Framing security through law: BERTopic modeling of Chinese national security legislation

Abstract This study investigates how security is framed through law in Chinese national security legislation under a holistic approach to national security. Combining legal discourse analysis with computational text analysis, it constructs a corpus of 19 currently effective Chinese laws related to national security and applies BERTopic modeling to identify major topics, map inter-topic semantic relations, and trace topic evolution over time. The analysis identifies ten security-related topics, covering both traditional security concerns such as national defense and emerging security issues such as cyber and data security. It further finds that these topics remain semantically connected despite their different legal domains, which suggests that Chinese national security legislation integrates heterogeneous security risks into a relatively unified security order. The temporal distribution of topics also indicates that security is framed not as a fixed category but as an ongoing and dynamic process marked by cumulative expansion and boundary reconfiguration. The findings suggest that, under a holistic approach to national security, law does not merely regulate security but helps produce and structure the social and institutional meaning of security.