Provincial Rural Revitalisation Policy-Text Completeness and Regional Structural Conditions in China

How provincial governments articulate institutional arrangements within a common national rural revitalisation strategy, and whether this articulation relates to pre-existing regional conditions, are distinct empirical questions. Using comprehensive provincial rural revitalisation policy documents from 2018–2022, this study constructs an eight-dimension, 30-item Policy Modelling Consistency Index (PMC8) to measure policy-text completeness and relates it to industrial and urban–rural population structure in 2015–2017. A 14-province documentary-evidence-supported sample is used for the main comparison, with a 20-province conditional-source extension and a nine-province plan-only subset as sensitivity analyses. Ordinary least squares (OLS) models with heteroskedasticity-consistent type 3 (HC3) standard errors show that the 14-province mean PMC8 is 7.786; 92.86% of item scores are in the highest category, and 20 of 30 items show no cross-provincial variation. Plans score 0.297 points higher on average than comprehensive implementation opinions. The pre-policy regional-structure coefficient is not stable across controlled specifications in either the 14- or 20-province sample. In the nine-province plan-only subset, a significant bivariate negative association (p = 0.021) becomes non-significant after controlling for income (p = 0.417). The findings indicate high textual completeness, limited item-level discrimination, and sensitivity to document type and source scope. Policy evaluation should distinguish textual completeness, local problem fit, and implementation outcomes.