In 2022, China's military, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), had around 2.185 million active-duty military personnel. Together with reserve military and paramilitary groups it had a total force of around four million people.

This dataset contains code and metadata for the paper "Vectors of Violence: Legitimation and Distribution of State Power in the People’s Liberation Army Daily (Jiefangjun Bao)." We provide the MALLET topic model, the lists of Chinese stopwords and violent terms, the Python code for acquiring the journal articles, the Python code to reproduce the results analyzed in the paper (two tables and three figures), the fine-tuned BERT model, and the metadata for all PLA Daily articles considered in the article, together with their respective violence scores.