Twelve days in the career of a China missionary: Timothy Richard at the Protestant Conference in Shanghai in 1890
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article proposes to examine an obscure episode in the long career of the well-known Welsh Baptist missionary Timothy Richard, who went to China in 1870 and spent most of the next 45 years there. Richard attended the second general Protestant Missionary Conference in Shanghai in 1890 and served on committees, spoke at meetings, and presented a paper. The information available, though scanty, confirms key components of his approach to mission at this time: his goal was to achieve Chinese ‘salvation’ by promoting the principles and practices of what might be broadly termed ‘Christian civilisation’; his means of propagation was the written word; his preferred point of entry was contact with members of China's ‘ruling’ or ‘governing’ classes. In response to his call for action against anti-Christian, anti-Church propaganda, the conference appointed a permanent committee, with Richard as chair, to present an address on the ‘missionary question’ to the Qing government. It was this project that took him to Beijing in 1895, where he met with court officials and members of the educated elite, and established connections that involved him, rather haphazardly, in court politics in 1898. The sequence of events sheds light on an intriguing aspect of Sino–foreign relations during the late Qing period.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".