Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ever since Beijing has sought to fuel domestic growth through Chinese-led development overseas—first under the aegis of Jiang Zemin’s Going Out Policy and more recently as part of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative— thousands of Chinese have moved overseas for work. Africa has been one of the destinations of Chinese companies and their expatriate staff. Although we have learned a great deal about China’s mega-projects across the African continent, little is known about the certified engineers and experienced builders who carry them out. What brings them to Africa? And, more importantly, what makes them stay for years on end, even if they wish to return to China? In this article I zoom in on the lives of Chinese men employed in Ethiopia’s construction industry to show how three decades of domestic growth in China has pushed workers overseas, while jeopardizing their return. Workers’ lives are marked by double displacement. They are not only isolated from local African communities through a dormitory labour regime that controls their time and limits their mobility, but also, more importantly, they are displaced from social life in China. Domestic development has at once increased aspirations and made them harder to obtain, especially for men, who are expected to fulfill the promise of upward social mobility for themselves and their families. In order to realize aspirations and meet social expectations related to social reproduction, geographic mobility has become a necessity for men who cannot rely on family wealth or connections, forcing them into a state of suspension.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".