted long ago, "those who tell the stories rule society."But don't they also grasp that ordinary middle class moviegoers or TV viewers in a mass society buy into a narrative not so much by a considered weighing of ideas as on what image they identify with emotionally and want to China Cracks Down on "Western Values" in Textbooks, but Embraces Hollywood's "Captain America"C O M M E N T IN THIS ISSUE . . .we look at China today through the prism of its ancient sages and examine how the Internet is upending notions of memory and privacy.We also reflect on the Sunni-Shia religious war raging across the Middle East as well as the new reach of home-grown ISIS terrorists in Europe.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
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".