Foreign Ministry Strategic Communication in the South China Sea: A Corpus of Official Stat

A curated corpus of 13 years of official foreign ministry statements from three Southeast Asian nations on the South China Sea. Mark Aca compiled this dataset at Harvard Dataverse, providing machine-readable text and structured metadata for analysis. The resource captures outward-facing diplomatic communication intended for international audiences, focusing on maritime disputes.

Use Cases

• Conduct longitudinal trend analysis of diplomatic rhetoric based on the 2013–2025 time range.
• Perform comparative content analysis across countries based on institutional consistency of foreign ministry sources.
• Study patterns of rhetorical convergence or divergence based on thematic indicators like references to international law or sovereignty claims.
• Analyze state signaling behavior in the information domain based on the focus on outward-facing diplomatic statements.

Strengths

• Covers a 13-year time range from 2013 to 2025, enabling long-term trend analysis.
• Ensures institutional consistency and comparability by restricting sources to the foreign ministries of three specific countries.
• Documents are provided in machine-readable text formats to facilitate computational analysis and reproducibility.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for certain quantitative methods.
• Data may reflect source bias inherent to the selected three countries and their official diplomatic channels.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse, author Mark Aca.

Collection Method

Constructed through a multi-stage process involving collection, verification, text standardization, and file linkage.

Time Range

2013 to 2025

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-13 16:34:35; freshness should be verified.

Geography

South China Sea, with official statements from the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia.