Engaging a Huangniu: Commodification of State-Society Bargaining in China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A strong authoritarian state such as China has a range of institutions and instruments at its disposal to resolve social conflicts. This study proposes a new mechanism—citizen's engagement of a profit-seeking intermediary—that helps to facilitate state-society bargaining, resolve conflicts and thereby absorb social contention. This form of state-society bargaining is conducted via professional brokers whose objective is to make a profit from the transactions. By establishing trust between the officials and citizen, the broker brings the two parties together, enables and facilitates state-society bargaining that would not have taken place otherwise. In so doing, the broker helps to resolve conflicts or protracted stand-offs that might have spilled into street protest. These profit-seekers represent commodification of state-society bargaining by matching demands from discontented citizens with supplies of special favours by state officials. This study contributes to the growing body of conflict resolution and state repression literature in China.
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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 | 0.004 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".