Data Uncovers Xi Jinping's Policy Agenda: How has the concentration of power changed policy?

Politics and policy in the Xi Jinping era

The concentration of power in the hands of a single leader is not unique among authoritarian regimes. However, given that the essence of elite politics lies in the competition and cooperation among elites over power sharing, the excessive concentration of power in one individual suggests that some problems have arisen within elite politics. Particularly during China’s reform and opening-up period, efforts were made to establish a collective leadership system and curb the concentration of power as a reflection on the Mao Zedong era. In this context, the concentration of power in Xi Jinping represents a conundrum that warrants thorough examination.

There are competing views regarding this conundrum. One argument focuses on the peculiarities of the internal and external situation in which the Chinese Communist Party found itself at the beginning of the Xi Jinping administration. Specifically, it posits that a sense of crisis within the party, driven by factional conflicts within the leadership, widespread corruption, and growing U.S.-China confrontation, prompted the concentration of power in the hands of Xi Jinping (Shirk 2023). Another argument focuses attention on how the Xi Jinping administration came to power. It emphasizes that Xi Jinping's appointment as general secretary was not dependent on the support of a particular leader or faction, but was the result of collective choice by a broad range of elites (Shih 2022).

On the other hand, the consequences of the concentration of power, especially its impact on policy, have not yet been fully discussed. As a matter of course, many studies have noted that the Xi Jinping administration reformed policy making processes significantly (Dickson 2021; Cabestan 2021). However, there has been little discussion about how the concentration of power in Xi Jinping’s hands and the changes in the policy processes have affected the substantive content of policy, although some studies pointed to changes in the frequency and timing of policy changes (Chan, Lam, and Chen 2021).

Moreover, many existing studies tend to view Xi’s power consolidation as inevitable. This perspective, however, may be too static to fully capture the power dynamics within the Communist Party. Instead, the concentration of power should be understood as a dynamic development resulting from Xi Jinping's own motivations and strategies in response to the situational and institutional conditions as described above.

Given the current state of research and Xi's own orientation and choices to consolidate power, we analyzed the changes in the policy agenda under the Xi Jinping administration. What kind of policy agenda has Xi Jinping presented and pursued since he came to power? How has the policy agenda changed over time? In this essay, we introduce the data and methods used and present the results of the analysis regarding these questions.

Data and methodology

The data used for this study are from Xi Jinping Xilie Zhongyao Jianghua Shujuku (hereinafter referred to as “Xi-Database”), published on the website of the Chinese Communist Party newspaper network. The database contains more than 10,000 documents such as speeches, activity reports, field visits, press conferences, overseas trips, and congratulatory telegrams by Xi Jinping since he became general secretary. Although caution should be exercised regarding potential bias and political propaganda in this database, as it consists of articles from Chinese state media, it is valuable for its high frequency and high-dimensionality, allowing for empirical analysis of the Xi Jinping administration (Ito, Lim, and Zhang 2024a). For example, we use these and other data to discuss the differences in policy orientation between General Secretary Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang (Ito, Lim, and Zhang 2024b). This method of treating documents or texts as data was a classical method used for studying the communist countries including China. In recent years, however, a broader application of larger-scale datasets and machine learning, known as “Text-as-data” approaches, has become prevalent in various fields of the social sciences (Grimmer and Stewart, 2013; Gentzkow, Kelly, and Taddy, 2019).

This study uses Structural Topic Modeling (STM), a type of unsupervised machine learning, to extract Xi Jinping's policy agenda from Xi-Database. This method is an extension of topic modeling, which classifies documents by topic (Roberts, Stewart, and Tingley, 2013). Topic modeling can efficiently aggregate information from a large number of documents by estimating the probability of a topic having appeared in each document and that of each word having been generated from a topic, which is defined as “a set of words that are likely to appear in the same document.” In particular, STM can be used to check correlations between topics and examine the impact of document metadata (attribute information). These features of the STM made it possible to consider information (time of writing in this case) that accompanies any document in Xi-Database in connection to the distribution of topics and words.

Policy agenda in the Xi Jinping era

The following are the highlights of the results:

First, our analysis shows that the number of agendas came to 25. As described above, in topic modeling like STM, the content of the document is classified into topics which are predetermined by the analyst. In order to determine the optimal number of topics, we calculated estimates for different numbers of topics and checked the quality (including semantic coherence and exclusivity) of the topics classified by both quantitative and qualitative metrics (see Lim, Ito, and Zhang 2024, Appendix). As a result, the optimal number of topics was 25. In other words, Xi Jinping laid out roughly 25 distinct policy agenda items in the 10 years after he took office.

Second, we found that there are three main policy clusters as indicated by the policy agenda structure. This finding came from the network structure of the topics shown in Figure 1. The network provides a visual understanding of the overall structure of the topics and their relationships. The 25 topics can be broadly divided into three clusters -- foreign policy, domestic policy, and crisis response -- based on the content of the policy agenda. Dominant agenda items are “Global Economy and Governance” and “China and Major Powers” for the foreign policy cluster and “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” and “(Xi Jinping’s) Speeches and Writings” for the domestic policy cluster. “Culture and Civilization” is the only domestic agenda that has a connection with foreign policy. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that “Military Modernization,” and “Nationalism and Taiwan” are positioned in the domestic policy cluster in Xi Jinping's discourse.

Third, the content of policy agendas indicated some notable changes between the first and second terms of the administration, as shown in Figure 2. The figure shows the effect of the second term (November 2017 to October 2022) or the time of document creation on the topic distribution compared to the first term (November 2012 to October 2017). The vertical axis lists the 25 extracted agenda items, while the horizontal axis indicates the difference in prevalence for each topic between the first and second terms. A higher positive value on the horizontal axis for a topic indicates a greater increase in its prevalence from the first term to the second. Topics with horizontal axis values close to 0, or the dotted line, suggest no significant difference in prevalence between the first and second terms, meaning that these topics received similar attention throughout both terms of the Xi Jinping administration.

Specifically, Figure 2 shows that agenda items more frequently mentioned in the second term include “COVID-19,” “China and Developing Countries,” “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” “Anti-Poverty,” and “Global Economy and Governance.” Conversely, the frequency declined for “China and Major Powers,” “Anti-Corruption and Cadre Management,” and “China and Asia-Pacific.” These results suggest that China's diplomacy expanded both geographically and substantively from the first term to the second. In other words, policy priority shifted from major power relations (including U.S.-China relations) to relations between China and developing countries, with the relative weight of the Asia-Pacific region decreasing. In terms of content, topics such as global governance, culture and civilization were more frequently discussed in the context of foreign relations in the second term. Within the domestic agenda, socialism and Communist Party history, Internet and propaganda and other topics with stronger ideological emphasis became more prevalent in the second term. The leader’s interest changed over time concerning these agenda items while remaining strong in military modernization, the Belt and Road initiative, and Chinese nationalism and Taiwan.

Let us delve further into the transformation of the agenda in the second term. Figure 3 outlines a policy agenda aimed at supporting the legitimacy of the regime, disciplining elites, and increasing organizational cohesion. The figure indicates that in the first term, policy tools for maintaining the regime and disciplining the elite focused on movements and institutional reforms, such as the anti-corruption campaigns and the development of the legal system. In the second term, however, there was a shift towards more ideological measures. This pattern suggests that the basis of legitimacy of the regime is increasingly tied to Xi Jinping's personal authority and ideological contributions within the organizational history of the Communist Party. This implies that the concentration of power tends to heighten the dependence on Xi Jinping's personal authority in policy implementation.

Future challenges

The following two issues should be further examined in the future.

The first issue concerns the relationship between Xi Jinping's policy discourse and implementation. Specifically, it is necessary to analyze how much of Xi Jinping's policy agenda (and the level of his personal attention given to each policy agenda) is shared and implemented by the Communist Party and government organizations. Examining the relationship between Xi Jinping's policy orientation and subsequent implementation on the ground provides an important indicator for evaluating the policy effects of political changes during the Xi Jinping era. This is particularly pertinent since enhancing the policy coordination capacity of the Communist Party leadership, with Xi Jinping at its core, has been discussed as an urgent issue from the beginning.

In fact, our study uses the Belt and Road Initiative and the anti-corruption campaign to confirm the relationship between Xi Jinping's discourse and actual policy implementation. In both cases, the correlation between the discourse and the current situation is high. However, occasional discrepancies were conspicuous, reaffirming the dynamism of the policy process.

Another issue to be examined is the estimation of changes in the vocabulary that constitutes and defines each policy agenda item (topic). While this study focuses only on changes of topics, it is conceivable that the language that characterizes the same policy agenda item may evolve. The observation of changes in policy priorities even under the same slogan may allow us to predict future policy developments.

June 11, 2024
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