Fleshing out a content analysis involving China and Vietnam

I used the morning commute to flesh out my idea for an expanded study of China's official attitudes and policies toward Vietnam, based on a content analysis of Xinhua stories from the late 70s through the late 90s.

This could be a two-stage content analysis. The first stage: a "dumb" computer-assisted counts of lead paragraph refs to Vietnam, China, the USSR, Kampuchea, the United States, territory, trade, and maybe overseas Chinese, and combinations of these terms, to measure their relative rankings amongst all Xinhua stories, and their correlation to each other. I would tentatively hypothesize that spikes would correlate to bilateral crises or changes in the geopolitical landscape, developments in Vietnam's relations with the Chinese-supported Khmer Rouge government and later rebels, as well as changes in China's leadership and Vietnam's leadership.

While the first stage computer-assited content analysis is good for comparison and correlation between variables, it is not good for extracting meaning from the stories -- criticism, support, indifference, etc. Therefore, the second stage would involve a human-coded content analysis of Xinhua news items that mention Vietnam in the lead paragraph. The coding would attempt to measure if these items are directly supportive of Vietnam or its leaders, indirectly supportive, directly critical, indirectly critical, or neutral. As I learned in my earlier study of Xinhua references to Vietnam and overseas Chinese in the late 1970s, there was a period in which almost all criticism of Vietnam was indirect, i.e., Xinhua would cite third party criticism of Vietnam -- a Parisian newspaper slamming Vietnam for the refugee crisis, or Fidel Castro denouncing Hanoi over the invasion of Kampuchea. I believe this indirect criticism is an indication that China sees, or wants to see, certain issues as being of international concern as opposed to a bilateral dispute, or segments of the international community back China over Vietnam. Measuring direct and indirect support or criticism of Vietnam would be useful in determining how Chinese policy is tied into larger international issues.