The 10 most prominent People’s Daily keywords per year since 2000
CHINA
Which topics remained at the center of coverage, and which surged in a particular year? This project examines 780,969 deduplicated People’s Daily articles published between 2000 and 2024.
The chart connects each year’s top ten keywords. Search in English or Chinese, click a trajectory to follow its time in the top ten, use the smaller overview to change the visible years, or switch between the topics discussed most and those that were unusually prominent relative to other years.
The chart traces annual top-ten rankings. Years in which a keyword ranked outside the top ten are not included in the current dataset.
Gaps mean the keyword was outside the supplied top ten.
Current ranking
MOST DISTINCTIVE
Keywords ranked by how unusually prominent they were that year compared with other years, adjusted for article volume to reduce small-sample volatility.
Selected keyword · Top-ten observations only
This English rendering is flagged for editorial review and should not be treated as definitive official terminology.
View selected top-ten observations
| Year | Rank | Articles | Coverage | Relative lift |
|---|
Loading keyword trajectories…
Annual rank is shown vertically and year horizontally. Each marker is one observed top-ten ranking; only consecutive annual observations are connected. Missing years are not zeroes and are not assigned an artificial rank.
2000 to 2024
Drag the window or its handles to change the focus chart.Some interesting insights
In 2003, ranked #1 in the Most Distinctive list.
In 2008, ranked #1. The remained in the Most Distinctive top ten from 2008 through 2011.
In 2020, and ranked #1 and #2 in the Most Distinctive list.
In 2024, ranked #1 and ranked #4.
The Most Discussed list reveals a different pattern: appeared in the annual top ten in all 25 years, while appeared in 24.
Methodology
What the data supports
The corpus covers 2000–2024 and contains 780,969 deduplicated People’s Daily articles. Rankings use a curated, non-person topic lexicon; personal names are excluded.
Most Discussed ranks keywords by annual article coverage: the share of that year’s articles in which the keyword appears at least once.
Most Distinctive compares annual article coverage with a cross-year baseline and includes smoothing and an article-support adjustment. Relative lift is available for context, but raw lift alone does not determine rank.
What the chart does not show
The supplied data contains only ten ranked keywords per year and method. A missing year means “not present in the supplied top ten,” not zero article coverage. The visualization does not reconstruct values between observations or claim to show a complete keyword-frequency history.
Colors identify trajectories by approximate first top-ten appearance across both methods. They are not topic categories.
Methodological details still required
The supplied files do not document keyword-matching rules, minimum within-article occurrences, synonym and abbreviation handling, Chinese word segmentation, lexicon construction, deduplication procedure, the exact cross-year baseline, smoothing formula, support-weight formula, or tie-breaking rules.
English keyword translations
English labels are stored in an explicit editorial dictionary; original Chinese terms remain the stable identifiers. Policy terms that may require an official or publication-specific rendering are visibly flagged.