1. Introduction

In the database, we provide detailed biographical information including birth year, gender, ethnicity, county-level birth place, education level, university alma maters, year of entering and retiring the CCP, work experience prior to becoming a CCP member, revolutionary and purged background, and all the job trajectories that each cadre had experienced since 1949. In particular, we build up the most extensive job codes that can virtually identify almost every party, military, and government departments and sub-departments from the central level to the county level. The database also includes directly administered organs of the state council, bureaus administrated by each ministry, temporary or cooperative offices, leading small groups in party and government, mass organizations led by the CCP, and abolished departments from 1949. There are 2411 administrative units, 1040 universities and colleges, and 15000 job specifications in the codebook.

Building up this large-scale database only with manual efforts needs too much time and energy. I wrote a Visual Basic script that automatically scraps, parses, and compiles web-based biographical information from a variety of open-source web-pages including encyclopedia, newspapers, blogs, government websites, and so on. The main sources will be cited along with the codebook. From unstructured text-formatting data, the automated web-scrapper has achieved over 90% accuracy rate on demographic variables and around 80% detection rate on career variables. I am currently working on improving accuracy and detection rates of the automation processes. After the program stores the scrapped data in our local data-server, we manually double-check and confirm the stored information. You can download the automated programs, here.