The Chinese Foreign Policy Elite Atlas
method — how people were found, ranked and checked
How the podium has changed
How much of this is checked
method
Every posting in the Chinese Diplomats Biographical Database, by country. Shade = people we hold who have ever been posted there; dot = how many are currently in post, from China's own appointment decrees where they speak and a verified profile otherwise. China is different in kind: nobody is "posted" to it, so it counts the people based there — a confirmed headquarters post, a serving PLA rank or a seat on the 20th Central Committee — which is what puts the Beijing desks on a map of where the elite sit.
method — why this differs from the posting map
Coverage, not location. A desk officer sitting in Beijing who runs the Africa file appears in Beijing on the posting map and across Africa here; an ambassador appears in their host country on both. Built from each researched profile's own recorded portfolio countries plus that person's full CDBD posting history, so it answers "who works on my country" rather than "who is physically here".
method
Birth province from CDBD's own birth_region field, or — where CDBD has
none — parsed from a researched profile's stated birthplace. Both are recorded on each person's
page; nothing here is inferred from a name or a posting.
method
The issues these officials are documented as working on, grouped into a controlled vocabulary from the free text of each researched profile. Click an issue to see who carries it and what they have actually said about it — or search for an issue OR a country below (a country isn't one of the controlled categories, but the MFA podium and embassy corpus both cover it directly).
method — how issues were grouped, and how stance is decided
In their own words
Verbatim, sourced quotations — never paraphrase — from ministry transcripts, embassy statements, signed op-eds and interviews, about the ISSUES themselves (not about the people who said them — see the People tab for that). Each carries its source and whether that source still supports it. Search or click a topic, then click a quotation to open the person who said it.
method
Ties are computed from data we hold, never inferred: who succeeded whom in a post, who served in the same country or MFA department at the same time, who went to the same graduate school, and — for researched profiles — sourced ties carrying their verification status.
Most connected
By school
Where their ties serve now
Where their ties were born
method — the evidence, the limits, and the full scoring table
How people actually reached the top
Every person in the atlas with a researched career record, asked one question: of those who reached vice-ministerial rank or above, what had they done first? The outcome is read from rank words and Central Committee seats only — never from an ambassadorship — for the reason given below. Military careers are held out and counted separately: they run a different ladder.
Why this is a watchlist and not a forecast
Who was scored
The score, in full
Nothing below is a coefficient fitted to our own data — the section above explains why the data cannot carry one. Each row is a convention of the Chinese system, or a route marker from the evidence above, stated so that a reader can disagree with the row rather than with an unexplained ordering.
Research queue
People you have marked for promotion into the fully-researched tier. The list lives in this browser only; copy it out to make it real.
Save the JSON below as data/promote_requests.json and run
python3 scripts/12_promote_queue.py. That validates the ids, writes
data/promoted.csv (so these people carry a "queued" badge on the next build), and writes a
ready-to-dispatch research prompt pre-filled with everything the map already holds on each of them.
Who do I need to talk to?
For a policymaker with a problem: pick your country and what has come up, and this assembles who in China's foreign-policy system is likely to be handling it, who is likely to come into contact with you, and what Beijing has already said about it — each name with the reason it is on the list.
method — how people are matched, and what this cannot tell you
Choose your country and a situation to build the briefing.
Track Two
Academics, think-tank figures, and other people who shape or transmit Chinese foreign-policy thinking OUTSIDE the formal state hierarchy the rest of this atlas is built around — no rank, no tier ladder, and a different kind of influence (citations, dialogue participation, media reach) rather than a government post. Where someone here also holds a roster entry, the two pages link to each other.
Ties are a shared institution (solid) or a tie their own profile names (dashed) — click anyone for their details, colleagues and issue areas without leaving the diagram.
Where each person is based, from their current institution — dot size is how many people are there. Click a city.