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Tracing the Evolution of China’s Green Development Policy Discourse: A Corpus-Based Diachronic Study

Author(s)

Jingru Lian

Affiliation(s)

School of Foreign Studies, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China

Abstract

Understanding the diachronic evolution of green development policy discourse is essential for interpreting the transformation of China’s development philosophy and the evolution of its environmental governance practices. This study combines corpus linguistics with policy discourse analysis to examine the changing characteristics of green development discourse in China over the past four decades. A specialized corpus was constructed based on the outlines of the Sixth to the Fourteenth Five-Year Plans and the white paper China’s Green Development in the New Era. Using keyword analysis, collocation analysis, and word co-occurrence network visualization, this research systematically investigates the evolution of China’s green development policy discourse. The results show that China’s green development discourse has demonstrated a continuous strengthening trend. The discourse has evolved from problem-oriented governance to institutionalized regulation, and further to value-oriented and systemic governance. Meanwhile, the relationship among development, environment, and ecology has gradually shifted from separation and conflict to integration and coordination. In this process, ecology has transformed from a natural object of governance into a core developmental value. The evolution of green development discourse is driven by both macro-level factors, including changes in national development stages, increasing governance demands, and global environmental agendas, and micro-level factors such as policy goal adjustments and institutional development. This study provides corpus-based empirical evidence for understanding the transformation of China’s green development philosophy and offers a methodological perspective for policy discourse research.

Keywords

Corpus Analysis; Green Development; Policy Discourse; Diachronic Evolution; Five-Year Plan

References

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