Time-Space Punctuation: Hong Kong's Border Regime and Limits on Mobility
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chinese people seem to be increasingly on the move, as this special issue emphasizes, among the diaspora, and especially among residents of the People’s Republic of China after it re-opened to the capitalist world after 1979. We argue, however, that an emphasis on mobility can be misleading unless we also pay close attention to factors that inhibit movement. Foremost among the inhibiting factors are international borders. The notion of a “world without borders” is only realized by the world’s elites. For ordinary people, borders are substantial or even insuperable barriers. One of the most powerful metaphors for globalization has been David Harvey’s idea of “time-space compression,” in which the speeding up of economic and social processes by transportation and communication technologies has in effect shrunk the globe. As with all metaphors, it both offers important insights and is potentially misleading. The world is not shrinking in any uniform manner. Compression is uneven for different kinds of actors, objects and ideas. In this article, we set out the concept of time-space punctuation. We offer this approach as a complement to time-space compression, not as a substitute. Even a combination of both metaphors distracts attention from other representational approaches to globalization, such as accounting, visibility or fi ltering.1 Punctuation conventionally identifi es arbitrary symbols that break up the fl ow of speech. Here we extend this idea to other arenas. The world is punctuated by barriers, the most important of which are national borders. For some people and things, borders act as periods, full stops denying legal entry. For others, they are like semi-colons, requiring visas and work permits. For the global elite, by reason of their citizenship status or their assets, borders are like commas, slightly slowing movement at various checkpoints, particularly if they have access to VIP lanes or private jet facilities at ports of entry. The metaphor can be extended. In these post-9/11 days, certain people move around the world with the equivalent of asterisks attached to them, having been placed on “no-fl y” or other watch lists. Others,
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".