Hcss report

rhetorical
military 
assertive events than it did 
factual
ones. Russia too seems to talk softer than it acts 
(even if the discrepancy is smaller than in the Chinese case and is also declining). 
Factual military assertiveness
(red and blue) is however much more pronounced 
across the entire period, with a slightly more marked presence of the positive/neutral 
type (blue) overall, although its decline is larger than the small increase in negative 
factual assertiveness (red). Both tend to experience peaks simultaneously: around 
September 2004, September 2006, September 2007, September 2008, September 
2009, and September 2010. On some occasions, the negative factual assertiveness 
was stronger that the positive/neutral one (in 2004, 2006, 2007, 2009 and 2010). But 
contrary to the Chinese case, there is little to suggest an overall dominance of positive/
neutral rhetoric over the negative one, or vice-versa.
Cross-Country Comparison
A first important observation is that the overall levels for Russia’s assertiveness 
remain higher than the Chinese ones. In 1990, Russia started at about twice the level 
of China’s assertiveness. In the decades since then, China has been closing that gap – 
especially in the past 5 years. But it still remains below Russia. 
Both countries’ assertiveness is mostly expressed in the diplomatic arena, where their 
figures are very close to each other. In the economic arena, Russia appears to be a lot 
more assertive than China, although China saw a bigger increase – especially in the 
2006-2007 period. Militarily speaking, Russia again scores somewhat higher than 
China, but that gap seemed to be almost closed by August 2013. Zooming in on the 
military assertiveness, the results reveal that China is more inclined to factual and 
negative attitudes than Russia is.
When we look specifically at the events that were coded as military assertiveness and 
their breakdown in positive/neutral vs. positive and factual vs rhetorical, we note that 
both China’s and Russia’s actions seem to speak louder than their words – a gap that 
is bigger for China (and growing) than it is for Russia (where it is declining). 
What Do the Official Websites Tell Us? Off-Base and N-grams
The second dataset we turn to is an official one. In our analysis of GDELT-data, we 
already pointed out that both countries tend to speak more softly than they behave. 
But that was based on an automated analysis of what was said about those countries 
in newspaper articles. We also wanted to find out – and construct a similarly 

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