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Journal of Chinese Political Science

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Open Access 23.09.2021 | Review Essay

Studying Chinese Foreign Policy Narratives: Introducing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Press Conferences Corpus

verfasst von: Michal Mochtak, Richard Q. Turcsanyi

Erschienen in: Journal of Chinese Political Science | Ausgabe 4/2021

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Abstract

The paper presents an original corpus of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conferences. The dataset is a unique source of information on official positions and diplomatic narratives of China mapping almost two decades of its foreign policy discourse. The corpus contains almost 23,000 question – answer dyads from 2002 to 2020 ready to be used for analytical purposes. We argue the dataset is an important contribution to the scholarship on Chinese foreign policy stimulating further research using corpus based methods while employing both qualitative and quantitative strategies. We demonstrate possible applications of the corpus with two case studies: first maps the diplomatic discourse towards the US under the presidency of Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping (employing quantitative tools), while second analyzes narratives concerning the South China Sea disputes (employing more qualitative approach).

Vorheriger Artikel Policy Reinvention and Diffusion: Evidence from Chinese Provincial Governments

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Corpus and all supporting materials are available via Harvard Dataverse platform at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/BAKGET.

The conferences are transcribed and published online on the official website of the Ministry in Chinese, Arabic, English, French, Russian, and Spanish languages [11].

See the recent work of Dai and Luqiu [14] using Chinese transcripts of press conferences.

This claim is possible due the nature of the MFA website which at any given time stores approximately two years of press conferences. Dense snapshots taken by the Wayback Machine therefore hugely overlaps so any corrupt link in a snapshot of the website is corrected using a different one covering the same window. First such snapshot exists from 7 October, 2003 and covers press conferences back to 15 October 2002. Beyond that date, it is not possible to collect any additional data on press conferences using the Wayback Machine archive.

Over the studied period, eleven spokespersons held the press conferences: Geng Shuang (3382 responses), Hong Lei (2142 responses), Hua Chunying (4237 responses), Jiang Yu (1793 responses), Kong Quan (1294 responses), Liu Jianchao (2055 responses), Liu Weimin (240 responses), Lu Kang (2151 responses), Ma Zhaoxu (496 responses), Qin Gang (2440 responses), Wang Wenbin (581 responses), Zhang Qiyue (814 responses). 105 responses do not have any name assigned.

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Titel: Studying Chinese Foreign Policy Narratives: Introducing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Press Conferences Corpus
verfasst von: Michal Mochtak
Richard Q. Turcsanyi
Publikationsdatum: 23.09.2021
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: Journal of Chinese Political Science / Ausgabe 4/2021
Print ISSN: 1080-6954
Elektronische ISSN: 1874-6357
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-021-09762-3

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