Mitigating missingness in analysing Chinese policy and implications for the fragility of our knowledge base

Abstract

Access challenges for China researchers have increased, including for online research. This paper focuses on one subset of such challenges: policy documents. As no studies have to date analysed variation in data availability over time, researchers studying official documents risk conflating variation in transparency with actual policy change. This paper analyses missingness and finds that publication of policy documents under China's “open government information” initiative increased until the mid-late 2010s but then began to decrease. A key determinant of policy transparency is whether a document is related to citizens’ daily lives, as opposed to national security. Furthermore, nearly 20 per cent of policy documents become unavailable two years after their publication. The paper concludes with a discussion on how to mitigate these challenges.

中国学者面对的研究权限挑战日益恶化，包括在线研究。 本文章重点关注此类挑战的其中一个问题：政策文件。 因为至今还没有分析政策文件在不同时间下数据可用性的研究，所以研究官方文件的中国学者可能会将透明度的变化与实际政策的变化混为一谈。 本文分析数据缺失，显示在政府信息公开倡议下，在 2010 年代中后期前，政策文件发布量一直增加，但此后有所减少。决定透明度的关键因素是文件是否与公民日常生活还是与国家安全有具体的关系。此外，近百分之二十的政策文件在发布两年后就无法获得。 本文最后讨论了如何化解这些挑战。