Projects

Victor SHIH
The CCP Elite database provides detailed biographical information including birth year, gender, ethnicity, county-level birth place, education level, university alma maters, year of entering and retiring from the CCP, work experience prior to becoming a CCP member, revolutionary and purged background, and all the job trajectories that senior cadres had experienced since 1949.  Currently, the database contains all full and alternate Central Committee members since the founding of the party up to the 18th Party Congress, as well as all provincial standing committee members since 1976.

Margaret ROBERTS
China From the Ground Up is an ongoing public opinion survey conducted online by researchers at the 21^st Century China Center. It is a new initiative by the Center to study the society-level dynamics in China. Through repeat as well as thematically-focused questions each time, the survey series t aims to explore the changes and diversity of perspectives within Chinese society in order to gain a more accurate and textured picture of the Chinese people’s everyday concerns, opinions and values.

Micah MUSCOLINO
This project explores the history of land use, environmental change, and water and soil conservation in northwest China’s Loess Plateau region from the early-twentieth century to the present. It aims to promote the study of human interactions with soil and water in Chinese environmental history and welcomes contributions from a wider community of scholars and students interested in the area.

Michael DAVIDSON
Energy sectors–traditionally dominated by central planning–are increasingly exposed to market forces, but why markets have been adopted in certain areas and not others, or why certain implementations have led to greater efficiency gains, are unclear. This project explores these new developments through the collection and categorization of energy market data from a variety of primary and secondary Chinese-language sources.

Young YANG
The China Data Lab Dataverse is a platform for sharing, preserving, citing, exploring and analyzing research data on China. Our goal is to provide a user-friendly interface, to facilitate easy access to data, and promote cross-disciplinary research on China.

Margaret ROBERTS
The Chinese media project seeks to understand how the Chinese media portrays events within China and abroad.  Leveraging data from traditional media, social media, and television, the team is involved in research that automatically extracts information about events within China and quantifies differences in perspectives between the Chinese and international media.

Yiqing XU
We attempt to systematically measure the ideology of Chinese citizens and understand its origin and changes. We define ideology as the configuration and constraints of preferences for institutions and public policies. By studying ideology in China, we hope that it will not only shed light on the dynamics of political conflict and societal cleavages, but also help us understand the popularity of policies and political changes.

Kwai NG
This project researches how Chinese grassroots courts rule on divorce petitions. It scrapes off decisions on divorce cases made available online by the Supreme People’s Court and other official sources to create a database of cases where men and women dispute over the decision to divorce. The dataset provides source materials for understanding systematically how the courts rule on marital disputes in China.

Weiyi SHI
The project on China’s outbound investment seeks to understand the dynamics of China’s global capitalism and its implications for the world. Using data from public registries, surveys, and policy documents, we identify drivers of China’s outward investments, qualify differences between China’s state-owned enterprises and private firms, and examine how host countries respond to the influx of Chinese capital.