Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the West, Mao has been cast in many roles, sometimes as the Mao people needed and sometimes as the one they feared. Depending on whether their story was that of liberating revolution and historical progress or one of communist expansion and destructive violence, and depending on whether China was an ally of the West – first against Japan, later against the USSR – Mao has appeared in the role of nationalist unifier, peasant rebel, Red Emperor, knockoff Stalin, humane modernizer, model of third world revolution, or leading political murderer of the twentieth century. Mao collaborated with his audiences to produce a range of conflicting stories that cannot be reconciled because they reflect differences in politics and philosophy that cannot be corrected by reference to facts. Yet Mao is not some gigantic historical Rorschach test, an inkblot in which to see what we will. My purpose here is neither to chronicle confusion nor correct misperceptions. In this chapter I rehearse the stories told in the West, mainly those based on some direct knowledge of China, to see where the honestly competing meanings made of Mao will lead us and what they tell us of twentieth-century world history. 1789–1920: THE STAGE IS SET, THE COLD WAR BEGINS The first Western Maos were framed in a nineteenth-century “Grand Story” that grew out of the French Revolution of 1789: Progress, in the view of revolutionaries, came from destroying the ancient regime and leaping from feudalism of the Dark Ages to the sunlight of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".