Research database · Independent project
China Leadership Foreign Exchanges DB v1.0
Completed Research Database · Limited Access Available 完成済み研究データベース・限定アクセス受付中This database records all publicly available and source-verifiable official foreign-exchange events involving the defined set of Chinese leadership figures, roles, and time periods. Each recorded event is verified by source, date, principal, official role, and counterpart.
Dataset metrics
What the database records
Official foreign-exchange events involving the defined Chinese leadership: members of the 18th, 19th, and 20th Party Congress Politburo Standing Committees, the National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference top leadership, the State Councillor and Foreign Minister channels, the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission, and the International Department of the CPC Central Committee.
Each event is verified by five axes — source, date, principal, official role at the time of the event, and counterpart — against article-level URLs on twelve registered PRC-side official source families.
The dataset records what is publicly disclosed; it does not record unpublished diplomacy, internal deliberation, negotiation content, or policy outcomes.
Why event-level data
Public reports of Chinese leadership diplomacy are fragmented across multiple ministries, party departments, party-state media outlets, and counterpart-government publications. Reading them through impressionistic aggregation loses pattern.
Event-level data, verified for existence at scale, allow descriptive- comparative analysis across roles, periods, regions, and counterpart types — the kind of analysis that supports academic research on Chinese foreign policy, channel- specific case work, and quantitative anchors for policy analysis.
The dataset does not claim to reveal internal intent or hidden contact. It documents the publicly enacted face of Chinese leadership diplomacy at full collection within a defined scope.
Research status
China Leadership Foreign Exchanges DB v1.0 is complete as of June 2026, with the snapshot window closing on 2026-06-16. The dataset is currently under controlled access while two associated academic manuscripts complete submission:
- a dataset / methodology paper describing the collection methodology, source policy, verification, and reproducibility infrastructure — prepared for a peer-reviewed data journal;
- an empirical analysis paper documenting the structured division of diplomatic labour observed in the data — prepared for a peer-reviewed China-studies journal.
Full public release of the dataset will be coordinated with these submissions.
Access policy
Limited research access is available on request. The request channel is appropriate for:
- academic researchers (China studies, IR, comparative politics, area studies);
- policy analysts at think-tanks and policy-research institutes;
- editorial reviewers and institutions evaluating the project.
Access is reviewed by the project maintainer on a per-request basis. Approved access is limited in scope (read-only preview, leader-profile pages, summary statistics, representative events). Full dataset download is not available at the current stage.
Method and verification
The dataset follows five binding methodological commitments:
- Full collection within a defined scope. Within the bound of 27 registered principals, 43 registered roles, three Party Congress periods (18th, 19th, 20th), and 12 PRC-side official source families, every event for which a public source-verifiable article-level body could be located is included.
- Strict source policy. Inclusion requires a URL on one of the registered source families; media-only reports are not treated as verified events.
- Event-level verification. Each event is verified by five axes — source, date, principal, role-at-event, counterpart — at the level of the article body.
- Role-tenure modelling. The office held at the time of an event is recorded separately from the principal's current title.
- Transparent soft-hold ledger. Events whose occurrence is independently corroborated but whose article body could not be located on a registered host are documented as soft holds, not as events.
Known limits. The database does not record unpublished diplomacy, internal deliberation, negotiation content, or policy outcomes. The bound is part of the claim.
Leader profiles
The database includes profile pages for each of the 27 registered leadership figures. Each profile shows:
- official profile image with source attribution;
- Chinese name, English name, alternative renderings;
- official roles held during the snapshot window;
- total event count within the database;
- distribution by region and counterpart type;
- representative verified events with source citation.
Profile pages are part of the gated preview and are visible to authorised access-holders. To request access, see the access request page.
Request access
Limited research access is available on request. See the access page for the request form and access policy.