Navigating Through The Fog: Reflexive Accounts on Researching China’s Digital Surveillance, Censorship, and Other Sensitive Topics
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Researching China’s sensitive topics, such as digital surveillance and censorship, exposes scholars to mounting challenges including difficult field and internet access to quality information, scrutiny and security of research participants and researchers, and positionality amidst geopolitical tensions. This article presents self-reflexive accounts from six scholars of diverse backgrounds, fields, and career stages who work through varied methods, positionalities, and epistemic approaches. We share our research journeys’ challenges and coping strategies to aid scholars, beyond China or digital surveillance and censorship. We propose that reflexivity is essential for scholarly work on contentious or opaque topics; that the China studies research community should organize knowledge sharing and cross-training; and that academia should create emotional support structures for researchers who encounter surveillance and restrictions.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it