The world in China's People's Daily: how often the paper mentioned each country, 1946–2025

What happens in the newspaper when a country's relations with China are broken off#

The Chinese foreign ministry's pages on relations with each country record 24 episodes in which diplomatic relations were broken off or suspended after they had been established; one more, North Macedonia's, is in the ministry's history of relations with Central and Eastern Europe. That makes 25 episodes, with 23 countries. Most have the same cause, named by the ministry itself: the country's government established or restored relations with the authorities in Taiwan, and the Chinese government suspended relations.

In 22 of the 24 episodes that can be compared, the average number of articles a year that mention the country falls, in the years of the suspension, to less than half the average of the three years before. Indonesia is in 1,361 articles in 1965, 36 in 1972 and 455 in 1990, the year relations were restored.

Two episodes do not follow the pattern: for Liberia between 1989 and 1993 there are more articles during the suspension than before it, and for Senegal the number fell, but by less than half. Congo (Kinshasa) cannot be compared: until 1964 the paper wrote plain 刚果, a name counted here for the two Congos together.

In 20 of the 21 episodes that ended and have whole years to compare, the number rises again after relations are restored. The count shows only that articles thin out and return along with relations; it does not show who decided that, or why.

Albania: relations not broken, and the articles all but stop

China did not break off relations with Albania. On 7 July 1978 the Chinese foreign ministry told the Albanian embassy in a note that it was stopping economic and military aid and bringing its experts home; the note ends with the hope that normal relations between the two countries will be kept up and developed. In the transcription, the whole note is entered on page 1 of the issue of 14 July, under the headline:

阿尔巴尼亚领导在反华道路上越走越远　我被迫停止对阿援助和接回专家

The Albanian leadership goes further and further down the anti-China road. China forced to stop aid to Albania and bring its experts home

People's Daily, 14 July 1978, page 1

The note counts 142 projects that China had agreed to build for Albania as complete plants, 91 of them finished, and nearly 6,000 Chinese experts sent over the years. The number of articles had been falling already: 617 in 1972, 243 in 1976, 112 in 1977. In 1978 there are 16. Until 1996 there are fewer than 90 a year; in 1999 there are 184.

In one summer, the paper changed its name for South Korea#

Until 1992 the paper wrote about South Korea as 南朝鲜 (Nan Chaoxian, “the south of Korea”). The name 韩国 (Hanguo), short for the official 大韩民国, Republic of Korea, hardly appeared: in 1991, 453 articles carry the first name and 11 the second.

China and South Korea established diplomatic relations on 24 August 1992 (the Chinese ministry's page). The two names stood at 29 to 3 in June 1992, 35 to 28 in July, 24 to 84 in August, 6 to 87 in September and 1 to 83 in December. In the whole of 1993 the old name is in 12 articles, the new one in 893.

In the occurrences from before 1990 that were read as a sample, the string 韩国 is mostly the start of a personal name (韩国栋), so it counts for the country only from 1990; real mentions of South Korea written 韩国 before 1990 are left out.

The United States: from 6,235 articles a year to 787#

The United States is the most-mentioned country in 70 of the 80 years; in the other 10, the Soviet Union. The year with most articles is 1965: 6,235, or 56% of the articles that mention a foreign country. In 2003 there were 4,551. In 2024 there are 787, the lowest number in a full year and 12% of the articles that mention a foreign country. In 2025 the number rises again, to 1,320.

Four common abbreviations do not make up the difference. Articles that use only one of them and not the full name (美方, “the American side”; 中美, “Sino-American”; 美军, “US forces”; 美苏, “American–Soviet”) number between 65 and 152 a year since 2015.

In the 1960s, alongside 美国, the paper often wrote 美帝, “US imperialism”. The word is in 53,332 articles: 27,002 in the 1960s, 269 in the 1980s. 苏修, “Soviet revisionism”, is in 7,511, nearly all of them (7,498) between 1960 and 1979.

A study by Li, Zhang, Jiang and Zhong (2025) examined the paper's foreign news from 1993 to 2022; the count here, country by country, runs to 2025.

Which country was mentioned most in each month#

In nearly all of the 955 months, the country mentioned in most articles is the United States or the Soviet Union. Another country passed both in 30 months; in three more it was level with one of them.

Fourteen of the 30 months fall in the last 40, from September 2022 to December 2025. The names in first place in those months: Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Russia, Vietnam, France, South Africa, Brazil, Japan. The other 16 are scattered over 915 months. September 2022 is the month of Xi Jinping's first trip abroad since the pandemic began, to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (14–16 September). The period was not chosen beforehand: it is where the run begins. In some months the gap is one to three articles; the table below shows them all.

In 2019, @AirMovingDevice on Twitter showed, in two grids of flags, which country came first in the paper's headlines, month by month from 1947 to 2018. Here whole articles are counted, text included, up to 2025. Counted in headlines only, by the same rule, another country leads alone in 198 months and shares first place in 25 more (in 22 of them with the United States or the Soviet Union).

How many of the articles mention the rest of the world#

In 1947, 22% of the articles in the transcription mention at least one foreign country. In 1963 it is 71%, the most, and in 1984, 44%. In 2022 it is 21%, the least in all 80 years; in 2025, 23%.

The percentages describe the transcription. The length of articles, the number of pages and what was typed up change from one decade to the next, so the percentages do not measure the paper's interest directly. That is why a country's share is worked out here from the articles that mention a foreign country, not from all of them.

All 197 country names#

Each row opens the country in the card above. A name without a rank has other uses in Chinese; its number includes those occurrences.

How it was counted#

The text. The source is an unofficial transcription of the People's Daily, with a date, a page label, a headline and a text for each article, from May 1946 to December 2025. After 22,299 duplicates that repeat another record exactly were removed, 1,991,747 articles remain, in 955 months; January 1971 is missing from the transcription. It is not an official archive of the newspaper, and what was transcribed differs from one period to another. Everything this page says about the paper is counted in that transcription.

The rule. An article counts for a country if its headline or text contains one of the country's Chinese names. The dictionary has 205 entries: today's states (without China), plus Palestine, the Holy See and twelve entries that are historical or counted separately (the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Sikkim, the two Germanys, the two Vietnams, the two Yemens and the two Congos). There are 322 names and 110 strings that contain a country name but mean something else and are set aside (内蒙古, Inner Mongolia; 印度洋, the Indian Ocean). One-character abbreviations (美, 苏) and their compounds (中美, 美方) are not counted; 美帝 and 苏修 are.

Names are counted, not states. A number from a year in which the state did not yet exist belongs to the name: a Soviet republic, a colony, a region. Each country's card shows the names counted and the years in which they occur. Some names are counted only between certain years, because in the others they meant something else: 安哥拉 is, in the paper's first years, Ankara, the capital of Turkey, and counts for Angola only from 1955; 孟加拉 is Bengal before 1971; 捷克 is Czechoslovakia up to and including 1992. Germany, Vietnam, Yemen and Congo include the articles that mention one of their parts.

How often the dictionary is wrong. 17,778 occurrences were read one by one, from every decade, along with 596 occurrences that the rules had rejected. The reading was done by language models, not by a person who knows Chinese. By their verdict, 97.2% of the counted occurrences did mention the country; weighted by how often each name occurs, 99.7%. Of those rejected, 44 were about the country after all. Of 2,388 occurrences read a second time, independently, the verdict was the same for 2,372.

Names without a rank. A country is ranked only if, by the sample, at least 95% of the occurrences of its names are about it; in that estimate each name weighs as much as it occurs. Seven names are under that bar and appear with their number, without a rank, and as an outlined circle on the map: Dominica, El Salvador, Mali, Mongolia, Oman, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sudan. The card of each says what else the name means.

The rank. A country's rank in a year is 1 plus the number of names with more articles that year, among the 190 names that are ranked. The share is the country's number of articles divided by the number of articles that mention at least one foreign country (786,311 in all, 39.5% of the transcription).

The dates. In the months when China kept summer time, from 1986 to 1991, the transcription dates each issue one day early; the dates were corrected before counting by month and by day.

What the page does not show. The number of articles that mention a country says nothing about what they said, or whether the country was their subject. An article that lists twenty countries counts for each. For Romania there is a separate page with translated headlines: Romania in China's newspaper; its total, 16,793 articles, is the same as the one here.

The headline of 14 July 1978. The translation was made for this page. Its second part follows the English of the note in Peking Review (No. 29, 21 July 1978): “forced cessation of aid to Albania and bringing back of its experts”. 我, the pronoun by which the paper writes of China (“our side”), is given as “China”.

• Articles per year, all countries (CSV)
• Articles per month, all countries (CSV)
• Articles per month, counted in headlines only (CSV)
• The dictionary and the measured precision (CSV)
• Articles that use only abbreviations, per year (CSV)

Sources

• Papersnake, “people_daily_news” (Hugging Face): an unofficial transcription of the People's Daily, 1946–2025, one file per year; read on 4 October 2026
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, the “China's relations with…” pages (中国同…的关系) of the countries in the table of breaks; read on 4 October 2026
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, history of relations with Central and Eastern Europe (for North Macedonia, 1999 and 2001)
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, “China's relations with the Republic of Korea” (relations established on 24 August 1992)
• Peking Review, No. 29, 21 July 1978, pp. 20–23: the Chinese foreign ministry's note of 7 July 1978 to the Albanian embassy (facsimile, marxists.org)
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, the spokesman's statement of 11 May 1999 on the strike on the embassy in Belgrade (“early morning of 8 May, Beijing time”)
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, 17 September 2022: Xi Jinping in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, 14–16 September, “the first trip abroad since the pandemic began”
• @AirMovingDevice, Twitter, 27 June 2019: the country most mentioned in People's Daily headlines, month by month, 1947–2018
• Li, Zhang, Jiang and Zhong, “Domestic Politics and Editorial Control Over Foreign News Coverage in the People’s Daily, 1993–2022”, Journal of Contemporary China 35 (158), pp. 1303–1319, published online 8 April 2025
• Natural Earth, countries at 1:50,000,000 (public domain): the outline of the land on the map, in the Equal Earth projection
• United Nations, UNEF I background: Israel attacks Egypt on 29 October 1956; Britain and France begin air attacks on 31 October
• U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian: Ending the Vietnam War, 1969–1973: the Paris peace accords on Vietnam, signed on 27 January 1973
• U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian: The 1973 Arab-Israeli War: Egypt and Syria attack Israel on 6 October 1973
• 中华人民共和国外交部：《中日和平友好条约》的签订: Deng Xiaoping visits Japan; the ratifications of the peace and friendship treaty are exchanged in Tokyo
• Olympic Council of Asia: Beijing 1990: the Asian Games in Beijing, 22 September – 7 October 1990
• Japan Meteorological Agency: The 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake: the earthquake in Japan, 11 March 2011
• FIFA: 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia: the football World Cup in Russia, 14 June – 15 July 2018
• 中国政府网，2022年11月13日: Xi Jinping in Bali (14–17 November) for the G20 summit and in Bangkok (17–19 November 2022) for the APEC meeting
• 中华人民共和国外交部，2023年3月22日: Xi Jinping's state visit to Russia, 20–22 March 2023
• 中华人民共和国外交部，2023年10月17日: Indonesia's president in Beijing, 17 October 2023; the Jakarta–Bandung high-speed railway enters service
• 《人民日报》，2023年12月8日: Xi Jinping's state visit to Vietnam, 12–13 December 2023
• 中华人民共和国外交部，2024年5月5日: Xi Jinping's state visit to France, from 5 May 2024
• 中华人民共和国外交部，2024年8月23日: the summit of the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation, Beijing, 4–6 September 2024
• 《人民日报》，2024年10月19日: Xi Jinping in Kazan, Russia, for the BRICS summit, 22–24 October 2024
• 《人民日报海外版》，2024年11月9日: Xi Jinping in Peru, 13–17 November, and in Brazil, 17–21 November 2024
• 中华人民共和国外交部，2025年9月3日: the gathering and parade in Beijing for 80 years since victory in the war against Japan, 3 September 2025

On the same subject#

• Romania in China's newspaper: 80 years of Romanian–Chinese relationsThe same archive, one country: every year with its count and three translated headlines.
• 1989 in China's People's Daily: the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, day by dayOne year, issue by issue: where the news of six East European countries stood on the page.