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

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).

The United States in Chinese environmental policy narratives: Is there a trump effect?

“…They do so to capture the contours of a policy debate, which is largely representative for policies within western contexts. Yet given China's authoritarian political system and less‐developed civic culture (Shen et al, 2009), it is difficult to capture narratives of its interest groups and policy elites directly (Mochtak & Turcsanyi, 2021). The scholarly community, on the other hand, is more accessible with available narrative outputs such as articles written by scholars of various knowledge and disciplinary backgrounds on various issues.…”