The Diachronic Evolution of the Discourse on the People-Centered Orientation: A Review of CNKI Literature (1982–2026)

People-centered orientation is the core category of Marxism and the theoretical discourse system of adapting Marxism to the Chinese context. Since 1982, the academic community has continued to study the discourse of people-centered orientation in the Party and government documents, but the review is mostly confined to a single discipline and a single topic. This study takes the relevant literature of China Knowledge Network from 2017 to 2026 as a direct sample, and examines the evolution of research in this field from 1982 to 2026 with the early stage of connecting Party and government documents and retrospective reviews such as Party Congress reports since 1982. This study finds that this field presents an overall pattern of “policy-driven and academic subordination”. It has evolved through deepening and expanding under the context of restoration and reaffirmation, interest response in the context of market economy, governance shift, and systematic construction to Chinese modernization. The focus of research gradually expands from the field of literature to political discourse, governance practice and civilizational narrative, and the research is concentrated in the two major plates of literature, art and political science; The academic community has reached a consensus on the historical continuation of the discourse of people-centered orientation, but disagreements concerning its conceptual boundaries have persisted throughout the period. Their terms are shared but the caliber is different, the generalization of concepts is obvious, and there are far more normative discussions than empirical studies. Accordingly, there are still gaps in the overall historiographical review and corpus-based analysis. This study aims to identify this gap and provide a reference framework for subsequent empirical research and discourse research.