From “people conquering nature” to “ecological civilization”: a corpus-based study of the shifts and continuities in climate discourses in China

There is a rapidly growing literature on environmental communication in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This chapter aims to enrich this large literature by identifying four climate discourses and studying when and why a climate discourse emerges and later is replaced by a different climate discourse in the PRC from climate policy regime change perspective. Data are from a databank called BLCU Corpus Center in China and cover the period of 1949-2015. This chapter first reviews the relevant literature and discusses the theme and associated narratives of the discourse for each climate policy regime. Next, it develops seven keywords and keyword clusters to map the rise, decline, or persistence of each climate discourse in China. This chapter offers solid evidence to support the consensus that the transition from one climate discourse to the next in China is a progressive development. More importantly, it argues for and shows the evolutionary nature of the transition in China, which forms an interesting contrast to the back-and-forth paradigm shifts in the US. This chapter explains the progressive and evolutionary nature of the transition from policy regime change perspective. © The Editors and Contributors Severally 2024. All rights reserved.