125‑Year China Water Governance Policy Dataset (1900‑2025)
Description
Water resources underpin Earth's ecosystems and societal development, and their security is a determinant of global sustainable development. Driven by accelerating climate change and socio-economic shifts, regions worldwide confront escalating water scarcity, underscoring the dynamic co-evolutionary feedback between water security and socio-economic development. Water management policies function as the primary regulatory instrument for mediating human-water interactions, crucial for improving water use efficiency, ecosystem integrity, and sustainable development. To bridge this knowledge gap, this study constructed and calibrated a high-resolution dataset characterizing the evolution of China's water resource policies from 1900 to 2025, focusing on elucidating policy evolution trajectories and their implications for regional water governance. Drawing from government gazettes, historical archives, and regulations, we employed Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) algorithms and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling for data processing. A document-level Policy Intensity Index was derived from legal force, quantitative targets, and penalty clauses to summarize de jure policy-text stringency. The released package includes the main dataset, operational documentation, validation files, and code for preliminary metadata extraction. This dataset provides reusable empirical infrastructure for studying Chinese water-governance policies, institutional hierarchy, spatial coverage, and long-term policy documentation.