All the Chinese President’s Men
Introducing the PCI-Personnel Project
Dear Human Readers,
It’s been a while, but the Policy Change Index (PCI) newsletter is now on Substack! Our team has been busy developing new machine learning algorithms that help observers peek under the hood of authoritarian regimes like China, Russia and North Korea. Today, we’re excited to introduce the new PCI-Personnel project!
PCI-Personnel
Meet all the Chinese President’s men. Chinese politics remains one of the world’s most important yet least understood. Take President Xi Jinping’s personnel choices for example. When he assumed a third term in 2022, he unexpectedly picked Li Qiang as the Premier and added Cai Qi to the Politburo Standing Committee. A year later, Xi purged his Foreign Minister Qin Gang—who’s now reportedly pushing papers at a publishing house—Defense chief Li Shangfu and several top commanders of the People’s Liberation Army’s Rocket Force—all within a few months. Whose heads will be on or off the chopping block next?
PCI-Personnel for top Chinese politicians around Xi. We have developed the new PCI-Personnel algorithm to track the rise and fall of key Chinese officials. The algorithm uses large language models (LLMs) to quantify each politician’s relationship with Xi, as reflected in the CCP’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily. Initial results suggest that the index reflects, and in some cases seems to predict, the political fortune—or the lack thereof—of Xi’s underlings.
Qin Gang and Wang Yi. The figure below shows the PCI-Personnel indices for the two former/current foreign ministers. Qin had a meteoric rise in early 2023 after he was promoted to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. However, Qin’s “stock” in the index started to trend downwards in late June 2023, weeks before rumors about his disappearance and subsequent ousting surfaced in late July.
Wang, Qin’s predecessor (and successor), became the foreign minister in 2013. However, his PCI-Personnel index did not take off until early 2018, shortly before he was named a state councilor in March 2018. After a brief interruption during the pandemic, his index continued to climb from 2021 to the present. The trend is consistent with his increasing prominence around Xi, including being promoted to the Politburo in 2022 and reinstated as the foreign minister after Qin’s downfall.
We have so far tracked 28 top Chinese politicians formerly or currently serving in the CCP’s Central Committee—and yes, they’re all men—and we will continue to expand the coverage and improve the quality of the indices. Check out the interactive chart on the PCI website and see how these top Chinese politicians are doing.
PCI-China
The 2024 Q2 update. In the second quarter of 2024, the PCI-China did not record any signs of major changes in China’s policy landscape. The chart below shows the PCI-China series up to the end of June, now nearing its all-time low. It may or may not be the calm before the storm, but our algorithm will stay tuned either way.
Note: The PCI-China predicts if and when the Chinese government will change its policy priorities. A spike in the indicator signals a policy change, while a vertical bar marks the occurrence of a policy change labeled by the event.
PCI Resources
The open-source PCI projects are meant to crack a window to otherwise opaque political systems like China’s, so everyone can look inside—for free. You can find out more about our projects on the PCI website. And if you are a Macrobond user, you can now get the PCI data streams there, too. Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or ideas!
Edited by Weifeng Zhong and Julian TszKin Chan.
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