Insights

Part 1: Vizualizations

About This Tool

  • This tool visualizes trends in diplomatic rhetoric over time using more than 4,000 official speeches from the Chinese and Russian Ministries of Foreign Affairs.
  • Keywords of geopolitical relevance are pre-tagged; custom searches are available on our data page.
  • The charts show the number of speeches per year containing selected keywords for each country, with an option to view results as a share of total speeches in a given year.
  • This allows users to compare how China and Russia prioritize and discuss key geopolitical issues over time.

    • Example Explorations

    A chart illustrating speeches mentioning ASEAN per year in China and Russia
    A chart showing Chinese speeches mentioning reunification and peaceful reunification per year

    Speeches Containing Selected Keywords (per year)

    Usage Notes:

    *As Russia's MFA publishes articles with greater frequency, using the adjusted button is recommended for comparative analysis. This demonstrates the number of speeches containing the keyword as a a percent of total speeches from that year.


    **Visualization of Russian data begins at 2014.

    Part 2: Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency

    TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) measures the importance of terms in each country's speeches relative to the entire corpus. Higher scores indicate terms that are distinctive to that country's diplomatic discourse.

    Top 20 Terms by TF-IDF Score

    China

    Rank Term TF-IDF Score
    1 bri 0.312
    2 rejuvenation 0.268
    3 urbanization 0.184
    4 mekong 0.153
    5 boao 0.105
    6 vigor 0.099
    7 unremitting 0.097
    8 differentiated 0.081
    9 revitalization 0.081
    10 synergize 0.075
    11 outbound 0.065
    12 decouple 0.060
    13 colorful 0.059
    14 straits 0.051
    15 blaze 0.048
    16 innovate 0.048
    17 readjustment 0.047
    18 optimize 0.043
    19 utilization 0.041
    20 energize 0.040

    Russia

    Rank Term TF-IDF Score
    1 osce 0.672
    2 zelensky 0.203
    3 donbass 0.202
    4 donetsk 0.172
    5 nusra 0.163
    6 lugansk 0.161
    7 mgimo 0.125
    8 normandy 0.121
    9 poroshenko 0.120
    10 jabhat 0.116
    11 alexander 0.107
    12 church 0.102
    13 militant 0.102
    14 orthodox 0.098
    15 kosovo 0.096
    16 armenian 0.095
    17 georgia 0.082
    18 allegedly 0.082
    19 ultimatum 0.079
    Data Notes:

    A small number of acronyms and domestic political figures have been removed from this preview for presentation purposes. A link to download the unedited dataset is available on our data page.