Zipf’s Law in China’s Local Government Work Reports

This study presents an in-depth empirical investigation of this law in 651 Chinese provincial government work reports (2003-2023). Employing natural language processing techniques (including Jieba word segmentation with a custom dictionary) and a double-logarithmic regression model, we analyzed word frequency distributions. Results indicate that while generally conforming to Zipf’s Law, substantial inter-regional and inter-temporal variation exists. This may be attributable to factors beyond the scope of this study, such as region-specific policies or the influence of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. While our findings largely confirm the applicability of Zipf’s Law to this specific corpus, this study is limited by the exclusion of prefecture- and county-level reports. Future research can address this limitation by incorporating a broader range of administrative levels and by conducting cross-country and cultural comparisons of political documents. Further investigation of alternate quantitative linguistic laws (e.g., Heaps’ Law, Menzerath’s Law) within this corpus is also warranted.