Mapping the semantic transformations of major powers in Cold War East Asia: a word embedding approach using Chinese and Korean newspapers (1946–95)

Abstract Leveraging dynamic word embedding techniques, this study examines semantic shifts surrounding political entities during and after the Cold War as portrayed in influential Chinese and Korean newspapers, and probes how these shifts reveal changing geopolitical perceptions of major powers in these East Asian societies. Our corpus comprises 2.7 million articles from two major East Asian newspapers spanning the period from 1946 to 1995: the Chinese-language Renmin Ribao and the Korean-language Chosun Ilbo. By tracking the semantically relevant words surrounding the term ‘Soviet Union’ in both dailies, we show how these publications informed the evolving diplomatic and ideological perceptions of the nuclear-armed Cold War superpower. This study demonstrates how a dynamic word embedding-driven approach complements close reading by providing hermeneutic contexts for textual analysis at scale, illuminating long-term perspectives through which Chinese and Korean societies perceived powers and their geopolitical stakes in the Cold War world.