Applying LLMs to Thematic Analysis of Regional Food Security Strategies in China (2021–2025)

Against the backdrop of growing external risks and internal structural constraints, China’s food security policy is undergoing transformation. The state seeks to enhance its effectiveness by developing a more integrated system for ensuring food security. In this context, a new initiative has been proposed, namely the establishment of a National Food Security Industry Belt, a spatial-institutional model of cooperation aimed at coordinating the development of key food-producing regions and integrating production, logistics, and resource components into a unified system. The article examines the extent to which the ideas of interregional coordination are reflected in regional policies. The study draws upon a corpus of fourteen socio-economic development plans of the PRC for the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021–2025), encompassing both the national plan and regional plans of three key agricultural and food-producing regions – the Northeast Plain, the Huang – Huai – Hai Plain, and the middle and lower Yangtze River region. To uncover their distinctive features, there was conducted a thematic analysis using ChatGPT (GPT-5 version) in accordance with the Guided AI Thematic Analysis (GAITA) protocol. The article contributes to the understanding of the language of Chinese planning by revealing how the discourse of food security is reproduced across strategic documents of different administrative levels. The analysis revealed a high degree of uniformity in the wording of both national and regional plans. Significant signs of interregional coordination were found only in the plans of the administrative units of the Northeast Plain. This suggests that horizontal mechanisms of interaction have not yet become a priority within the food policy planning system and are still being developed in a pilot format.

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