After Mobile Phones, What? Re-embedding the Social in China’s “Digital Revolution”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“After Bicycles, What?” was the fundamental developmental question posed to the Chinese by the Canadian communication scholar Dallas Smythe at the dawn of the reform era in the late 1970s. Since then, China’s information policy in three decades has been characterized by a well-recognized and seemingly paradoxical pattern of development. On the one hand, access to telecommunication and media infrastructure has been expanded enormously, although unevenly among the population. On the other hand, the regime of state control over content, infrastructure, and access has also been strengthened. This paper explores the internal logic of this seemingly contradictory development by re-embedding the analysis of access and control in the social domain. In particular, it describes the enormous social tensions that have been engendered by launching a state-led and market-driven “information revolution” in the context of a “counterrevolution” in the social domain. The resulting developmental condition of “one country, four worlds” within the framework of a single nation state has posed profound challenges in governance, and thus necessitated the state’s relentless efforts in maintaining social stability through a fortified regime of information control. The paper then reviews the multi-faceted struggles that have been waged by various social forces in rearticulating and reinserting the social in the Chinese developmental agenda and discusses the implications of the Chinese state’s recent reclaiming of the social in its developmental strategy for a post-reform information policy regime.
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".