The China Daily newspaper has been the most important tool used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for policy communication for, well, just about ever and researchers Julian TszKin Chan and Weifeng Zhong wondered if patterns of policy shift would appear if it’s content could be machine-drilled? Spoiler alert. They do.
Analyzing the contents of the China Daily from May 15th 1946 to September 20th 2018 they created a Policy Change Index (PCI) . Their algorithm analyzed over 1.9m articles taking into account not only content but placing within the paper. Usefully their PCI produced zero false positives over the period.
It correctly spotted in advance the Great Leap Forward in 1958, the economic reform of 1978, the move to the Socialist Market Economy in 1993 and subsequent modification of that policy to the Socialist Harmonious Society in 1994. It missed the Cultural Revolution and the 2008 stimulus package but as the former was a clandestine move and the latter a reactive policy the PCI didn’t have a chance of spotting either no matter how well tuned the algorithm.
They save the best to near the end of their paper in terms of how CCP policy may be changing now and how significant Xi Jin Ping’s incumbency to date has been. The surprising conclusion is Xi’s administration has, so far, been characterized by an absence of major policy shift.
Sure, there’s been the Tigers and Flies campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative and Made in China 2025; but none of these represent a major break from how China Inc. was run in the years preceding Xi’s stewardship.
The researchers go on to note “.. having a bundle of incoherent policies is not sustainable. The last time this happened in the PCI time series was the “dual-track reform” leading up to 1993. [But]…, the duality was not stable, and it eventually led to a major policy change, moving the Chinese economy toward an era of comprehensive market reforms.” Hmmmm… Watch this space?
You can access the paper in full via the following link Predicting Policy Change.
Happy Sunday.