Corpus-Based Lexical Features and Thematic Analysis of CHina’s Five-Year Plan for the 21st Century

The Five-Year Plan is one of the typical symbols and representations of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics, and its interpretation is of far-reaching significance. This paper selects the five Five-Year Plans of China since the 21st century to build a corpus. It was found by high-frequency words, keywords, LDA topic,and systematic clustering analysis that the words “发展 (develop)” and “建设 (construct)” are not absent in the Five-Year Plan of different stages. Although national economic and social development are shared topics, the Five-Year Plans focus on different topics in detail according to the different stages and requirements. Among those topics, three topics are emphasized, namely, optimizing industrial structure, promoting trade cooperation, and securing resource expansion, which are very different from each other and each covers a wide range of concerns respectively. Generally Speaking, the five Five-Year Plans can be divided into two categories, “Solid Advancement Type” and “Quality Expansion Type”, which have their own characteristics in four aspects: stability, balance, sustainability, and fairness.