Restoring 'Zhongguo' and Traditional Chinese Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After the turbulent transition from the Yuan dynasty to Ming dynasty, the Ming emperor Yong-le attempted the revitalization of traditional Chinese values that were lost during the prior period of non-Chinese/Mongol leadership. This attempt at the restoration of traditional Chinese worldviews was a way for the new Ming dynasty to combat previous political chaos and establish/strengthen the rule of the Ming empire as a traditionally Chinese empire. Important in this restoration is Yong-le's focus on zhongguo (China as the Middle Kingdom), and the undertaking of the Zheng-He voyages. This paper, using secondary sources, provides an overview of medieval Chinese cultural values (i.e., zhongguo, Confucianism), and a brief history of the Yuan and Ming dynasties - as well as Yong-le's rule. Once this socio-political and historical background is established, the paper then introduces the Zheng-He voyages and the primary source of Ma Huan's Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan, arguing (using both primary and secondary scholarship) that Ma Huan's records of the Zheng-He voyages directly reflects the concept of zhongguo - as well as works to bolster Yong-le's revitalization project. Ma Huan's writings were not simply documentation of the voyages he undertook, but rather served Yong-le's larger, politically propagandistic mission to restore zhongguo and Chinese suzerainty throughout the borderlands. It is important to understand this aspect of Chinese maritime history, as it demonstrates that late-Medieval Chinese explorations went beyond materialistic goals, and actually had significant cultural and political ramifications within the empire.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".