Instead of providing purely ideological explanation, this paper is designed to investigate the roles of China in the bloc of global authoritarian regimes as international source, through Social Network Analysis (SNA) by software UCINET, based on Chinese foreign relations (diplomacy, investment, trade, aid, human rights, and military, etc.) with authoritarians during 2001-2010. This paper will regard the group of authoritarian regimes as one Whole Network. It tries to explore following questions, including 1) What roles has China played in authoritarian network on the five events, like coordinator, consultant, gatekeeper, representative, or liaison? 2) What resources and by what ways have China provided for authoritarian peers to maintain the regime nature? 3) To what extent does China hold relative power and exerts its influence in the network? 4) Why would China like to support the authoritarian regimes from the perspective of network analysis? The analysis will apply the concepts like Centrality, Hierarchy, Position, Core/Periphery, etc. to solve questions. This research will firstly select relevant states according to the Polity IV data (2006-2010) and Democracy Index (2006-2010) by Economist Intelligence Unit. Polity IV provides states named “Autocracy” (score from -10 to 16) and Democracy Index lists the states marked “Authoritarian Regimes” (score less than 4.0). The target states will include all states mentioned in two categories. Secondly, this research will collect related information on diplomacy, investment, trade, aid and military support as the events between China and its peers from the Chinese Yearbooks and global related reports. Finally, an actor-by-actor matrix and an actor-by-event matrix (1 or 0) will be formed for the analysis of whole network and 2-mode network. If data is available, it will particularly focus China’s attitude (in the rhetorical form on People’s Daily) during crises that authoritarian regimes meet, which will be a supplementary to the above discussion.
