Urban industrial heritage is increasingly embedded in urban regeneration, public space provision, and community governance, yet existing studies have insufficiently examined how heterogeneous publics perceive its value through everyday digital discourse. Taking the Guangzhou Iron and Steel Plant industrial heritage site (hereafter, the Guanggang industrial heritage site) as a case study, this study used user-generated content from Rednote posts and local WeChat public-account comments to identify platform-mediated expressions of public value perception. A corpus of 745 valid samples comprising 51,459 Chinese characters was constructed after data collection, screening, and text preprocessing. Word-frequency analysis, semantic network analysis, and sentiment analysis were conducted using ROST CM 6.0. The results show that the two retrieved platform-contextual corpora foregrounded different concerns. Rednote discourse foregrounded ruin landscapes, industrial aesthetics, photography-based check-ins, and exploratory experiences, whereas WeChat comments emphasized park construction, public facilities, governance responsiveness, safety, and the residential environment. At the corpus level, lexicon-based sentiment classification indicated that Rednote texts were dominated by positive and neutral categories, while WeChat comments contained a higher proportion of texts classified as negative. This study conceptualizes dual foregrounding as a bounded selection process through which platform affordances, user self-selection, and users’ relationships with the site influence which concerns become visible in each corpus; it does not treat the observed differences as a causal platform effect. It argues that industrial heritage regeneration must translate historical, technological, and aesthetic values into public values that are interpretable, accessible, usable, and trusted by local communities.

Sustainable heritage governance depends on institutional arrangements that sustain community participation and connect conservation decisions with local knowledge. This study examines how participation was represented, expanded, and institutionally configured in 86 Chinese national cultural heritage policies issued between 1982 and 2025. It integrates semantic network analysis, BERTopic modelling, and the Policy Modeling Consistency (PMC) index; the latter compares 11 purposively selected policies with different legal and administrative functions across nine design dimensions. The semantic network remained centred on cultural relics, protection, government, planning, and management, while communities occupied a peripheral position. Topic modelling showed that traditional-village, ecological, adaptive-use, and transmission concerns expanded after 2010 but were layered onto a persistent administrative-conservation core. Within the purposively selected 11-policy set, the mean PMC score was 5.18 out of 9. Policy instruments, evaluation, timeliness, and content were comparatively well specified, whereas X4 covered few of the predefined national-level institutional categories and X9 disclosure and feedback provisions were uneven. The 2024 Cultural Relics Protection Law scored 2.93 PMC points higher than its 2007 version (calculated from unrounded totals), reflecting broader explicit coverage of the coded provisions; X4 remained unchanged. These text-level findings support a bounded administrative-absorption proposition; the purposive PMC subset is not representative of all 86 policies, and policy texts cannot establish implementation outcomes, changes in formal decision rights, or actual community influence. Clearer responsibilities, closed feedback cycles, sustained capacity building, and procedural guarantees could strengthen the institutional basis for long-term community participation. The study distinguishes discursive expansion from institutional transformation and clarifies how policy design can support inclusive participation and the long-term continuity of heritage values.