Stage-Wise Systemic Evolution of China’s Digital Economy: Evidence from Topic Modeling of Think Tank Reports

With the in-depth advancement of the “Digital China” initiative, policies and research discourses related to the digital economy have continued evolved, making it necessary to systematically examine their stage-specific characteristics and underlying logic from a long-term perspective. Accordingly, this study adopts information society theory as the analytical framework and selects the annual series of reports on China’s digital economy development published by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) from 2015 to 2024 as the research corpus. Using text mining techniques and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, this paper conducts a longitudinal examination of the stage-wise systemic evolution of key topics in China’s digital economy development. The findings indicate that over the past decade, the topic structure of China’s digital economy has followed a clear evolutionary trajectory, progressing from “informatization-driven development” to “platform expansion,” and subsequently to “data factors and institutional governance.” In the early stage, the focus was on information infrastructure development and industrial integration; the middle stage shifted toward the platform economy and enterprise growth; more recently, the emphasis has increasingly been placed on the construction of data factor markets and the improvement of governance frameworks. This process of topic evolution not only reflects changes in the practical forms of the digital economy but also reveals the ongoing adjustment of the state’s cognitive framework and governance logic regarding digital economy development. These findings provide empirical evidence for understanding the systemic evolution of China’s digital economy over time. By identifying the stage-specific pathways of China’s digital economy, this study extends the application of information society theory within this context and provides new empirical evidence for understanding the evolutionary logic underlying high-quality digital economy development.