Tracking China’s Economic Reform Program

Unbalanced and unsustainable economic development led president Xi Jinping to enact the Chinese economic reform program in 2013, to sustain essential economic policies both locally and globally. Finding a lack of substantial data, the Asia Society collaborated with Rhodium Group to create The China Dashboard, an interactive dashboard that documents the progress of the China economic reform. Schema collaborated with both groups on defining the vision and experience, as well as implementing the interactive dashboard.

China Dashboard Visualization

Process

Schema’s goal was to design a dashboard that provided objective measures, without taking sides. Our process began by collaborating with both groups to define project objectives and discussing potential design solutions. After the general design direction was identified, Schema created a set of prototypes of various levels of fidelity to help evaluate the designs. Schema also worked closely with both groups to set guidelines for the content of 10 economic reform essays and the designs for close to 50 interactive charts and graphs. For the implementation, we used our data visualization platform, Arrays, to create a backend solution that would be easy for the Rhodium Group and the Asia Society to maintain and update as more data is collected.

Outcome

The China Dashboard is a data-driven, interactive experience that provides a detailed analysis of economic reforms in China. The website is accessible to a wide range of audiences including economists, policy makers, political leaders and journalists. The data will be updated quarterly through 2020. View the visualization.