<em>The Problem of China</em>: Orientalism, "Young China", and Russell's Western Audience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<p>Bertrand Russell’s trip to China (1920–21) led him to write numerous articles about China culminating in <em>The Problem of China</em>. This paper reconsiders <em>The Problem of China</em> using Edward Said’s discussion of Orientalism and contextualizes it with Russell’s other published and unpublished writings on China and the reactions of his Chinese contemporaries. I argue that Russell’s views reflect his prior philosophy and Western influences more than an analysis of his trip and reveal that this was what his Western readers wanted. Moreover, his reliance on the research of other scholars and popular writers was unusual, even at the time. He was an intellectually honest but relatively unqualified and imprecise interpreter, not a Said-style Orientalist. He recognized Orientalism, but was unable to avoid reproducing Orientalist stereotypes. These findings help us understand both how Russell processed foreign phenomena and the origins of Western perceptions of China in the 1920s.</p>
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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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".