Data on law enforcement by Chinese police

Web Scraping

Administrative Penalties

12 million administrative punishment documents (2018 ~ 2023)

Author

Affiliation

Xinzhuo Huang

HKUST SOSC

Published

June 6, 2023

Modified

November 24, 2023

Data Compliance

All of the data is publicly available and any sensitive personal inforamtion has been removed. This data is solely for my research purposes.

Overview

Elite challenges and mass uprisings pose significant threats to authoritarian regimes (Svolik 2012). State coercion has been crucial in addressing the uncertainty induced by these issues (Cai and Chen 2022). This dataset concentrates on the potent instruments of state coercion in China, specifically administrative punishment by police, to explore various topics related to Chinese politics (Stern and Hassid 2012).

Svolik, Milan W. 2012. The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139176040.

Cai, Yongshun, and Chih-Jou Jay Chen. 2022. State and Social Protests in China. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108982924.

Stern, Rachel E., and Jonathan Hassid. 2012. “Amplifying Silence: Uncertainty and Control Parables in Contemporary China.” Comparative Political Studies 45 (10): 1230–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414011434295.

The author has scraped over 12 million data points from various apps and websites in China. Using httr2 and V8, data collection can be made easier with functional programming, allowing for seamless multithreading and efficient error handling. For more technical details about the web scraper, please refer to my blog.

Population Data distribution

Sample Data

Examples of Data Application: Policing Protest in Jilin Province

Policing protest is a key topic in the study of social movements (Elliott et al. 2022). Based on these 12 million policing documents, the author has identified about 100,000 instances of social protests happening in China.

Elliott, Thomas, Jennifer Earl, Thomas V Maher, and Heidi Reynolds-Stenson. 2022. “Softer Policing or the Institutionalization of Protest? Decomposing Changes in Observed Protest Policing over Time.” American Journal of Sociology 127 (4): 1311–65.

Utilizing the geocoding R package developed by the author, we have obtained the geographic coordinates of where the protests take place.

Where did social protests occur in Jilin Province, China?

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@online{xinzhuo2023,
  author = {Xinzhuo, Huang},
  title = {Data on Law Enforcement by {Chinese} Police},
  date = {2023-06-06},
  url = {https://xinzhuo.work/data/penality},
  langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Xinzhuo, Huang. 2023. “Data on Law Enforcement by Chinese Police.” June 6, 2023. https://xinzhuo.work/data/penality.