Freedom and its limitations: The contemporary mainland Chinese debate over liberalism
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The emergence of Chinese liberalism carries with it a specific China-centric character that reflects both a Chinese and a foreign focus on the nation’s complicated domestic situation. As part of the research dialogue on the intellectual public sphere in China, this article provides a historical perspective of the development of contemporary Chinese liberalism and explores the complexities of those Chinese liberals’ engagement with a number of key issues in political thought, both among themselves and with their principal opponents, the New Left. We review four themes in these ongoing debates: the relationship between freedom and equality; the liberals’ demands for a more open civil society; their call for balanced social structures, including a mechanism for expressing interest; and their search for a new synthesis of Chinese tradition with a strong nation state. Contemporary Chinese liberals propose their visions for a China that operates within and against a Euro-American-dominated system. Thus, their interpretation of classical liberal texts is characterized by one of creative adaptation, and informed by both local and foreign intellectual resources. The article’s ultimate goal is to provide a deeper understanding of the internal debates among Chinese liberals, which may give a sense of the multifarious predicaments and opportunities that China’s intellectuals face as China attempts to pursue wealth, power, and a revitalized role in a new world order.
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.
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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it