Party and State Leaders of China. Biographical Data (1978-2019)

The dataset contains coded information on 71 people who fall within the category of “Party and State Leaders” of China. This category, although not clearly defined in official documents, is often used in the state media and governmental papers. The list of names is available on Baidu, a Chinese online search engine. To collect data on these leaders the authors used the official website of CCP, Xinhua as well as ChinaVitae, a database collected by Carnegie-Tsinghua Center. When any contradictions in biography data were found, the information provided by official websites was considered true. Since it is impossible to find every significant episode in the lives of every elite member in open or official sources, the team decided to register data since 1978, the year when the famous policy of reforms and openness was proclaimed.

The dataset consists of three spreadsheets. The first one contains biographical data organized in the following columns: name, birth year, party membership year, province of birth, the township of birth, organ, department, position, year of assuming the post, year of leaving the post. The team chose to code the organs hierarchically as far as local bodies were concerned, i.e. the prefecture-level committee was labeled differently from the province-level committee. Original names were kept for individual organs, such as various mass organizations or enterprises’ names to reduce the risk of identifying false connections. The team further assigned a department within the organ where it was possible and necessary: the information on a department within prefecture-level instances and non-state organs, was not always available. Each year between 1978 and 2019 is also registered in a separate column to identify connections among the elite members.

By connection, the team means the experience of studying or working at the same university/organ within a given year. Each connection is assigned weight, the largest being four: working in the same province, the same organ, the same town within a province (for provincial and municipal levels), and the same department within the organ. There are several exceptions as regards identifying connections. First, the same province and township of birth only count as one connection for the entire career. Second, the authors do not consider people who work in Beijing to have territorial connections. Only if two elite members work in the same organ in Beijing does the coincidence count as a connection. Third, the authors exclude CC CPC membership as a type of connection since the organ does not operate on a daily basis.

The team registered connections from 1978 to 2019 and created an unweighted spreadsheet containing 5,832 rows (edges). The authors calculated the weight of connections within each existing pair of elite members and removed duplicates to create a weighted edge list. The connections are undirected, and there is no difference between where a name sits in the A-B connection pair.

本数据集收录了71位属于中国“党派及国家领导人”类别的编码信息。此类别虽未在官方文件中明确界定，但在国家媒体及政府文件中却频繁被引用。名单可通过百度，一家中国在线搜索引擎查阅。为收集这些领导人的信息，作者们参考了中国共产党中央委员会官方网站、新华通讯社以及卡内基-清华中心所收集的ChinaVitae数据库。一旦发现传记数据的矛盾之处，则官方网站提供的信息被认定为准确。鉴于在公开或官方资源中难以找到每位精英成员生活中的每一个重要事件，研究团队决定自1978年起记录数据，即改革开放政策宣布的那一年。

数据集由三张电子表格组成。第一张表格包含按以下列组织的生活传记数据：姓名、出生年份、入党年份、出生省份、出生乡镇、机构、部门、职位、任职起始年份、离职年份。对于地方机构，团队选择按照层级对机构进行编码，即地区级委员会与省级委员会被赋予不同的标签。为降低识别错误关联的风险，保留了个人机构的原始名称，例如各种群众组织或企业名称。在可能且必要时，团队进一步为机构内部指定了部门：在地区级实例和非国家机构中，部门信息并不总是可用。1978年至2019年每年的信息也分别登记在单独的列中，以识别精英成员之间的联系。

所谓联系，指的是在特定年份内于同一大学/机构学习或工作的经历。每个联系都被赋予一个权重，最高为四：在同一省份工作、在同一机构工作、在同一省份的同一乡镇（对于省级和市级层次）以及在同一机构内的同一部门工作。在识别联系方面存在一些例外。首先，出生省份和乡镇在整个职业生涯中仅计为一个联系。其次，作者们不将工作在北京的人视为具有地域联系，只有当两位精英成员在北京的同一机构工作时，这种巧合才被视为一个联系。第三，作者们排除了中国共产党中央委员会成员资格作为联系类型，因为该机构并不在日常运营中。

研究团队记录了1978年至2019年的联系，并创建了一个包含5,832行（边）的无权重电子表格。作者们计算了每对现有精英成员之间联系的权重，并删除了重复项，以创建一个加权边列表。这些联系是无向的，在A-B连接对中，名称的位置并无差异。