PropagandaScope is live: tracking keyword propagation across China's provincial party newspapers
A quantitative tool for tracking how political keywords propagate through China's provincial press
When the center issues a political signal, which provinces fall in line immediately? Which ones drag their feet for three days? Which ones never mention it at all?
That delay is itself a signal.
I have spent the past few months building a tool to answer this question. Last week it went live: propagandascope.org
PropagandaScope automatically scrapes the full text of 20 Chinese provincial party newspapers every day and scans them against 158 political keywords, quantifying how quickly and how intensely each province echoes central discourse.
The database currently holds nearly 700,000 articles dating back to 2023. You can search any Chinese keyword and see its daily frequency across all 20 newspapers, each province’s amplification ratio relative to People’s Daily, and a heatmap of its distribution across China.
A few examples.
Search "铸牢中华民族共同体意识" (forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation) and you will see that Xinjiang Daily and Tibet Daily amplify this phrase at several times the rate of People's Daily. Southeastern coastal provinces barely mention it. The gap tells you exactly where the center thinks this message needs reinforcing.
Search “鲁比奥” (Rubio) and you can trace the timeline of this keyword appearing across provincial newspapers after Trump nominated him as Secretary of State. Which provinces reported first, which followed later. The differences are immediately visible.
Search "新质生产力" (new quality productive forces), the most important economic slogan in China in 2024, and you can trace the full lifecycle of a political phrase. Xi Jinping coined it in September 2023. After the Politburo elevated it as a national strategic priority, mentions surged dozens of times across provincial newspapers. Then it plateaued. PropagandaScope lets you watch a slogan being born, peak, and decay.
These analyses used to require manually checking each newspaper. Now they take seconds.
Features currently live include keyword search, amplification analysis, provincial map visualization, daily timelines, and sensitive date annotations. Planned features include anomaly detection, keyword co-occurrence analysis, and leadership appearance frequency monitoring.
I am building this project alone, with no institutional backing. Servers, domain, and development tools cost roughly $300 per month. All features and data are free and open to everyone. That will not change.
The database is growing by thousands of articles every day. As it scales, I will need to migrate to a larger server capable of running a more advanced database and full-text search system. That upgrade is the next major milestone, and subscriber support will make it possible.
If this tool is useful to your research or reporting, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers can submit one custom keyword per month and I will generate a dedicated transmission analysis graphic that you can use directly in your articles, reports, or presentations.