Thematic Evolution of China’s Media Governance Policies: A Tri-Logic Synergistic Perspective

China’s media governance policies play a crucial role in shaping media ecology and promoting the modernization of national governance capacity. This study employed the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model and co-occurrence network analysis to systematically analyze the thematic content of national-level media governance policies issued in China between 1996 and 2024, and to examine the evolution of policy themes from a triple logical synergy perspective. In consideration of the socio-economic context and governance issues, this study has categorized the evolution of media governance policies into four distinct phases. This study used the LDA model to extract high-frequency words and built a co-occurrence network to explore the structural relationship among these words, with a synergy framework to analyze the thematic evolution across periods. The findings indicate that China’s media governance policies over the past three decades have been the result of stage-by-stage adjustments under the synergistic influences of technological drivers, social demands, and governance philosophies. Media governance constitutes a pivotal component in the modernization of China’s national governance capacity. A comprehensive analysis of the evolution of policy themes reveals the internal pattern of media governance in China.