About Tracking People's Daily

Tracking People's Daily

Tracking People's Daily is an English-language newsletter by Manoj Kewalramani, a political scientist at the Takshashila Institution in Bengaluru, India, that offers a breakdown, summary and analysis of the weekday editions of the People's Daily (Renmin Ribao), the flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. Published on Substack at trackingpeoplesdaily.substack.com, it reads Beijing's most authoritative party organ the way Kremlinologists once read Pravda — page by page, story by story — and explains, in plain English, what the Chinese leadership is signalling to its own system and to the world. The Takshashila Institution lists the newsletter among its publications with over 10,000 subscribers; it is recommended in the University of Pennsylvania's library guide to Chinese news media, and was profiled by Table.Media in November 2024 under the headline 'Manoj Kewalramani reads the People's Daily every day'. Kewalramani, who chairs Takshashila's geostrategy work and previously spent over a decade as a journalist in India and China, began the daily tracking in March or April 2020 and has sustained it for years, turning a personal reading discipline into one of the most-used open windows onto Chinese official discourse. In this directory the newsletter is filed under Beijing by the rollout's convention for foreign-based China-watch outlets; its author and institutional home are in Bengaluru, and this profile states that plainly.

The author: from newsrooms to Takshashila

Manoj Kewalramani is Chairperson of the Geostrategy Programme at the Takshashila Institution — an independent centre for research and education in public policy in Bengaluru — where he is also described as a China studies fellow and chair of its Indo-Pacific research work. His research interests, per his institutional and East Asia Forum biographies, range from Chinese politics and great-power competition to how India can work with like-minded partners amid structural shifts in the international order. Before academia he spent over a decade working as a journalist in India and China, where he helped set up digital newsrooms and train young journalists — a newsroom formation that shows in the newsletter's method, which is closer to a foreign editor's daily read of a rival capital's paper of record than to academic textual analysis. He is the author of Smokeless War: China's Quest for Geopolitical Dominance (Bloomsbury India, 2021), a study of China's political, diplomatic, economic and narrative responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, and of Taming the Dragon: A Manifesto for a New Modus Vivendi with China (Rupa, 2026). He also writes a weekly newsletter, Eye on China, tracking developments in China from an Indian perspective, and hosts The Great Power Show, described by Takshashila as a leading international relations podcast. Since 2025 he has also been a Senior Associate Fellow at MERICS, the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies, which hosted an expert conversation with him in September 2025 and introduced him as a leading scholar of political developments in Beijing.

What the newsletter does, each weekday

The format is disciplined and distinctive. Each weekday edition takes that day's People's Daily and works through it: a 'Big Picture' summary of what the edition, taken as a whole, is and is not saying; then a page-by-page account — Page 1's lead stories and their placement, the domestic policy pages, the international page — summarising the significant reports, commentaries and speeches, and noting emphases, formulations and omissions. A surviving early edition, from 19 June 2020 on Medium, shows the method in miniature: the big picture records that there was no coverage of the Ladakh border situation in the People's Daily that day (the PLA Daily covered it briefly on page 4), while the edition's big stories were the US Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, a Belt and Road video conference and movement on Hong Kong's national security law; the page-by-page notes then track Xi Jinping's appearances, the NPC Standing Committee's deliberations, and a page dominated by reaction to the Uyghur act, down to the composition of page 16's international coverage. The omissions are treated as data, not absence of data: what the party's flagship chooses not to tell its domestic readers on a given day is, for this newsletter's purposes, among the most informative things about it. Over years, that daily accumulation becomes a searchable record of how official Chinese discourse evolves — which slogans rise, which formulations harden or soften, which foreign countries and issues move up or down the page order.

Why the People's Daily is worth tracking

The premise of the newsletter is that the People's Daily remains the single most authoritative text of the Chinese party-state: the newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, in which leadership speeches, policy signals, personnel clues and authorised interpretations appear first and in their canonical wording. For governments, investors and researchers outside China, understanding Beijing's intentions requires reading that wording closely and in sequence — but the paper is published in Chinese, in a formulaic register that rewards expertise, and few foreign institutions can justify a specialist reading it in full every morning. Tracking People's Daily performs that labour publicly. Kewalramani has explained, in a 2022 Q&A with The Wire China reflecting on two years of daily reading, that he began in March or April 2020 by scanning the People's Daily occasionally for his research, found that what Beijing said at home increasingly mattered abroad because 'everything is interconnected', and began putting out summaries on a blog that grew into the newsletter. He also described the craft honestly: the paper can be inaccessible at first, but it has an order and a structure, and once a reader learns that rhythm, patterns and new lines of inquiry emerge. The newsletter, in other words, sells learned pattern-recognition — the ability to notice when the order changes.

Scale, recognition and use

By the Takshashila Institution's own listing, Tracking People's Daily has over 10,000 subscribers — a substantial audience for a specialist daily read of a Chinese-language party newspaper, and one composed heavily of the professional China-watching community: diplomats, journalists, analysts, academics and business readers. Its recognition markers are of the kind that matter in that world. The University of Pennsylvania's library research guide to Chinese news media recommends it to students and researchers. Table.Media, the German professional briefing publisher, profiled its author in November 2024. MERICS brought him to Berlin for an expert conversation in September 2025, billing him as the prolific publisher of the daily People's Daily newsletter and a leading scholar of Beijing politics. The Wire China's 2022 Q&A called the newsletter a 'must-read for China-watchers' and its author a former full-time journalist in both India and China who had also held a senior associate role at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The newsletter is also woven into Takshashila's wider output: Kewalramani's daily reading feeds his books, his Eye on China weekly, his podcasting — All Things Policy episodes on subjects from China's national security white paper to data localisation — and Takshashila's AI-assisted China monitoring projects, which draw on the institution's accumulated newsletter and tracking data.

Analysis at scale: 7,000 statements

Tracking People's Daily is not only a daily summary service; its underlying discipline has produced research. Reporting on how China portrays US presidents cited the newsletter's AI-assisted analysis of nearly 7,000 Chinese official statements issued since 2021 — work that could only be built on a multi-year, systematically collected corpus of official texts, of exactly the kind the daily tracking habit generates. That connection between the newsletter and large-scale analysis is one of its most important features: the weekday editions are the visible product, but the durable asset is a structured, longitudinal record of Chinese official discourse, maintained by the same reader over years, which can then be mined for shifts in tone, terminology and emphasis toward particular countries and topics. Takshashila's published AI policy — which requires disclosure of AI assistance, insists authors remain responsible for their work, and commits the institution to independent verification of AI-generated information — frames how such tools are used in its research programme. For readers, the practical consequence is that Tracking People's Daily functions both as a morning briefing and as an archive: a claim about how Beijing's language changed can be checked against the daily record rather than left as an impression.

An Indian vantage on Beijing

The newsletter's perspective is part of its identity. It is written from India, by an Indian scholar at an Indian institution whose mission is to advance India's national interest through independent analysis, about the official newspaper of a country with which India has a contested border and a deep strategic rivalry. The 19 June 2020 edition's leading observation — the absence of Ladakh coverage in the People's Daily during a live border crisis with India — captures that vantage in a single editorial choice: an Indian reader notices first what a Chinese party paper is not telling Chinese readers about India. Kewalramani's books extend the same standpoint: Smokeless War examined China's quest for geopolitical dominance through its pandemic-era narratives, and Taming the Dragon is explicitly a manifesto for a new modus vivendi between India and China. None of this makes the newsletter partisan in method — its daily product is summary and sourced analysis of a defined text, and its reputation in Berlin, Philadelphia and the wider China-watching world rests on accuracy — but readers should know the standpoint from which the summary is written, as they should for any single-author interpretive newsletter. It is, among other things, a demonstration that some of the most careful reading of Beijing's official voice now happens in Bengaluru rather than in Washington or London.

Takshashila and the newsletter ecosystem around it

Tracking People's Daily sits inside a small ecosystem of Takshashila publications that reinforce one another. Eye on China, Kewalramani's weekly, steps back from the daily text to track developments in and around China from an Indian perspective. The Great Power Show podcast carries the analysis into long-form conversation. The institution's China Watch and Takshashila China Brain projects use AI to monitor China-related news and to organise the institution's China research — papers, op-eds, blogs, newsletters and tracking data — into a searchable, queryable repository organised by theme. The daily newsletter is the ecosystem's foundation layer: the primary-source habit from which the weekly synthesis, the podcast arguments and the books are all, in part, distilled. It is also a model that has influenced how other analysts present primary-source monitoring, standing alongside translation and tracking projects elsewhere in the China-watch world — several of which are profiled elsewhere in this rollout — as evidence that the most valuable China media of the 2020s is often not reporting from inside China, which has become steadily harder, but disciplined, transparent reading of what China's own official media publish every day.

How to use this source

For researchers, Tracking People's Daily is best used in three ways. First, as a daily alerting service: its Big Picture summaries tell a busy reader, within minutes, what the Chinese leadership chose to emphasise that morning and what it conspicuously omitted. Second, as an archive: the run of editions since 2020 allows a question — when did a formulation first appear, how was a crisis handled day by day, how did coverage of a country change — to be answered from a consistent record. Third, as attributed expert analysis: when the newsletter moves from summary to interpretation, it speaks with the authority of a scholar-journalist who has read the source text daily for years, and it should be cited as Kewalramani's analysis, with his Indian institutional standpoint noted, rather than as a neutral wire report. Its limits are the mirror of its strengths: it reads one newspaper, however authoritative; it is one reader's selection and emphasis; and the People's Daily itself is a curated official artefact, so the newsletter reveals what Beijing publishes, not what Beijing privately decides. Within those terms, it is one of the most transparent and useful instruments the open-source China-watching world has produced — a daily, page-by-page account of the Chinese Communist Party's own newspaper, sustained for years and read, fittingly, by more than ten thousand people who need to know what the People's Daily said today.