This article examines how China’s foreign policy rhetoric at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has evolved over the past 35 years, focusing on the relationship between discourse, identity, and legitimacy in multilateral settings. Drawing on constructivist and discourse-analytic approaches that treat foreign policy as a site of identity performance, the study analyzes all Chinese UNGA speeches from 1991 to 2025 using a hybrid computational–interpretive design. Topic modeling (BERTopic) and sentiment analysis (VADER and Asent) are combined with close reading to trace long-term patterns in thematic emphasis and rhetorical posture. The dataset includes 35 annual statements drawn from the UN General Debate Corpus and supplemented with manually added transcripts. The analysis identifies a persistent development-centered narrative across the period, alongside gradual but meaningful shifts in tone and conceptual framing: a cautious, legitimacy-seeking posture in the 1990s, a more outward-looking and institutionally embedded mode of multilateral engagement in the early 2000s, and after the early 2010s, more explicit articulation of sovereignty and governance principles. Under Xi Jinping, these trends consolidate into a more clearly identity-assertive style, including increased emphasis on China-initiated governance concepts. Sentiment patterns complicate the linear portrayals of rising assertiveness, as security-related language often aligns with neutral or positive tonal orientation rather than overt confrontation. The findings suggest that China’s rhetorical evolution reflects an ongoing effort to reconcile a developing-country identity with expanding global ambitions, and demonstrate how computational text analysis can illuminate slow, cumulative changes in foreign-policy discourse.
Kenan Dagci (Wed,) studied this question.