Our paper centers around the dataset of Chinese leader visits, China V isits. The visits consist of goodwill visits, working visits, official visits and state visits by the Chinese president, and working visits and official visits by the Chinese premier, which we collectively refer to as ‘formal visits.’ Similar to Kastner and Saunders (2012) and Li (2015), we do not include visits whose sole purpose is to attend a multilateral meeting, such as President Xi’s visit to Japan in 2019 for 14th G20 summit.Footnote 5 We do, however, include visits whose purpose is to attend a multilateral meeting as well as pay a formal visit to the host country.Footnote 6 The dataset covers the years between 1998 and 2020. It includes visits by President Jiang and Premier Zhu made between 1998 and 2002, visits by President Hu and Premier Wen between 2003 and 2012, and visits made by President Xi and Premier Li from 2013 to 2020. The dataset includes all United Nations member countries, except China itself, as potential recipient countries.Footnote 7
Data collection
We collect the data set from five sources that complement and corroborate each other: (1) leader-based summaries of foreign visits, (2) year-based leaders’ foreign visits, (3) summaries of China’s bilateral relations, (4) keyword-based Google search, and (5) Wikipedia pages on leaders’ foreign visits. Interested readers can refer to the appendix for our detailed sources and the keywords that we use. We validate each leader visit with a supporting document. Note that a few visits can refer to the same supporting document since Chinese leaders sometimes visit a group of countries in one trip (Fig. 1). Our supporting documents can be downloaded together with the ChinaV isit dataset.
Once we have collected all the visits, it is straightforward to create the binary variable PresidentialV isitc,t, which is 1 if country c receives a presidential visit in year t and the binary variable PremierV isitc,t, which is 1 if country c receives a visit from the Chinese premier in year t. We note that no country has received a Chinese presidential visit or premier visit more than once a year. For this reason, we code both PresidentialV isitc,t and PremierV isitc,t as binary variables. In addition to the fact that a country is visited, we also include information about the date of the visit, its duration, and whether a multilateral meeting is involved. In cases where the visit is part of a larger group visit, e.g., President Hu’s visit to Germany in 2005, we also record the ordering of the visit. For example, the U.K. is the first host country, Germany second, Spain third, and South Korea fourth (Fig. 1).
Dataset comparisons
Before diving deep into the dataset, we first compare it to existing datasets regarding granularity, coverage, auxiliary information, and completeness. In Table 1 we list the papers that have used leader visits as a variable, data availability, time and country coverage and data format. Six of these papers, including one dataset paper from AidData, have published their data sets. Of these six, Kastner and Saunders (2012) count the number of visits by the Chinese president and the premier per country, Bader (2015) includes Chinese leaders’ visits to other countries as well as foreign visits to China, Li (2015) focuses on visits to non-OECD countries, McManus (2018) focuses on presidential visits, AidData (2019) includes high-level and provincial-level bilateral visits, and Stone et al. (2022) are a subset of our dataset with coverage through 2012. Lin et al. (2017) report the cumulative number of visits to Africa by Chinese leaders.
Table 1 Published papers that include Chinese leaders’ visits as a variable Granularity
There are three levels of granularity. At the most aggregated level is Kastner and Saunders (2012). All visits by both the president and the premier are aggregated across multiple years for each country. At the intermediate level are Bader (2015), AidData (2019), and Stone et al. (2022), where visits by the president and the premier are aggregated to create a dummy variable. At the most granular level are McManus (2018), Li (2015), and our China Visits dataset, where visits by each leader are recorded. A key difference to note is that McManus (2018) covers only the president whereas China Visits and Li (2015) cover both the president and the premier.
Coverage
We next compare the geographical and temporal coverage of the datasets (Table 1). AidData (2019) focuses specifically on East Asia and the Pacific and covers 25 countries. Li (2015) focuses on countries that are not in the OECD. Other datasets, including ours, largely cover all UN member countries. Some notable peculiarities include that McManus (2018) excludes leader visits to the United States and Russia and that Li (2015) and Kastner and Saunders (2012) explicitly drop countries that recognize Taiwan rather than, for example, coding them as zero. Temporally, McManus (2018) covers the longest period (58 years), and China Visits covers the second longest period (23 years). Our dataset covers the most recent years. In this regard, scholars studying recent developments, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (Kaya and Woo, 2021; Wang, 2018), the Belt and Road Initiative (Broz et al., 2020), and the expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, will find our dataset particularly useful.
Auxiliary information
Existing studies mainly focus on whether a visit takes place, and consequently, data on Chinese leader visits are predominantly binary: one if Chinese leaders visit a country and zero otherwise. By contrast, our dataset incorporates much richer auxiliary information: (1) the date of the visit, (2) its duration, and (3) whether a multilateral meeting is involved. When a leader visits more than one country during a tour, we further record the ordering of the visits. Interested scholars may examine the significance of such orderings, as being selected as the first destination may confer honor on the destination country. For example, Prime Minister Desalegn of Ethiopia felt honored that Premier Li Keqiang visited his country first during a four-country tour of Africa in 2014.Footnote 8 Chinese media highlighted the significance of the order of visits when President Xi chose the United Arab Emirates as his first stop in 2018.Footnote 9
Many of our original documents include information about which foreign officials went to the airport to receive and see the Chinese leaders off. For example, it was high-ranking government officials who saw President Xi off in the airport during President Xi’s visits to Argentina and Netherlands in 2014. By contrast, it was the presidents of Sri Lanka, Maldives and Tajikistan who went to the airport to see President Xi off during his respective visits in 2014. Future research could study whether such carefully choreographed diplomatic details affect Chinese public approval of the government’s performance or attitude towards the host country.
Data completeness
We compare our dataset with Kastner and Saunders (2012), Li (2015), Lin et al. (2017) and McManus (2018). First, in Table 4 in the appendix, we provide a country-by-country comparison of our dataset with that of Kastner and Saunders (2012), where we aggregate our data to be consistent with the baseline and report the rows where our records differ. We find that on average, our results are the same for 184 of 192 UN member countries (96%). For the cases where our numbers do differ, we have double-checked our sources to ensure our coding is correct per definition. Second, we perform a visit-by-visit comparison with Li (2015). For a fair comparison, we exclude visits to OECD countries as is done in Li (2015). Our results are the same for 169 of 171 visits (99%). Between 1998 and 2012, both Li (2015) and we have recorded the same 169 visits. In addition, Li (2015) further includes two visits that we have not recorded: one visit to Ivory Coast and another visit to Ghana in 1999.Footnote 10 Third, in Table 5 in the appendix, we provide a leader-by-leader comparison of our dataset with that of Lin et al. (2017). Note that while Lin et al. (2017) do not have a publicly available dataset, they do report the aggregated number of visits in their paper. Therefore, we use the aggregated numbers as the basis of our comparison. For the 2001-2005 period, we have recorded two more visits by the Chinese premier than Lin et al. (2017). For the 2006-2012 period, we have recorded one fewer visit by the Chinese president and one fewer visit by the Chinese premier. For these two differences, we have provided a corroborating document to support our result. Lastly, we compare with McManus (2018) for the period of 1998 and 2006. For a fair comparison, we exclude the U.S. and Russia and focus on presidential visits only as is done in McManus (2018). Of the 84 presidential visits that McManus (2018) records over this period, we are able to match 78 of them (93%). The 6 visits missing from China Visits are invariably multilateral meetings, for example, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit and Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA), which do not involve a state visit according to our definition. In addition, our dataset includes 5 state visits that are missing from McManus (2018). We report the exact differences in Table 6 in the appendix. Overall, this high level of consistency with existing published datasets validates our data collection method and data quality.
In the following subsections, we analyze the leaders’ visits and highlight prominent patterns that we believe may be of broad scholarly interest. These are by no means exhaustive.
Geographic distribution
In Fig. 2, we show the geographical distribution of presidential visits from 1998 to 2020. We observe that Russia and Kazakhstan are by far the most frequently visited countries by the Chinese president with 11 visits and 10 visits, respectively, in 23 years. France, South Africa, and Vietnam are a distant third with 5 visits each. The fact that Russia and Kazakhstan are visited with such a high frequency leads us to examine the role of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in shaping presidential visits (see Section 3.6). We also note that both President Hu and President Xi chose Russia as their first stop after taking office as president. Potter (2013) refers to this type of visit as an obligatory visit; for another example, the U.S. president invariably visits the U.K. within the first few months in office.
In Fig. 3, we show the geographical distribution of premier visits. Russia is the most visited country by the Chinese premier with 11 visits, followed by Germany (9), Belgium (7), and the U.K. (6). Compared with the president, the premier is less likely to visit Africa, South America, and North America, and is more likely to visit South Asia instead.
Premiers and presidents frequently visit the same countries in different years. As we report in Table 2, 74 countries have received both presidential visits and premier visits; 81 countries, which are mainly in Africa and Western Asia, have never received a visit from either the Chinese president or the premier; 9 countries have received visits only from the premier; and 28 countries have received visits only from the president.Footnote 11 The president has visited 23% more countries than the premier.
Temporal Distribution
Figure 4 displays the monthly distribution of leader visits from 1998 to 2020. We group them by office, president or premier, as well as by administration, Jiang, Hu, or Xi. We observe that the president and the premier exhibit similar travel patterns. Both President Jiang and Premier Zhu often visit abroad in April. They travel substantially less between December and March. Both President Hu and Premier Wen like to visit other countries in June and November. They rarely visit other countries in March, July, or August. Both President Xi and Premier Li like to travel in November. They seldom visit abroad between December and February. We believe that some of the travel patterns result from regular multilateral meetings. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, for example, is partly responsible for 7 presidential visits in June. APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting is responsible for 6 presidential visits in December. ASEAN summits are responsible for as many as 10 premier visits in November.
In Fig. 5, we report the duration of leader visits by office and by administration. On the left, we show that the average duration of presidential visits has been steadily going down from President Jiang (3.7 days on average) to President Hu (3.2 days) and then to President Xi (2.9 days). On the right, we observe that the duration of premier visits first decreased from Premier Zhu (4.3 days on average) to Premier Wen (2.6 days) and recently has seen some increase under Premier Li (3.3 days). In Figure 1 in the appendix, we further report the total number of days spent visiting per month by the leaders.
Shanghai Cooperation Organization
Meetings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an international organization co-founded by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to promote economic, military and domestic security collaboration, contribute to the frequent visits to Russia and Kazakhstan as well as June being one of the most likely months for visits abroad. The creation of the SCO was announced in 2001. The SCO Charter was signed in 2002 and entered into force in 2003.Footnote 12 In June 2017, India and Pakistan joined the SCO as full member states, extending membership to 8. In September 2021, the SCO started the procedure to admit Iran as a full member and accepted Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Qatar as dialogue partners.Footnote 13 The Heads of State Council (HSC) is the supreme decision-making body in the SCO, which meets annually to make all the important decisions regarding the SCO. For this reason, the Chinese president often pays a state visit to the host country. For example, in June 2009 President Hu attended the 9th Meeting of the Council of Heads of States of the SCO (as well as the BRIC Summit) held in Russia and paid a state visit to Russia.Footnote 14 In June 2017, President Xi attended the 17th meeting of the Council of Heads of State of SCO held in Kazakhstan and paid a state visit to the host country.Footnote 15
If the annual SCO chair country always receives a visit from the Chinese president, given that there are only 6 member countries before 2017 (8 afterwards), this would translate into a 1/6 probability of being visited for SCO membership. In Table 3 (left), we list the chair country for each year between 2003 and 2019 and whether the host country received a presidential visit.Footnote 16 We find that the Chinese president invariably pays a state visit to the host country. This suggests that SCO membership plays a role in shaping the distribution of Chinese presidential visits.
Table 3 SCO Chair Country and Chinese Leader Visit: Chinese president invariably pays a state visit to the SCO chair country and the Chinese premier often, but not always, pays a formal visit In addition to the Heads of State Council, the Heads of Government Council (HGC) also meets annually “to discuss the organisation’s multilateral cooperation strategy and priority areas, to resolve current important economic and other cooperation issues, and also to approve the organisation’s annual budget.”Footnote 17 This lays the ground for the Chinese premier to visit the chair country. In Table 3 (right), we list the corresponding SCO chair countries between 2003 and 2019 and whether the chair country received an official visit from the Chinese premier. We observe that out of the 14 years in which China was not the chair country, the Chinese premier paid a formal visit to the host country in 10. Russia is clearly the exception. It never received a formal visit from the Chinese premier when chairing the SCO in 2005, 2011 and 2017. Uzbekistan did not receive a formal visit by the Chinese premier either when it hosted the HGC meeting in 2014, but it did receive formal visits in 2007 and 2019.Footnote 18
Intervals between visits
Russia stands out for another reason: the Chinese president has visited Russia in 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017 and 2019. These visits have been occurring every two years and they all fall on odd years. The Chinese premier has visited Russia in 1999, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2019. This recurrent pattern is similar to previous observations made by Lebovic and Saunders (2016) on U.S. leaders’ foreign visits in the sense that leaders tend not to visit the same country in consecutive years.
Given the fact that Russia is the most frequently visited country by the Chinese leaders and that even Russia tends not to receive visits in consecutive years, this reflects a diplomatic habit and suggests that a leader visit in one year strongly reduces the probability of a leader visit in the following year for an average country.Footnote 19 In Table 4, we show that the probability of receiving a presidential visit conditional on having a visit in the preceding year is 61% lower than the average probability and that the probability of a premier visit drops by 14%.
Table 4 The probability of a presidential visit decreases by 61% after a visit in the previous year. The probability of a premier visit drops by 14% Association of southeast asian nations
Besides the SCO, another organization that may serve as a drawing force for premier visits is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). ASEAN was established on 8 August 1967 in Bangkok, Thailand by Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. ASEAN has since expanded to include Brunei (1984), Vietnam (1995), Laos (1997), Myanmar (1997), and Cambodia (1999), making the number of members ten. ASEAN’s economy collectively (2.97 trillion dollars in 2018) is larger than that of India, and has been growing at a high rate (average 5.08% among members in 2018).
China has developed multiple channels to engage with ASEAN, including ASEAN plus China (10 + 1) and ASEAN plus China, Japan, South Korea (10 + 3) and the East Asia Summit. Both ASEAN plus China and ASEAN plus China, Japan, South Korea were established in the late 1990s.Footnote 20 The East Asia Summit was established in 2005 (Emmers et al., 2010). In addition to ASEAN members, it includes Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, the United States and Russia. In spite of their varied membership, all three meetings are held annually in the ASEAN chair country at around the same time, suggesting that ASEAN plays a leading role therein.
With China being a member of all these meetings, this creates an opportunity for the Chinese premier to come to the ASEAN chair country in person. While in the late 1990s and early 2000s the premier typically returned to Beijing after attending these meetings, the norm has gradually shifted to include an official visit to the chair country. For example, in 2005, Premier Wen attended the ASEAN plus China Summit, the 9th ASEAN Plus China, Japan and South Korea Summit and the First East Asia Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and paid an official visit to the chair country.Footnote 21 In 2016, Premier Li Keqiang attended the 19th ASEAN Plus One Leaders’ Meeting, the 19th Leaders’ Meeting between ASEAN Plus Three and the 11th East Asia Summit, and paid an official visit to ASEAN chair country, Laos (Fig. 6).
In Table 5, we summarize whether or not the rotating ASEAN chair has received a visit from the Chinese premier from 1998 to 2019. We observe that in the 2000s, it was still not likely that the premier would pay an official visit to the ASEAN chair. The norm of the Chinese premier visiting the host country only became entrenched in the 2010s. As a matter of fact, since 2011, all the ASEAN member countries have received an official visit from the premier when serving as the ASEAN chair. Timor Leste is the only Southeast Asian country that is not a member of ASEAN (Bertrand, 2013). The fact that it has never received a visit from the Chinese premier, while all other Southeast Asian countries have, supports the argument that ASEAN membership increases the probability of visits by the Chinese premier.
Table 5 ASEAN Chair Country and Chinese Premier Visit: ASEAN chair countries tend to receive a formal visit from the Chinese premier, especially in the 2010s Hitherto, we have covered the SCO and ASEAN. Other prominent multilateral meetings in China Visits include APEC Economic Leaders’ Meetings, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) and Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries.Footnote 22 For example, the ministerial conference of FOCAC is held every three years alternately in China and an African country.Footnote 23 The second, fourth, and sixth ministerial conferences were held in Africa in 2003, 2009, and 2015 respectively. The host countries invariably received a visit either from the Chinese president or the premier.