For the first time in the literature, we develop a quantitative indicator of the Chinese government’s policy priorities over a long period of time, which we call the Policy Change Index (PCI) of China. The PCI is a leading indicator of policy changes that runs from 1951 to the third quarter of 2018, and it can be updated in the future. It is designed with two building blocks: the full text of the People’s Daily — the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China — as input data and a set of machine learning techniques to detect changes in how this newspaper prioritizes policy issues. Due to the unique role of the People’s Daily in China’s propaganda system, detecting changes in this newspaper allows us to predict changes in China’s policies. The construction of the PCI does not require the researcher’s understanding of the Chinese context, which suggests a wide range of applications in other settings, such as predicting changes in other (ex-)Communist regimes’ policies, measuring decentralization in central-local government relations, quantifying media bias in democratic countries, and predicting changes in lawmaker’s voting behavior and in judges’ ideological leaning.
Weifeng Zhong is a research fellow in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where his research focuses on Chinese economic issues and political economy. His recent work has been on the application of text-analytic and machine-learning techniques to political economy issues such as the US presidential election, income inequality, and predicting policy changes in China. He has been published in a variety of scholarly journals, including the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics. In the popular press, his writings have appeared in the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, and Real Clear Politics, among others. He has a Ph.D. and an M.Sc. in managerial economics and strategy from Northwestern University. He also holds M.Econ. and M.Phil. degrees in economics from the University of Hong Kong and a B.A. in business administration from Shantou University in China.
For exhibition and sponsorship opportunities, email strataconf@oreilly.com
For information on trade opportunities with O'Reilly conferences, email partners@oreilly.com
View a complete list of Strata Data Conference contacts
©2019, O’Reilly UK Ltd • (800) 889-8969 or (707) 827-7019 • Monday-Friday 7:30am-5pm PT • All trademarks and registered trademarks appearing on oreilly.com are the property of their respective owners. • confreg@oreilly.com
Leave a Comment or Question
Help us make this conference the best it can be for you. Have questions you'd like this speaker to address? Suggestions for issues that deserve extra attention? Feedback that you'd like to share with the speaker and other attendees?
Join the conversation here (requires login)