How social organizations participate in social governance in China: Official media’s attention distribution analysis (1949–2021)

The attitude of the Chinese government towards social organizations (SOs) is crucial, as it affects the management rule and development tendency of SOs. To research the rule of SOs’ participation in social governance in China, this study used a new historical perspective, the institutional development perspective, to conduct its exploration. This perspective provides an accurate measure of the reality of the SOs’ participation, as it involves a mixed research methodology using continuous data from 73 years of reports and content mining, as well as topic clustering analysis to reveal a macroscopic and multi-line picture. Using a co-word analysis of hundreds of reports, from 1949–2021, in the People’s Daily, an official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, this study quantified changes in intensity, emotion, and content regarding social organization participation in social governance through topic distribution. Three trends were revealed: (1) “social-oriented character” and “organized-oriented character” were identified during the change in SOs; (2) the extent of being managed gradually strengthened and shifted from the Communist Youth League of China to the Community Party of China; (3) the goals of SOs shifted from general to innovated function in special charitable organizations. The institutional development perspective can complement the focus event perspective, including a new method, co-word analysis, to examine official Chinese media and validate the Administrative Absorption of Society (AAS) theory by identifying two lines of topic clustering trends. The attention distribution analysis in official media from an institutional development perspective can help explore the role of official media reports in analyzing the allocation of national attention and provide new analytical methods for big data mining to establish the social and organizational natures of SOs to optimize their roles. It offers a basis for modern social governance policy innovation in China.