Development and Governing Philosophy in CPC’s Discourse by the Party Congress Reports

Abstract

Over the past century, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has transformed China from extreme poverty to prosperity, leading the country into modernization. Utilizing descriptive statistics, the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model, and word co-occurrence networks, this paper systematically explores the development and governing philosophy articulated in the CPC’s discourse, as presented in the official reports of 20 Party Congresses from 1921 to 2023, in order to comprehend the pathways of China’s rapid development. For better understanding through visualization, a thematic evolution chart is constructed to display the CPC’s ideological development, and aword co-occurrence network is established to illustrate the changes in terminology over time. The analysis reveals distinct characteristics of the CPC’s development and governance across different phases, specifically shifting from a focus on revolutionary ideals and class struggle in the early stages to an emphasis on economic reforms and modernization in recent stages. Such kind of works not only help to catch up the core concepts and working endeavors during the different period of development, but also highlight the significance of analyzing the political documents from a systemic perspective.

The main contents of this work were previously presented at the 22nd International Symposium on Knowledge and Systems Sciences (KSS2023) held in Guangzhou during December 2–3, 2023.

Keywords

CPC / Party Congress / text mining / LDA / word co-occurrence network

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Systems Engineering Society of China and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany