The Emerging and Mapped Discourse of Age-Tech in China: A Textual Analysis of Policy, Research, and Practice Narratives

(Purpose) This study investigates the emerging discourse on Age-Tech (养老科技) in China, a field at the intersection of demographic ageing and digital transformation. While Age-Tech has been more systematically theorized in Western and Japanese contexts, in China it remains fragmented. The study aims to map how Age-Tech is discursively constructed through academic, policy, and media narratives. (Design/methodology/approach) A corpus of 798 Chinese documents published between 2016 and 2025 was compiled from Baidu News, CNKI, and WeChat public accounts. To identify salient concepts and relational structures, we employed a mixed computational approach combining term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) analysis and convergence of iterated correlations (CONCOR) network clustering. This enabled us to reveal both keyword salience and latent thematic clusters. (Findings) TF-IDF results highlighted the centrality of age-friendly adaptation (适老化), elderly care (养老), smart technologies (智能), and services (服务), along with policy-related terms underscoring the guiding role of government. CONCOR analysis revealed four thematic clusters: (1) smart technology and community services, (2) industrial and product innovation, (3) socio-cultural and family dimensions, and (4) governance and regulation. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that Age-Tech in China is conceptualized as a multi-layered socio-technical ecosystem rather than a purely technological domain. (Research implications or Originality) This study contributes by providing one of the first systematic discourse analyses of Age-Tech in China. It emphasizes the importance of a discourse-oriented perspective, showing how policy-driven and socially embedded narratives shape the trajectory of Age-Tech. The findings also highlight cross-national differences, suggesting that institutional contexts must be incorporated into comparative theorization of Age-Tech development. positioning, providing valuable implications for policy and cross-border cooperation.