Diffusion of Influence? Detecting China’s Footprint in Foreign Policies of Other Countries

Abstract

“Chinese influence” has become a hot topic among politicians, media, and pundits. Academic studies dealing with the subject, however, generally take a much more cautious position. This paper suggests an innovative approach of studying political influence using data from the UN General Assembly voting and speech records. Utilizing the latest advancements in natural language processing (NLP), we show how to estimate, quantify, and visualise foreign policy positions using raw textual data. In Europe, it has been argued that China’s growing presence and activity in Central and Eastern European states (CEE) undermines “European unity” as the region allegedly starts shifting towards Beijing. We adopt the CEE region as a case study of China’s potential influence and highlight the positioning of CEE countries towards China, Germany, and the U.S. by visualizing the proximities among them over time. We find no evidence that the CEE countries are strategically pivoting towards China. We have controlled for known positions and trends of other countries from elsewhere in the world to strengthen the case for our methodological approach.