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Faces of Diplomacy

Facial-emotion recognition on five years of China Daily imagery: how a state-run outlet pictures allies and adversaries.

2025-03 · 2020 – 2025 · 18 views · · 0 comments

Webscraping Face Recognition Emotion Classification Correlation Analysis

State media chooses its pictures deliberately. Faces of Diplomacy scrapes every China Daily image of world leaders published between 2020 and 2025, identifies 225 heads of state and government with a purpose-built face-recognition model, and classifies the emotion on each face with a vision transformer — asking whether the emotional register of coverage tracks how closely a leader's country votes with China at the United Nations.

Research Questions

Whose faces does a state-run outlet choose to show, and how often?
Do the emotions on those faces track geopolitical alignment with Beijing?
Is the framing a crude positive–negative split, or something subtler?

The pipeline

Coverage was collected with keyword-driven Selenium scraping of China Daily. A face-recognition SVM — trained on 22,607 Wikimedia portraits of 225 de facto national leaders — verified 5,202 published images. Each face was cropped, normalized, and augmented, then passed to a ViT-based classifier that scores seven expressions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutrality, sadness, and surprise.

Who gets pictured

Attention is extraordinarily concentrated: Xi Jinping alone accounts for 1,926 of the 5,202 verified depictions — nearly 37 percent. Beyond China, the outlet's visual gaze follows geopolitical weight: the United States, Russia, and China's regional partners dominate the picture desk, while much of the world barely appears at all. The treemap view above drills from continents down to individual leaders.

Emotion tracks alignment

Sorting countries by their UNGA voting coincidence with China reveals a systematic pattern. Neutrality — the composed, statesmanlike face — is significantly more common among leaders of aligned countries (Pearson's r = −0.21), while anger rises with diplomatic distance (r = 0.25, significant after Bonferroni correction). Happiness, contrary to intuition, shows no significant relationship: the dividing line is not smiling versus scowling but composure versus emotional charge. In the heatmap view above, every country's emotional profile can be sorted, filtered, and inspected cell by cell.

Reading the pattern

The result is subtler than a positive–negative dichotomy. China Daily frames allied leaders with emotional restraint — calm, controlled, diplomatic — while leaders from countries at odds with Beijing are more often caught in expressive, agitated moments. A caveat applies at the tails: for countries with only a handful of images, a single unflattering photograph can dominate their profile, which is why outliers like Cyprus or Slovenia should be read with care.

This project has an interactive viewer. It works best on a larger screen, but you can open it full-screen here.