Replication Data for: The decade-long growth of government-authored news media in China under Xi Jinping

Replication dataset for the paper accepted by PNAS titled "The decade-long growth of government-authored news media in China under Xi Jinping". State propaganda campaigns are influential but difficult to detect by design. We develop a method for identifying government-authored propaganda by linking leaked propaganda directives to the behavior of millions of newspaper articles published over the last decade in China. We find that propaganda is quite common—even in commercial newspapers—and has become even more prevalent and homogeneous under Xi Jinping. Using the case study of domestic coverage of COVID-19, we show how the government used propaganda to constrain reporting on the outbreak before the Wuhan lockdown.