ABSTRACT
A key feature of China’s evolving foreign policy is Beijing’s efforts to expand its global reach by establishing partnerships with countries. Scholars typically assume that the partnership’s title is an important component when evaluating China’s partnership diplomacy and treat each type of title as a distinct form of diplomatic relation, each associated with different degrees of bilateral cooperation. Without empirical evidence, however, it remains unknown whether the specific wording of a title can, in fact, distinguish levels of bilateral cooperation.
We collect all documents of China’s partnerships with 78 countries and implement a structural topic modeling analysis to identify a latent mixture of issues within the type of diplomatic relations described by each partnership. We argue that the content of the partnership document, compared to the partnership’s title, more accurately signals a country’s relation with China. Based on a new way to distinguish partnerships, we show that the contents of partnerships are more consistent with the degree of cooperation between China and other countries. This chapter aims to systematically categorize a massive number of diplomatic documents using text analysis.
