China’s changing expectations of the SCO between 2001 and 2019

After the cold war, some countries gradually seek to regional cooperation when they could not handle various transnational challenges alone. Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is a good example. It brought Central Asian countries together. This paper applies the text-mining method, using co-word analysis, co-occurrence matrix, cluster analysis, and strategic diagram to analyze the selected articles from newspapers quantitatively and visually. In order to investigate the Chinese government’s attitude toward the SCO, this study collected data from the China Core Newspaper Full-text Database, which contains high-impact government newspapers revealing the Chinese government’s perception of the SCO. This study characterizes the changing role of SCO as perceived by the Chinese government from 2001 to 2019. Beijing’s changing expectations in each of the three identified subperiods are described.