Dynamic Evolution of Multinational Relation’s Network in the South China Sea Arbitration Based on Massive Media Data Analysis

Abstract

Right after the South China Sea Arbitration was concluded on 12th July 2016, it quickly attracted much attention in the world and became one of the international hot events. It is of great importance to infer the dynamic evolution of international relations before and after the hot events through quantitative analysis. International relations can be viewed as many complex social networks, whose structures are often profoundly changed with the emergence of hot events. To explore how multinational relation’s network was affected by the South China Sea Arbitration, Global Database of Events, Location, and Tone (GDELT), is used in this study. GDELT is a massive political science data created for studying world-wide political conflict and instability and contains more than 400-million geolocated events with global coverage from 1979 to the present. We have extracted nearly 30,000 events from July 5 to 25, 2016 related to the South China Sea Arbitration from GDELT, constructed the relation networks of the relevant countries, and found that the structures of the networks changed significantly during this course.