Finished data gathering, starting preliminary analysis

I finished all of my LexisNexis searches on Saturday night (I estimate about 5000 searches, plus entering each value into a large spreadsheet). I spent the better part of Sunday and tonight creating charts which will aid in the preliminary analysis.

Some interesting trends have emerged, some expected, some not:

• As expected, the total number of New China News Agency items that mentioned Vietnam were much greater than those that mentioned Laos. However, while Vietnam items totalled 2902 (14%) of all 20,615 NCNA news items in 1979, by the early 90s the raw number of items mentioning Vietnam had declined to less than 1000 per year, or just over 1% of the 70,000 or so items then being produced by NCNA English service at that time.


• There was a major increase in NCNA English output from 1977 (14,292 items total) to 1993 (70603 items total). The greatest growth occured in the mid-1980s, which according to the Porter book, was when NCNA was aiming to become a world-class news agency.


• There was a strong correlation between Vietnam and Kampuchea in the data: Between 1979 and 1989, more than 65% of all items that mentioned Vietnam also mentioned Kampuchea (when measured by year). Between 1980 and 1985 it was over 80%. The correlation was expected -- Vietnam occupied Kampuchea during this period, something that angered China very much -- but the prominence among all Vietnam-related items was a bit surprising. Not surprisingly, as soon as Vietnam withdrew, the number of items that also mentioned Kampuchea dropped sharply.


• Here are a few other ways to look at the V+K correlation: Items that mentioned Vietnam but not Kampuchea -- e.g., and article about Vietnamese officials attending a trade conference, a regional athletic event, a bilateral meeting between Beijing and Hanoi that didn't discuss Kampuchea, etc. -- were rare during most of the 1980s. Additionally, the number of Vietnam items that also are Laos items never rose about 20% (annually) from 1977 to 1993.


• Except for a minor spike in the late 1970s, there was not a strong correlation between items that mentioned Vietnam and items that also mentioned the Soviet Union/Russia. The spike was to about 50% of all Vietnam items in 1979, but after 1982 this figure was less than 30%; after 1989, 15% or less. This surprised me to a certain degree; in line with the realist view of Chinese foreign policy vis a vis the superpowers, I had assumed China would be very focused on the close Soviet relationship with Vietnam, which involved many issues: the Soviet naval base, arms shipments, training of Vietnamese troops, Vietnam joining COMECON in 1978, etc. The Soviet-related issues were not as important to NCNA editors when compared with Kampuchea-related issues -- or, if they were important, the editors played them down consistently over the entire Deng Xiaoping period.

All right, almost midnight, time to hit the sack. I don't think I am going to get too deep into the analysis on my blog, but might share drafts of my thesis proposal (yay, I can get restarted!). I'll also try to figure out a way to upload some of the charts I created in Excel, which really illustrate a lot of these trends in an easy-to-understand way.