Each dataset's construction, source files, validation steps, and known limitations are documented below. Click any section to expand it.
No countries have officially "joined" the Global Security Initiative, but many have publicly referenced the initiative in joint statements or at bilateral meetings. These statements and meetings range in the language used to discuss the initiative. Three researchers searched Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and German-language media for official mentions of the GSI by a country's leader or foreign minister. If a country's "support" was only mentioned by China's state media or a Chinese official but was not supported by an official readout of the statement, we did not include it.
The researchers ranked each country's bilateral level of support for the GSI from 0–5. The ranking was cross-checked by three researchers.
In the paper for simplicity I combined 1 and 2 as noncommittal, and 3–5 as support, but also broke down whether this was initiated in a multilateral forum or a bilateral/unilateral statement.
To test the accuracy of this ranking, I examined how China's strategic partners respond to the initiative. According to Ketian Zhang (2025), countries have seven possible partnerships with China, in a hierarchy from a simple "comprehensive cooperative partnership" (with Liberia, for example) to the highest "comprehensive strategic co-ordinated partnership" (Russia only). We would expect countries at the top of the hierarchy to be more likely to explicitly join the initiative, while those with no partnership would be less likely to be invited to do so.
Coding these from 0 (no partnership) to 7 (Russia), suggests that the ranking is broadly accurate: a closer partnership with China means a country takes a stronger (bilateral) stance toward the GSI.
"No support" is the absence of a positive signal, not a documented refusal. Several Sahel and Pacific countries have indicated multilateral support that has not yet appeared in retrievable public statements. Bilateral support is credited only when the language explicitly references the GSI.
Every article from China's two English-language state-media services that mentions the Global Security Initiative (全球安全倡议), 2022-02-12 through 2026-06-17. n = 1,695 articles; 8,721 sentences after filtering.
The 2022 – June 2025 base corpus is a LexisNexis export of both services. The June 2025 – June 2026 extension re-runs the same Nexis searches for the Xinhua wire and MFA News; because the Nexis "Spokesperson's Remarks" feed thins out over that window, the GSI press-conference Q&As for the extension are drawn instead from a scrape of the MFA's own daily-briefing transcript archive. Genuine duplicate re-exports (the same article filed twice) are removed.
Each sentence is tagged with one regional class based on the countries / organisations it references:
Sentence-level lexicon score: (positive − negative opinion words) ÷ number of content words, using the Bing/Liu opinion lexicon. Range roughly −1 to +1; 0 is neutral.
The whole corpus (2022–2026) is scored with this one method, so the extension is directly comparable to the historical series. (The original 2022–2025 release used a different, undocumented lexicon; re-scoring everything uniformly preserves the by-source ordering — USA/NATO most negative, ASEAN most positive — while compressing magnitudes slightly toward zero.)
% negative vs mean. Dividing by sentence length, plus the uniformly positive tone of Chinese state media, makes the mean small and tightly clustered (most country means fall between +0.03 and +0.07). The share of negative sentences (% scoring below 0) is much more variable and interpretable — USA/NATO ≈ 40% negative vs ≈ 6% for Global South groups; conflict states (Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine) highest — so it is the default metric on the map and time series, with the mean offered alongside.
The "Mentions and sentiment by country" map only shades countries with ≥25 mentions across the corpus, to prevent noisy single-mention countries from dominating the colour scale.
English-language coverage only. Pure Chinese-language coverage in People's Daily and other domestic channels is not included here. Some sentences are double-tagged where they reference more than one source group; these appear as separate rows.
All figures are drawn from AidData's CLG-Global Dataset v1.0 (Custer et al. 2025), which records 33,593 Chinese government-financed projects committed to recipient countries between 2000 and 2023. Amounts are expressed in constant 2023 U.S. dollars using AidData's Adjusted_Amount_Constant_USD_2023 field. Pledges that never became formal commitments and projects marked Cancelled or Suspended are excluded.
The security dataset was constructed in three stages.
First, we hand-coded all CLG records for which at least one of the following applied:
Second, we used Claude Opus to cross-check the Security flag.
Third, we removed false positives through manual review.
Excluded categories include: oil/gas pipelines and refineries, crude-oil donations, power-generation infrastructure, mining and metallurgical projects, civilian transport infrastructure, civilian telecommunications, civic buildings, agricultural commodity transfers, debt rescheduling, and surveillance technology (held separately).
The final dataset covers 170 recipient countries. Note that many of the included cases had no actual monetary value (as they referenced training or equipment donations). They are included in the database but not in the figures in the paper.
The surveillance financing dataset was assembled separately.
First, we hand-coded deals whose title or narrative explicitly described:
Equipment supplied by named surveillance vendors (Hikvision, Dahua Technology, Megvii, SenseTime, CloudWalk, Yitu) was included.
Second, we used Claude Opus to cross-check the Surveillance flag.
Third, we removed false positives through manual review.
Excluded categories include: air-traffic surveillance, public-health (disease) surveillance, water-utility plant monitoring, and mining-site monitoring. Huawei and ZTE telecommunications-backbone projects (national broadband, 4G/LTE rollouts, fibre-optic backbones, data centres) are treated as commercial telecom infrastructure and kept as a separate dual-use series rather than counted as surveillance.
This is committed finance, not delivered. Some deals are still in implementation. Arms transfers (SIPRI TIV) are tracked separately from this dataset.