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State-run Chinese newspapers are believed to strategically select and frame news articles to align with the shifting political tides of the country. This paper describes methods to quantify these changes in content and framing over time. Looking at more than 50 years of articles from the People’s Daily and Reference News, we analyze differences in name mentions and sentiment in news articles for politicians before and after their deaths, as well as during and not during certain political events. We find significant estimates of difference, reflecting the changes in various aspects of the political environment in China during different time periods. We also apply change point detection methods to identify turning points in time series data of name mentions and sentiment. The identified turning points show a high co-occurrence with crucial political events and deaths of politicians. Furthermore, we utilize topic modeling to analyze the framing choices for articles written in different decades. The changes in frequent topic words are more significant in People’s Daily than in Reference News, which is consistent with the focus shifts of the Chinese central government in history. Finally, by using pre-trained language models to predict masked names in news articles, we analyze the distinctiveness of the language used to report individuals.