Review of Eli Friedman (2022) The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past four decades, China has absorbed not only global capital but also "surplus labour" from its vast countryside.These rural-to-urban migrants are denied equal citizenship rights despite increased intra-and inter-provincial mobility.The Urbanization of People offers an incisive critique of the contemporary Chinese political-economic and spatial development by analysing the role of the state in regulating flows of people into cities.Eli Friedman uses Marxist and Foucauldian approaches to examine the incorporation of internal migrant populations in the great transformation and discusses the exclusion of rural migrants from access to urban public resources for social reproduction of human life.Through the case of migrant education, the book convincingly shows that migrant parents, grandparents and children, as well as schoolteachers, suffer indignity produced and perpetuated by the Chinese state.The introductory chapter asks, "[W]ho will be urbanised in which spaces, why, and to what effect" (p.7)?During the 1980s and 1990s, the reform-minded government began to gradually lift decades-old restrictions on rural labour outmigration to fuel the growth of industry, service, and construction, particularly in fast-growing coastal cities where there were high levels of foreign direct investment.Tens of millions of peasants moved from the place of their official household registration to search for new opportunities in urban centres.As non-locals, however, they are not entitled to the public social services enjoyed by their city counterparts.Friedman frames a "just-in-time" mode of urbanisation (chapter 1) to analyse Chinese cities' attempt to bring together "appropriate quantities and qualities of capital and labour, in the right space and at the right time" (p.22).Local officials have facilitated healthy and moderately educated migrants to enter urban labour markets, often taking jobs that are disdained by city people.In this process of segmented incorporation, working migrants have been "urbanised as labour" but not
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.009 |
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".