Replication Data for: China Watchers

Recent debates have raised concerns about how academia, just like policy-makers, rely on country experts when trying to understand the politics of authoritarian regimes. This study argues that one possible source of bias is the experts’ network of affiliations and interactions with each other, and that we should therefore make the social background and networks of country experts more transparent. We implement this by examining experts on contemporary Chinese politics using a nomination process to establish a list of over 2,200 such experts. We find that US-based and -educated male academics still form the core of this community, but that younger cohorts appear to be more diverse in terms of educational background, gender and geographic location. Our findings provide not just the first analysis of the global China Watcher community, but also speak to current debates about the reliability of aggregated expert assessments.