Top-down pressure and bottom-up responses: a study on provincial Governments’ adoption and textual reproduction of sports industry policies in China

National policy documents, as the starting point of the "document transmission chain", are often directional and instructive in content. Provincial governments, as transmitters of these policies, possess more precise localized decentralized knowledge and are responsible for their specific implementation. During the downward transmission of policy documents, some provinces tend to directly replicate national policies, which results in provincial governments adopting certain policies, but with unsatisfactory outcomes. Accordingly, this study applies the Word Embedding-Word Mover's Distance method to calculate, for the first time, the variation coefficient of policy text reproduction for provincial governments' sports industry policies. This method is a semantic distance-based text similarity technique that quantifies the semantic divergence between central and provincial policy texts. The normalized variation coefficient ranges from 0 to 1, where a higher value indicates a greater divergence from the central policy text and a higher degree of local reproduction. On this basis, the study further explores the relationship between the speed of policy adoption and the variation coefficient of policy text reproduction at the provincial level. The results reveal significant heterogeneity among the 31 provincial governments in their policy adoption behaviors, which can be categorized into four types according to the characteristics of adoption speed and variation coefficient: rapid adoption with low variation, rapid adoption with high variation, slow adoption with high variation, and slow adoption with low variation.