From pollution control to system governance: five decades of environmental policy evolution in China

Abstract

China's environmental governance has undergone a profound transformation since the late 1970s, with implications that extend far beyond its borders. Existing accounts of this evolution rely largely on qualitative periodisation and expert interpretation, offering limited capacity to trace long-term changes in policy priorities and governance logics. This study analyses 3460 central-level environmental policy documents from 1978 to 2025 through an integrated computational framework that combines large language model-based semantic enhancement, dynamic topic modelling, and multi-layer validation, measuring discursive intensity in both absolute and normalised terms across nearly five decades of policy development. The analysis traces five interlinked stages of environmental governance, marking a transition from problem-driven pollution control and energy conservation towards concept-led, system-oriented governance anchored in ecological civilisation and the dual-carbon agenda. Change across these stages is cumulative, not substitutive. Normalised measurement reveals a pattern of institutional persistence with declining relative dominance: foundational regulatory instruments grew in absolute frequency even as their share of policy attention fell, a signature of institutional layering in which new governance paradigms accumulate upon established foundations rather than replacing them. The trajectory of circular economy discourse, from peripheral mention in the 1980s to structural integration with carbon mitigation objectives, shows how resource conservation themes achieve institutional embedding within this evolving architecture. The study provides systematic, corpus-based quantitative evidence that confirms, refines, and extends established qualitative narratives, demonstrates a replicable framework for large-scale policy text analysis, and offers new insight into how state attention and governance paradigms evolve in rapidly transforming economies.