Knowledge Mapping and Frontier Trend Analysis of Comparative Research on Chinese and Western Modernization from the Perspective of Text Data Mining

Comparative research on Chinese modernization and Western modernization has become a prominent field in philosophy and the social sciences in the new era. To systematically grasp the research status, hotspot topics, and evolutionary trends of this field, this study takes 500 articles from CSSCI source journals indexed by the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) as the sample and, with the aid of the visualization software CiteSpace, conducts a bibliometric analysis along the dimensions of annual publication volume, journal distribution, author collaboration networks, keyword co-occurrence, and time-zone evolution. The results show that publication output in this field has grown explosively since 2022 and has stabilized at a high level; journals such as Studies on Marxism and scholars such as ZHOU Wen, TIAN Pengying, and HAN Qingxiang constitute the main research force, whereas the author collaboration network remains relatively loose overall. Research hotspots focus on the critique of the “modernization equals Westernization” narrative, the critique of capital logic, human modernization, common prosperity, and a new form of human civilization. The evolutionary path exhibits a staged progression from “road interpretation” to “comparative transcendence” and then to “civilization construction.” Further content analysis indicates that existing studies have revealed the essential differences between Chinese modernization and Western modernization along three dimensions: value logic, development path, and civilizational form. Future research should be deepened in the construction of an independent knowledge system, the vision of the Global South, and the integration of interdisciplinary methods.

Keywords: Chinese modernization; Western modernization; CiteSpace; bibliometric analysis; knowledge mapping.