The Muslims of China and the "Frontier Question" after Empire: Revisiting Ma Zhongying's 1931 Invasion of Republican Xinjiang
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Paul Gosselin .European travellers in republican Gansu sometimes remarked on how Chinese-speaking Muslim military authorities used campaigns against Mongol and Tibetan separatism as pretexts to justify their autonomy from Beijing. 10 However, historians have not attempted to incorporate these independent, Chinese Muslim-led expeditions within the larger story of how the Chinese republic largely retained the borders of the Qing in its northwest.The case of Chinese-speaking Muslims in Gansu and their interventions across Gansu's frontiers is particularly interesting, given the backdrop of Han-Muslim tensions in the late Qing and early republican periods, and contemporary debates in republican-era China over whether they constituted part of the same ethno-national group as the Han Chinese.Many historians of Islam in China such as Jonathan Lipman, Matsumoto Masumi, and Anthony Garnaut describe how identities and interests among Chinese Muslim communities increasingly favoured greater integration with the Chinese nation-state by the early 20 th century.11 However, connections between these evolving Muslim identities and interests in republican China, and Muslim interventions into post-Qing borderlands remain under-researched.Addressing this gap, this paper investigates Chinese Muslim-led campaigns across Gansu's frontiers not only as a strategy of preserving local Muslim power and autonomy, but also as part of what Peter Zarrow termed a process of "translating" traditional imperial authority 9 Jonathan N. Lipman, "Ethnicity and Politics in Republican China: The Ma Family Warlords of Gansu," Modern
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".