Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Some of the most recognizable urban figures inChina today are not evenChinese, but “foreigners.” Foreigners stand out from the crowd, not simply because of their perceived racial distinctiveness, but because they are seen to possess and successfully manipulate symbols of a globalized world that manyChinese desire but feel disconnected from. Based on fieldwork in the northeastern city ofShenyang, this article will focus specifically on foreign teachers, itinerant native speakers ofEnglish who come toChina for adventure and a paycheck in return for teaching their language to others. They are encountered in foreign language classrooms, the media, and in public, acting as indexes of modernity in a rapidly changing urban landscape. WhileChinese urban residents bemoan a sense of isolation and backwardness within globalized structures of power and capital, they identify the interloping foreign teacher—stereotypically seen as white,English‐speaking, mobile, wealthy, and brand‐conscious—as an exemplar of the possibilities of modern selfhood. Foreigners are objects of desire, curiosity, envy, and resentment; each emotion is linked to their status as representatives of a world perceived to be beyond the boundaries of the local, but which in reality permeates it at every level. While foreign teachers themselves are often oblivious to this wider context, they are implicated in everyday practices ofChinese self‐fashioning, from education in global languages to marketing international brands. I argue that the image of the foreigner provokes reflections on the nature ofChinese ethnicity, culture, and national identity. Contemplating the foreign as a potential subject position, sometimes critically, is one way that urbanChinese articulate creative possibilities for their own futures.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".