Abstract
This paper certifies influences from provincial governments’ managerial tone reflecting their decision-making and attitudes on knowledge evolution through fixed effect regression while highlighting governments’ non-profitable feature of knowledge accumulation and construction. Based on strongly-balanced 496 observations of 31 Chinese mainland provinces with the full dataset of 6,179,621 text-derived words, a unique panel is constituted with the provincial governors’ tonality focuses and their knowledge evolution indexes. The quantitative study aims to investigate if, how, and to what extent the key constructs and terms in provincial governments’ managerial communication presented in provincial GWRs can promote or hinder regional knowledge evolution. It is unique in linguistic database of the government’s managerial discourse at the level of provinces and to interweave and interpret the framework of the panel dataset involving textual analysis and knowledge evolution from the regional and longitudinal view.