One task that we’ve heard to be challenging for analysts (business and intelligence alike) is capturing a snapshot of how the world appeared at a past time. This could be the PR from a company leading up to a past earnings announcement or the local news that precluded a major protest event. In this case, we’ll compare the diplomatic relations for China in months leading up to their leadership visiting the United States.

Here’s how to turn back the clock by setting limits on publication time in Recorded Future to evaluate a historical period:

• Chinese President Hu Jintao visited the US last year, arriving on January 18, 2011, which we’ll use as a reference point to evaluate his country’s diplomacy.
• You can use Recorded Future to set both event time (when an event took place) and content Publication Time to October 1, 2010 – Jan 17, 2011, then choose the event type “Diplomatic Relations”, and search for China.

The timeline below shows that diplomatic activity was relatively subdued leading up to Hu’s visit with the exception of meetings with the United States and Germany.

Diplomatic Activity for China in Lead Up to Hu's US Visit

The activity in the timeline can filtered down by the countries and officials with relationships to China, and we can actually gather up the most frequently co-occurring countries mentioned in these diplomatic relation events with China. Remember that these events occurred during the three months before Hu’s visit to the United States, and we find that after the US and Japan, the list is as follows:

Once we have an overview, we can compare that list to the network shown below of China’s relations for just the month prior to Hu’s trip. Interestingly, you’ll find that the most controversial relations from the US geopolitical perspective are absent. To view this yourself, click the network image and then use the time slider underneath to shift the frame in focus.

Diplomatic Relations Close to Hu Jintao's US Trip

All of this initial research builds into an opportunity to identify recurring themes or divergence from past behavior with respect to a current event. We can now contrast the above results with China’s diplomatic relations leading up to Vice President Xi Jinping’s visit to the US this past week.

Recent Xi Jinping US Visit Timeline - Click to View

The first thing that stands out looking at the timeline is the significant difference in China’s diplomatic activity leading up to Xi’s travel as well as the negative sentiment surrounding recent events. This stands in contrast to the generally positive sentiment in the month prior to Hu’s visit.

You can also take a step further and see that several of those controversial countries absent ahead of Hu’s 2011 visit are now very much in the picture (Syria, Iran, Sudan) leading up to the recent China-US meeting.

Network of Month Leading Up to Xi's Visit - Click to View

What’s to be learned? On the first take, we can pick up on the negative sentiment found in media surrounding China’s diplomatic relations during the recent months leading up to Xi Jinping’s visit to the US and the presence or mention of China’s relations with country’s at odds with the larger international community.

What’s still to be examined:

• Are there distinctions in the media coverage leading up to the separate visits made by Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao to other countries?
• Are there patterns to be found by mapping out the countries with whom China engages prior to visits by it’s officials to particular states or regions?

The stage is set for answering those types of questions now that we’ve gone about segmenting media coverage based on both event time (when something happened) and publication time (when those events were reported). If this type of analysis would be valuable to your organization, go ahead and try Recorded Future or contact us for more information.

When it comes to Xi Jinping, Hu Jintao’s heir apparent in the Communist Party of China, very little can be said except that he is enigmatic. He is presumably being groomed to take leadership in 2012-2013, but for such an important figure who is likely to soon have a major effect on world affairs, and who will certainly shape China’s future at a critical stage, it is surprising that so little is known about him. In comparison, the world knew a fair amount about Hu Jintao before he assumed leadership of China’s three highest offices — General Secretary of the Communist Party, president of the state, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission.

There are certain facts and patterns, however, that we can tease out from Mr Xi’s background using open source intelligence tools. He has been doing a fair amount of travel in the last few years to burnish his foreign policy credentials, and both domestic Chinese and foreign media have been there to capture these visits.

His most widely discussed visits have been the following:

• Feb 2009 — Latin America: Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, and Venezuela.
• Oct 2009 — Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Romania.
• Dec 2009 — Cambodia, Japan, Myanmar, South Korea.

These trips are all well known and included a few revealing and controversial moments, such as some prickly remarks in Mexico regarding the United States. But looking at the Recorded Future treemap below, we can clearly see that he has been far more active than his publicized grand tours would suggest. In fact, given China’s historically inward-looking nature in the last half century, this seems to foreshadow an expectation that China will play a more diplomatically forward role during the likely Xi presidency.

Click here to interact with the Xi Jinping - Travel Recorded Future treemap

As we can see, these are mostly countries that are strategically and economically important to China — several African countries, resource rich South American countries, industrial economies, and North Korea. Indeed, drilling down into the articles, not only are they economic, but in the wake of the financial crisis, China sent Mr Xi as an emissary to some of the U.S.’s partners and neighbors in order to promote the Shanghai World Expo and bring attention to China’s more robust reaction to the crisis’s deleterious effects.

Take this travel agenda in contrast to Hu Jintao’s treemap within the same period; fewer countries, but also highly important ones.

Click here to interact with the Hu Jintao - Travel Recorded Future treemap

Notably absent from Mr Xi’s travel profile are Pakistan and India. Mr Xi in June 2010 visited Bangladesh and other Southeast Asian countries, bringing with him infrastructure and financial package deals, among other things, presumably with a geopolitical interest in countering India’s expanding influence. While he has not traveled to either India or Pakistan in an official capacity, he has met with Pakistani party officials with whom he has affirmed “strategic and cooperative partnership”.  He has also had some positive contact with high-profile Indian officials in Beijing.

Click here to interact with the Xi Jinping - Pakistan Recorded Future timeline

It is remarkable that there is discussion regarding every other major relationship China maintains except this one. One may be tempted to say that he is staying away from controversial visits, but he has visited Japan and Venezuela and made those thorny comments regarding the United States on his Mexico trip. What is likely the case here is that he understands that India and Pakistan will perceive his choice on which country to visit first as a signal that will reveal the Chinese leader’s preference or China’s priorities. There is certainly curiosity about that, considering the sharp spike in momentum (see timeline above) that is noticeable in March of this year when Mr Xi and “Pakistani leaders agreed during meetings in Beijing Thursday to consolidate their ‘all-weather’ friendship and deepen pragmatic cooperation.”

Click here to interact with the Xi Jinping - India Recorded Future timeline

India, by contrast, has received a good deal more focus, albeit without any travel on Mr Xi’s part. He was selected to preside over a reception on May 28^th with Indian President Pratibha Patil to celebrate the 60^th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries. While this was more of a spectacle than the recent Pakistani visit — and involved a more senior official from the subcontinent — there was far more content to the Pakistani visit, which had been planned around the eighth Sino-Pakistani Defense and Security Talks. Still, appearances have been maintained, but with Pakistan coming out slightly ahead. This year has been dubbed the China-Pakistan Year of Friendship recognizing their 60 years of diplomatic relations.

Part of the same large spike in momentum on the timeline above is the official visit to Bangladesh by Mr Xi (also shown below). China sells arms to Bangladesh, which has been making peculiar statements regarding power projection and “maintaining stability” in their region. (For comparison, it has only been very lately that a large country with serious security concerns like India has been using language like that.) There are also several infrastructural projects in the works that would enable China to have the ability to more easily project influence into the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean beyond.

Click here to interact with the Xi Jinping - Bangladesh timeline

Mr Xi’s political involvement in this naturally raises the issue of what political goals this meets and whether this is targeted at India. Energy security, from pirates and potential conflict corridors like the South China Sea, is an urgent concern to China. But there are also reservations that India may have due to their intense displeasure with the so-called “String of Pearls” strategy, which is a Chinese effort to develop a line of bases along the Indian Ocean littorals projecting into what India considers its sphere. A similar visit to Myanmar by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao around the same time suggests that this is a fairly pressing issue for the Chinese leadership. That trip was also in relation to the infrastructural projects that would give China access to its own territory from the Bay of Bengal for oil and ground transport.

So far, it does not appear that India has commented on the matter.

Conclusion

Clearly Mr Xi is staying away from potentially disruptive political moments. Most of his visits are economic in nature, but even so, some of them are strategic and related to security. At first glance, China’s priorities are easy to discern from Mr Xi’s travel treemap above: energy security, resources, selling infrastructure projects, and developing a sense of economic and political camaraderie among emerging market countries. From time to time, though, one can make out signals of Mr Xi’s style and goals, and China’s needs more broadly looking into the future.

As we’ve noted previously, Hu Jintao was a very active traveller in 2009 and an active participant in international meetings. However – after his non-appearance at the global warming summit in Copenhagen (when he was busy doing energy deals in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) his travel activity has decreased, his coverage in media as fallen, and finally, his external communications have plummeted.

We will explore these patterns using open source intelligence and discuss their potential implication.

The “official view” on change in leadership in China is that in 2012 both Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao will step down (when Hu’s maximum tenure is up, by the time of the 18th party congress), and the current vice president Xi Jingping will step up to become the new president. We can very easily see this in Recorded Future by just typing EmploymentChange Hu Jintao Future – and get the below result.

Click to enlarge

For updates on the future of Hu Jintao, click the below link and fill in your email address – and you’ll be subscribed to a Future for Hu Jintao (very easy to unsubscribe!).

Travel Patterns

First we review the travel patterns of Hu Jintao in 2009-10 by posing the question Person Travel Hu Jintao 2009-01-01–2010-12-31. We can visually inspect how President Hu’s travel has shrunk across 2009 and even come to a stand still lately (including uncertainty around a trip to the US in April for a key nuclear weapons summit). In 2009 Hu visited a whole set of countries, key meetings, and world leaders.

Timeline view of Hu Jintao travel.

We can also export these travel patterns to Google Earth to visually and geographically review where President Hu has travelled across time. Click here to explore Hu Jintao’s travel patterns in Google Earth.

Travel patterns over Google Earth

To stay abreast of Hu Jintao travel click the below link to subscribe to a Future on travels of Hu Jintao.

Personal Communication

Personal Communications include meetings, phone calls or direct verbal communications – that Recorded Future picks up in news, blogs, government filings, speeches, etc. Just like we reviewed travel patterns we can review the personal communications of Hu Jintao. During 2009 we recorded a large number of public communications including Hu Jintao.

Hu Jintao Network Graph

However, in the first quarter of 2010, Hu Jintao’s public communications seem to have come to a halt as well, with only a few interactions being recorded, including Russian premier Putin, head of North Korea Kim Il, Barack Obama, and Harmid Karzai who recently visited in Beijing.

Fewer Public Communications for Hu Jintao

Quantitative analysis of media flow

Now, the above analysis of reviewing travels and communication patterns may be quite insightful and compelling, however it might be that we miss signals that requires more rigorous quantitative analysis. The below plot shows the volume of media flow on Hu Jintao across the world – in a so called SPC chart allowing us to find extreme levels of media flow – when it goes outside say 3 standard deviations or when there is an improbable run of higher or lower than average levels of media flow. The data is normalized and low media flow/weekend days are omitted in an attempt to show “true outliers”.

The visualization is produced in R using the Recorded Future API. We will shortly share an entry in the Predictive Signals blog on how these were done.

An interesting note: from the end of 2009 President Hu seems to be disappearing off the face of the earth compared to earlier. We can’t answer exactly why – but clearly it is a signal that correlates with the above patterns of communication and travel.

R Process Chart of Hu Jintao on the web.

Now then, when comparing, on a normalized basis, Hu Jintao to Wen Jiabao it gets even more interesting. Whereas both them had a “media lull” around Christmas/Chinese New Year, Wen Jiabao has had an upwards trend in general and has come back strongly after the holidays. We might try to draw some “big conclusion” from that, but probably too early.

Wen Jiabao in the media.

Detecting co-occurrence in media flow

Finally we will explore media co-occurrence of key Chinese leaders over time, to see if we can find anything interesting regarding who is clustering in their behavior. To identify the key Chinese leaders along with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, we consulted the CIA World Factbook/Word Leaders on China and extracted a set of key leaders with good coverage in Recorded Future. The below visualization (done in R) displays a dendrogram with Chinese leader clusters who’s behavior is similar in terms of media coverage over time (i.e. reaches peaks and lulls at same times). The theory would be that co-occurring in media systematically could infer subtle patterns alignment in behavior – such as part-taking in same events, travelling together, co-occurring in same speeches, etc.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is to look at Xi Jinping, the rumoured president to be. By exploring who clusters closely to him we might be able to find clusters of politicians that are close to him that we should watch in terms of their behavior and actions. Yin Weimin clusters the closest, his current portfolio is modest. Yang Jiechi, minister of foreign affairs, has had much more strong views on the US and its relationship to the China. Definitely worth watching.

Clustering of Chinese individuals in the media.