Sustainability-Oriented Assessment of the Governance Capacity of China’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Policies: A Hybrid BERTopic-PMC Systematic Analysis

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals requires intangible cultural heritage (ICH) policies that safeguard living heritage while enabling inclusive participation, capacity building, responsible use, and resilience. We introduce a reproducible, text-as-data framework that links semantic-agenda discovery to mechanism-level policy diagnosis by coupling BERTopic with the Policy Modeling Consistency (PMC) index. Using a corpus of 26 national-level Chinese ICH policies, BERTopic reconstructs agenda structure and stage-wise shifts; PMC operationalizes sustainable governance through nine primary dimensions and 45 binary indicators to test whether policies encode long-horizon, monitorable, and feedback-enabled governance loops. The agenda is dominated by inventory-based listing and key-item safeguarding, then expands toward standardization, implementation coordination, and communication/participation, and recently pivots toward resource allocation and performance governance. Policy design quality is moderate (mean PMC = 6.15; 8 Good, 14 Average, 4 Poor). Strengths concentrate on stated goals, instrument mixes, and implementation arrangements, whereas recurrent gaps cluster in time institutionalization (timelines, milestones, rolling revision), legal-institutional enforceability, and operational monitoring-evaluation-feedback provisions. We translate these bottlenecks into an SDG-aligned upgrading pathway that hardens temporal targets, binds evaluation to budgets and accountability, and codifies participation rights and risk boundaries, enabling ICH safeguarding to shift from project-style action to sustainable, cross-cycle governance.