Leader Tracker

This tracker monitors the public media appearances of senior Chinese officials by scanning provincial-level state media outlets. Officials outside the Politburo (provincial Party secretaries and governors, Central Military Commission members) are flagged as "absent" after more than 7 days without a mention in their assigned newspaper. An official not yet found in that newspaper is shown as "awaiting", not absent. When a newspaper has delivered nothing for more than 5 days, its officials are not tracked until it delivers again, so a broken source never shows up as absences.

Politburo members are evaluated against their own historical silence distribution rather than a fixed threshold. For each member, the system computes the distribution of calendar-day gaps between consecutive appearances in the member's primary source. The current trailing gap is then placed in that distribution. Members above the personal 75th percentile are flagged "watch"; above the 95th, "anomalous". Members with fewer than 20 appearances in the tracking window are marked "insufficient data" and not evaluated.

"Fallen" marks an official whose investigation or removal was officially announced (Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, Ministry of National Defense, or the National People's Congress Standing Committee) and recorded by hand in the tracker's roster, with the announcement's date and link. Automatic checks never mark anyone fallen; they only put candidates on an internal review list. An article announcing an official's own investigation or removal never counts as an appearance.