Turcsanyi Richard Q, Liškutin Kamil, Mochtak Michal
Department of Territorial Studies, Mendel University in Brno, Zemedelska 1, 613 00 Brno, Czech Republic.
Institute of Political Science, University of Luxembourg, Maison des Sciences Humaines, 11 Porte des Sciences, L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg.
Chin Polit Sci Rev. 2022 May 20:1-26. doi: 10.1007/s41111-022-00217-5.
"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.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41111-022-00217-5.
“中国影响力”已成为政治家、媒体和专家们热议的话题。然而，涉及该主题的学术研究通常持更为谨慎的立场。本文提出一种创新方法，利用联合国大会投票和演讲记录数据来研究政治影响力。借助自然语言处理（NLP）的最新进展，我们展示了如何使用原始文本数据来估计、量化和可视化外交政策立场。在欧洲，有人认为中国在中东欧国家（CEE）日益增长的存在和活动破坏了“欧洲团结”，因为该地区据称开始向北京靠拢。我们以中东欧地区为例，研究中国的潜在影响力，并通过可视化它们随时间的亲近程度，突出中东欧国家对中国、德国和美国的定位。我们没有发现证据表明中东欧国家正在战略上转向中国。我们还考虑了世界其他地区其他国家的已知立场和趋势，以强化我们方法论的合理性。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s41111-022-00217-5获取的补充材料。
