Insight · Diplomacy

Eight diplomatic switches, as seen from China's flagship newscast

Since 2016, eight countries that previously maintained ties with Taipei have established or restored diplomatic relations with Beijing. Each switch follows the same visible pattern in CCTV Xinwen Lianbo: a near-zero baseline, an announcement-day broadcast (linked below for every country), a mention spike in the switch year or the year after, then an elevated baseline as state visits and cooperation coverage follows.

Methodology

• · Counts: GET /v1/news?q=<country name in Chinese>&group_by=year — broadcast items containing the exact country name, from full transcripts of every Xinwen Lianbo since 2016.
• · Announcement links are the original CCTV broadcast pages, retrieved from the same dataset (each item stores its source URL) — verify any number yourself with one query.
• · Switch dates are the dates of the joint communiqués as reported in the linked broadcasts.
• · Mentions in non-diplomatic contexts (sports, disasters) are included; counts are items, not phrase frequency. The latest year is partial. Data as of 2026-06-11.

Chart any country's coverage the same way via the Xinwen Lianbo full-text API. More findings: Data Insights.