The construction of BCC diachronic corpus and the related DH research on evolution of contemporary Chinese

The BCC Corpus System is currently the world's largest open-access online corpus system of Chinese. Its diachronic channels cover continuous modern and contemporary newspaper texts ranging from 1872 to 2025, formed by the sequential connection of the data from Shen Bao and People's Daily.

This lecture will introduce the construction philosophy and the operational mechanisms of the BCC Corpus System, alongside demonstrations of its functional modules. Based on the 150-year longitudinal data, we conduct digital humanity research on the evolution of modern and contemporary Chinese, focusing on lexical morphology, usage distribution, and stylistic shifts. This study aims to provide empirical clues for understanding the formation of contemporary Chinese.

Rao Gaoqi, PhD., Associate Prof in Faculty of Linguistic Sciences, Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU), core member of the R&D teams for the BCC Corpus System and the BLCU Smart Teaching platform (BST). He founded and edits Hanyutang, a leading platform for Chinese linguistics popularization and academic information, also serves as editorial board members of several peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Language Strategy Studies, Studies in Language Planning and Digital Humanities. He has over 50 publications in journals and proceedings, and drafted a number of national standards and group standards. His research interests include: natural language processing, language planning, educational technology, digital humanities.