A Quantitative Evaluation of China’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Policies

As an important resource for strengthening national identity and enhancing cultural soft power, intangible cultural heritage (ICH) has become an increasingly integral component of national cultural strategies. In recent years, the Chinese government has issued a large number of ICH-related policies, providing institutional support for the protection, transmission, and utilization of ICH. This study integrates keyword-frequency analysis, co-occurrence networks, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling, and an adjusted Policy Modeling Consistency (PMC) index to assess the structural coverage of China’s ICH policies. A total of 5297 records were identified, of which 607 policy documents were retained for exploratory text analysis. Sixteen policies issued between 2011 and 2023 were selected for detailed assessment. The indicator framework comprises nine primary dimensions and 48 secondary indicators, with seven substantive dimensions contributing to the adjusted PMC index and two categorical dimensions reported separately. LDA analysis identified ten topics, subsequently organized into five thematic areas. The policies achieve an average adjusted PMC score of 6.44 on a seven-point scale, with individual scores ranging from 6.13 to 7.00, indicating extensive coverage of the predefined policy-text indicators. A leave-one-dimension-out analysis yielded Spearman rank correlations ranging from 0.844 to 1.000. The findings identify uneven coverage across substantive dimensions, limited discrimination in certain indicators, and differences in the intended scope of comprehensive and specialized policy instruments. Future policy design should strengthen policy precision, long-term support for inheritors, institutional coordination, and the operational specificity of implementation mechanisms. The results describe policy-text coverage rather than directly measuring implementation effectiveness.