Objective/Meaning  In view of the insufficient quantitative evaluation of the current cultivated land protection policy, the cultivated land protection policies were systematically sorted out and scientifically evaluated, in order to provide a reference for optimizing the cultivated land protection system.

Methods/Procedures  178 cultivated land protection policies issued at the national level from 2014 to 2024 were taken as the overall sample in this study. With the help of text mining and content analysis methods, 10 representative policies were selected to construct a PMC index model for empirical testing and quantitative evaluation.

Results/Conclusions  The results showed that: among the 10 selected policies, 2 were evaluated as excellent, 7 were evaluated as good, and 1 was evaluated as qualified, forming an olive-shaped effectiveness distribution, which reflected that the framework of cultivated land protection system in China was relatively mature, but there was still imbalance between policies in terms of subject coordination, content structure and function configuration. Some policies had insufficient coverage in dynamic assessment, public participation, quality improvement and ecological restoration, resulting in the single tool combination and incomplete governance chain. In view of the above problems, the recommendations for improvement were put forward from the three dimensions: evaluation mechanism, governance model and policy tools.