A contrast of the degree of activity among the three major powers, USA, China, and Russia: Insights from media reports

Determining the influence or strength of a country has become increasingly important for the world's politics, economics, culture, foreign policy, international trade, military, among others. While the issue has been tackled by researchers for decades, the results obtained so far have been largely static and unsatisfactory. By constructing daily matrices from a massive political events data, the Global database of events, location (language), and tone (GDELT), which covers all the political events data (over 300 million) since 1979, we report a scheme for quantifying the degree of activity of each country based on singular value decomposition of the matrices. Such media-based activity measure reflects to a good degree the strength or influence of a country, though the relation between this activity measure and the influence/strength of a country may not be linear. We show that among the three major powers, USA, Russian, and China, USA is not only consistently ranked first, but also its activity has been dramatically increasing since 2003. This highly suggests that the commonly believed decay of US power is more psychological than factual. The rate of increasing activity of USA has become negative around 2010, after its plan to largely end the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.