This survey makes use of an automated data development tool5)that codes news report leads into their basic event data parameters of who does what to/with whom, where, when, why and how. The tool was run on Reuters World News reports from 1990 through 2004, and produced a global data set of some 10.2 million event records. The Northeast Asian region countries collectively account for 3,692,809 of these event records,6) distributed as listed in Table 3-1 below.
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5) The software application is called the VRA® Reader, and was made available by Virtual Research Associates, Inc. for this research. See King and Lowe (2003) for an independent assessment of the automated coding. The software is guided by the IDEA (Integrated Data for Events Analysis) protocol - see Bond, Bond, Oh, Jenkins and Taylor (2003) for a description of the IDEA protocol, which is also viewable on line at http://www.vranet.com\IDEA.
6) These Northeast Asia events data coded from Reuters News reports are available from the authors; please contact [email protected]. The global data set from which the regional set was extracted is available from Harvard University at http://thedata.org.
Table 3-1. Event Counts by Country
Country Event Records
China 250,664
Japan 361,796
Mongolia 3,001
North Korea 22,708
Russia 181,841
South Korea 121,290
United States 2,751,509
We use this tool to track reported events—cooperation, conflict and other—over time as they evolve. We track both domestic events as well as directed dyad events, in which the reported “source” and “target”of the event is one of the seven regional Northeast Asia states. We use a modified version7) of the “Goldstein”(1992) weights for each of IDEA’s nominally- scaled cooperation and conflict events to produce cooperation and conflict scores for all countries in the region based on the frequency of their reported events. The unweighted frequencies and weighted scores are both presented in Table 3-2, along with the ratios of positive to negative values for each country. One must be careful with these (and all other empirical results based on news reports) to consider that the values are driven by the attributes of the source (Reuters in this case) as well as attributes of the countries at issue. Nevertheless, one can begin to see at least how each of the Northeast Asia countries is presented in the Western media in this table. For example, the ratio of positive to negative reports involving Japan’s dyadic interactions is more than three times (4.0 to 1.3) that of North Korea; and with the weighted scores, China is only about half (2.3 to 5.4) of Japan. In other words, North Korea (by raw counts of reports) and China (by weighted scores of the same reports) routinely present more conflictual reports toward their regional partners than cooperative reports.
7) The modifications are described in a paper by Taylor, Bond, Bond, Jenkins and Kuzucu (2001).
It is also interesting to compare the ratios of positive to negative reports across the raw frequencies and the weighted scores to assess the direction of their differences. China is alone in the region in that its weighted positive to negative reports ratio toward its regional partners is lower than its raw frequencies ratio. The rest of the Northeast Asia countries all reveal higher weighted scores to raw frequencies ratios. Note that the assigned weights for intense cooperation (like the giving of aid or transactions involving tangible rewards) are higher than the assigned weights for less intense cooperation like consultations. Likewise, intense (armed or violent) conflict is weighted higher than verbal conflict associated with accusations and demands. One interpretation of China’s reversed positive to negative ratio is that the reported conflict events with its regional partners reflect a lower intensity (largely verbal) conflict with its regional partners.
Similarly, the lower positive reports ratio for China may stem from the numerous reports on less intense social, cultural and economic activity as opposed to transactions involving humanitarian aid, military assistance or other more intense cooperation with its regional partners.
Table 3-2. Cooperation (positive) & Conflict (negative) Scores by Country
Unweighted Sums Weighted Sums
Country Positive Negative Pos/Neg Positive Negative Pos/Neg China 3852 1330 2.9 9138.3 4041.5 2.3 Japan 5134 950 4.0 12275.3 3088.5 5.4 Mongolia 66 14 3.3 160.7 48.8 4.7 North Korea 1974 823 1.3 3708.5 2964.2 2.4 South Korea 2741 677 2.5 6413.9 2559.8 4.0 Russia 2991 647 3.1 6484.5 2123.8 4.6 United States 9691 2427 3.1 21778.0 7136.7 4.0
We use country stability trends data to capture the dynamics of civil challenge, government repression and system violence within each of the Northeast Asia states. These data are usefully considered domestic and
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monadic in that they are not directed against another state. In contrast, the dyadic events data that we present below are restricted to events that are directed from one state entity to another within the region. We draw upon these directed dyads to systematically assess the differences of each state’s reported interactions across each of its regional partners.
All of the charts discussed below are appended to this paper as Adobe portable document files or (pdf) format, with the chart name also used as the file name. Discussion of data through 2004 refers to Reuters as the sole source of the reports, whereas discussion of data from 2005 refers to a combined news report feed of AFP and Reuters. This more recent combined data series is used as a check on the projections from the previous series developed with Reuters reports alone.