Measuring Chinese economic sanctions 1949–2020: Introducing the China TIES dataset

Abstract

Research on China's use of economic sanctions has proliferated in recent decades, yet coverage of Chinese sanctions in existing sanctions datasets is both inconsistent and incomplete. This article introduces both a new dataset on sanctions involving China and a research framework for expanding knowledge about non-Western economic sanctions more generally. The Chinese Economic Sanctions dataset (aka China TIES) includes 135 episodes where China is the sender and 88 episodes where it is the target from 1949 to 2020. Over 70% of our cases were not captured by the existing datasets. We use the Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions dataset (TIES v.4) as a baseline for identifying and coding sanctions episodes and provide a set of standardized narratives documenting each episode with secondary sources. The result is a dataset that is interoperable with TIES but also contains new variables that better capture the informal nature of many Chinese sanctions. We describe the dataset, paying special attention to the ways Chinese sanctions differ from other senders, and we present descriptive statistics for some of the key variables, highlighting the evolution of China's sanctions use over time.