Emile Dirks PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto writes. In the lead up to the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, I’d like to bring to your attention a project I’m releasing today:
The China Drug, Crime and Detention Database Project
This project is the first open access quantitative database focused on Chinese government drug policy, China’s crime rates and the country’s justice system. Spanning 500+ categories and drawing on data from more than 200 publicly available sources, the database can be used to examine a range of issues, including:
- changes in China’s domestic security system;
- the total number of people detained in more than half a dozen forms of detention;
- arrest rates for criminal and administrative offenses;
- judicial sentencing patterns, including recent data on sentencing for serious offenses related to national security;
- the growing use of community corrections, probation and parole;
- changes in China’s domestic illicit drug economy from a market dominated by heroin to one dominated by methamphetamine;
- the expansion of drug harm reduction programs and the continued use of drug detention;
- the demographics of the growing population of registered users of drugs;
- the budget of the Ministry of Public Security and People’s Armed Police;
- how trends in China compare with those of other countries like the United States.
As an open access project, researchers, journalists, advocates, and organizations are encouraged to use the data in their own publications. While the database will eventually be searchable online, for the time being it’s only available as a downloadable Excel file
The database is also available through Zenodo:
Documents listing all database categories and explaining data points for which there exist multiple estimates, and a bibliography of all sources used, are also available for download in both English and simplified Chinese. The database will be continually updated and users are invited to submit data or point out errors in need of correction.
In the future, data visualizations will be released. Over the next year, I will also be developing smaller sub-national databases for each of China’s provinces, autonomous regions and centrally administered cities, so that trends within China can be compared.
The release of this database comes at a time of growing concern among observers of China in and outside of the country. China’s expanding domestic surveillance system, the Xinjiang re-education camps and the proposed Hong Kong-PRC extradition bill all point to the deepening of authoritarian control under President Xi Jinping. By collating data on crime, sentencing, detention and policing in China from 1990 to the present day, these troubling developments can be placed in a wider historical and institutional context.
If you happen to be in Hong Kong next month, or know anyone who will be, a launch event for the database will be held at the University of Hong Kong on Monday June 17 (see the flier for full details).
Please feel free to share the site with anyone you think may be interested. And if you have any questions or suggestions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me through email or Twitter (@emiledirks).
Finally, apologies if I email any of you off-list and you receive a similar message later today. I have a rather extensive list of people and organizations I will be contacting, and I’m not sure how many are also members of this listserv.
Sincerely,
Emile Dirks
PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
