What is PropagandaScope?
PropagandaScope is a quantitative analysis platform that measures how political keywords propagate through China's state media hierarchy.
China's propaganda system is often described as monolithic. In reality, it operates as an amplifier. The center speaks once, and provinces repeat it many times over. Our data frequently reveals that regions designated as “autonomous” show disproportionately high amplification, a pattern worth examining in detail.
We analyze a growing database of articles from central and provincial party newspapers to measure this amplification effect. By tracking keyword frequency, transmission delay, and editorial prioritization across sources, we make visible the patterns that would otherwise require reading thousands of newspaper pages by hand.
Data Sources
PropagandaScope tracks 20 provincial party newspapers alongside People's Daily (人民日报), the Chinese Communist Party's flagship organ. The database is updated daily through automated scraping of each newspaper's electronic edition.
Not all sources have equal historical depth. Inner Mongolia Daily (内蒙古日报) deleted its archives prior to 2024. People's Daily coverage in our database begins December 2024. These gaps are noted where relevant in our analysis.
Methodology
Our analysis rests on several core metrics.
Density is the proportion of a newspaper's output that contains a given keyword. If a newspaper publishes 100 articles in a day and 18 mention the keyword, the density is 0.18. This controls for differences in publication volume. Without normalization, larger papers would always appear to mention keywords more often simply because they publish more. On the search page, users can toggle between Count (absolute mentions) and Density (mentions as a proportion of total output) to see both perspectives.
Amplification Ratio compares each provincial newspaper's density to the People's Daily baseline. An amplification of 16× means the provincial paper uses the keyword 16 times more frequently per article than People's Daily. We separate headline mentions from body text mentions. When an editor places a keyword in a headline, it represents a deliberate decision to prioritize that term. This is a stronger signal than a passing reference in the body of an article. Headline amplification is reported separately as a stricter measure of editorial intent.
Transmission Delay measures how quickly provincial papers echo People's Daily. After People's Daily uses a keyword, we track how many days pass before each provincial paper follows. Shorter delays suggest stronger political pressure or tighter editorial coordination. This metric is calculated for selected research projects where the propagation pattern is analytically meaningful.
Trend Analysis compares each source's keyword usage over the most recent 30 days against the previous 30 days, identifying whether coverage is intensifying or fading.
Sensitive Date Analysis examines how keyword frequency changes around politically significant dates, revealing patterns of deliberate amplification or suppression.
Our keyword vocabulary is manually curated and informed by the China Media Project (CMP) dictionary. Single characters carry little analytical weight. We track multi-character political phrases where the signal is meaningful.
Terminology
We follow these naming conventions throughout the platform.
We use “Southern Mongolia” when referring to contexts of indigenous resistance and cultural suppression, and “Inner Mongolia” for administrative references. This reflects the perspective of the affected community rather than the administrative designation imposed by the state.
We use “Ürümqi Incident” for the events of July 5, 2009, and “Southern Mongolia Education Protests” for the events beginning September 1, 2020. The term “riot,” frequently used in state media, is an editorial characterization we do not adopt.
We use “Tibet” rather than “Xizang.” The latter is the pinyin romanization promoted by the Chinese government since 2023 as part of a broader effort to displace the English name, which has historical and cultural roots predating the People's Republic.
Autonomous regions are referred to by their full names: Tibet Autonomous Region (西藏自治区), Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (新疆维吾尔自治区), Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (内蒙古自治区), Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region (宁夏回族自治区), and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (广西壮族自治区). The irony of “autonomous” regions consistently showing the highest propaganda amplification is analytically significant and intentional to highlight.
A Note on Data Sovereignty
Even visualization tools carry political assumptions. Our China map originally used GeoJSON boundary data from Alibaba Cloud's DataV service, a Chinese government-affiliated source that encodes official territorial claims in its geographic data. We replaced it with Natural Earth, a public domain dataset maintained independently and used widely in Western media and academia. The choice of map data is itself an editorial decision.
Analysis and Commentary
For long-form analysis, visit our publication: soyonbo.substack.com
Credits and Sources
Keyword vocabulary references the China Media Project (CMP) dictionary. Historical propaganda images courtesy of chineseposters.net, IISH, Amsterdam.