The Evolution of Sustainability Ideas in China from 1946 to 2015, Quantified by Culturomics

Economy and ecology are two main aspects of human sustainable development. However, a comprehensive analysis of the status and trends of economic and ecological cognition is still lacking. Here, we defined economic and ecological concepts as cultural traits that constitute a complex system representing sustainability ideas. Adopting a linguistic ecology perspective, we analysed the frequency distribution, turnover and innovation rates of 3713 concepts appearing in China’s mainstream newspaper, People’s Daily, from 1946 to 2015. Results reveal that: (1) In the whole historical period, there were more economic concepts than ecological concepts both in amount and category. Economic concepts experienced stronger cultural drift than ecological concepts tested by the neutral model of cultural evolution; (2) popular economic concepts became more diversified, but popular ecological concepts became more uniform; (3) both economic concepts and ecological concepts attained more variation in their own disciplinary domains than in cross-disciplinary domains; and (4) as a platform of both giving information and opinion, a newspaper is subjected to cultural selection, especially reflected in the change in ecological concepts under the context of Chinese ecological civilization construction. We concluded with a discussion of promoting vibrant and resilient ecological knowledge in fostering sustainability activities and behaviours.