“Universal service” and China's telecommunications miracle: discourses, practices, and post‐WTO accession challenges
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose To examine “universal service” as a policy objective in post‐WTO accession Chinese telecommunications and analyze the challenges of the Chinese telecommunications system in defining and promoting public service ethos in a country that is marked by staggering disparities. Design/methodology/approach A range of media, academic, industry, and policy discourses on “universal service” and a broader notion of “public service,” together with recent government efforts in promoting “universal service,” are examined and assessed to develop an analysis of the uneven nature of China's telecommunications development and reveal the dynamics of “universal service” policy formation, as well as the impetuses and impediments in developing any notion of public service telecommunications in China. Findings Public service issues in China need to be situated within a continuing process of uneven development which comprises dimensions other than residential telephone access. Although the ultimate policy goal appears to develop a nationally accessible telecommunications infrastructure as the basis of a unified national economy, this overall objective is beset by conflicts and contingent on the dynamics of elite and popular struggles over and beyond telecommunications development. Despite the spectacular expansion in telephone access, pragmatic concessions to dominant power groups, rather than a principled commitment to “universal service,” let alone efforts to define the social functions of telecommunications in more democratic ways, have shaped the development of China's telecommunications. Originality/value The development of China's telecommunications infrastructure offers lessons both as to the likelihood of successfully establishing an integrated national economy, and the role of public service in that context. However, the Chinese telecommunications policy field remains extremely fluid.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".