About
Official defense and security texts, preserved as published and analyzed in context.
What this project does
Indo-Pacific Record preserves official defense and security texts, with translations where available, and records what collection found, missed, or could not retrieve. Collection gaps are published because an archive with invisible gaps cannot support responsible comparison.
The project began in 2026 as China Mil Watch, collecting official Chinese military and security publications. That record continues, unbroken and unrenumbered, as the China Desk. The umbrella name changed because the scope did: a China-only masthead could not honestly carry a second desk. Additional desks appear only after their source universe is documented and collection has proved reliable, and they are labeled by what they actually do until then.
Pages published as China Mil Watch — including every issue of The PLA Watch — keep their original titles, dates, issue numbers and URLs. They are not rewritten to look as though they appeared under this name, because they did not.
This is not comprehensive Indo-Pacific monitoring. It is a record of what a declared, published, checkable set of institutions said, with the gaps in that record shown rather than smoothed. Institutional authority is a claim about position, not truthfulness: this project records what an institution declared, preserves the source, and keeps that record separate from any interpretation of it.
The project analyzes public institutional discourse. Official statements show what an institution said; they do not by themselves establish policy, capability, intent, or whether a described event occurred. Coverage is selective.
Who makes it
Benjamin Yang — Creator and Editor
Benjamin Yang studies International Affairs at George Washington University’s Elliott School, with interests in U.S.–China relations, public diplomacy, and security affairs. He writes The PLA Watch and maintains the project’s collection pipeline.
Corrections are made in the underlying source record and republished, rather than silently patched on the rendered page.
Citing this archive
Snapshot — 2026-08-26. Cite as: Indo-Pacific Record. China Desk Corpus. Snapshot — 2026-08-26. 3,574 records. Benjamin Yang, Creator and Editor.
Record-level and edition citation formats, the meaning of every stored field, and the corpus changelog are in the Corpus Guide.