China visits: a dataset of Chinese leaders’ foreign visits

Abstract

Leader visits constitute an important signal in international relations. While studies of U.S. diplomacy can all use the same dataset from the Office of the Historian, IR scholars on China must make do with ad hoc datasets and often need to build their own from scratch. We contribute a novel dataset, ChinaVisits, to fill this glaring gap. Our dataset has three major advantages: (1) it covers the period from 1998 onwards so that it is widely applicable to different research agendas; (2) each recorded visit has rich auxiliary information, including its date and duration, and is accompanied by a document from official websites for verification, and the dataset in its entirety is evaluated against existing datasets; (3) it is publicly available and indexed annually with country codes and country names. To facilitate its use, we provide a detailed analysis of the patterns in leader visits.