A Text-Mining Assessment of Green Public Procurement Implementation in China: Multidimensional Gaps and Practice-Led Policy Boundary Expansion

Green public procurement (GPP) is a key policy instrument for promoting sustainable production and consumption, yet its implementation performance as a multidimensional public-sector decision process remains insufficiently assessed. Existing studies often focus on selected dimensions or limited cases, lacking both a framework that captures GPP’s multiple core components and large-scale evidence from procurement texts. Without such an assessment, GPP may remain at the level of policy rhetoric. To address this gap, this study develops a six-dimensional evaluation framework covering environmental friendliness, green labels, circular economy, green innovation, green supply chains, and life cycle costing (LCC), and applies automated text-mining methods to 80,494 central-level and 407,955 local-level public tender documents in China from 2015 to 2022. The results show that GPP has entered procurement practice at scale: 55.1% of documents contain at least one green requirement. However, implementation is highly uneven. Among documents containing at least one GPP requirement, environmental friendliness (95.7%) and green labels (58.9%) form the core of current practice, green innovation occupies an intermediate position (35.1%), while green supply chains (16.4%) and LCC (16.3%) remain much less developed. A clear central–local gap is also observed, with implementation rates of 75.2% and 51.1%, respectively. Further analysis shows that green requirements appear in multiple combinations and vary across time, award methods, and contract types. More importantly, although green supply chains and LCC are not yet fully specified in national institutions, they have already entered some tender documents. These findings confirm the importance of assessing the implementation outcomes of GPP’s multiple core components and provide new evidence on implementation gaps and practice-led policy boundary expansion under multilevel governance. The text-mining framework offers a transferable tool for evaluating sustainable public procurement in other emerging economies.