•The quantitative analysis in terms of topic words and their correlation for mining and analysis of foreign relations is lacked and needed.•A framework for studying foreign relations is proposed and tested with British parliamentary texts.•Five communities are identified and the distribution of topics related to China is extremely unbalanced and highly concentrated.•Evolution patterns of main topics are widely different in terms of continuity and development trends.•The case study on UK-China relations contribute to deepen the understanding of international relations between the two countries, so as to provide valuable references and suggestions for the government and researchers. Parliamentary texts are records of discussions of domestic and international affairs, which reflect national attitudes and development trends in foreign relations. In this paper, a research framework is proposed to analyze foreign relations on the basis of parliamentary texts. First, topic words are extracted from parliamentary texts, and then a co-word network is constructed to represent the correlation structure of topic words. The basic statistics, calculation of network indicators, community detection, and visualization of network maps and evolution venation, as well as the depiction of a strategic diagram, elucidate deeper characteristics and connotations of foreign relations. This case study on UK-China relations during the period of 2011-2017 using British parliamentary texts reveals the following findings. Over this period, UK-China relations changed in terms of the topics involved, topics which are greatly unbalanced in distribution, but are quite concentrated. Five different directions exist, centering on Trade, Human rights, Nuclear, Steel, and Visa. The evolution of topics includes merging and differentiation. A minority of topics exhibit marked continuity, which constitute the main focal points discussed each year, such as Economy and Trade. Regarding development trends, themes related to trade and steel remain focal points in UK-China relations. Overall, the framework proposed in this paper is proven to be both effective and feasible, and its application through this case study can foster a deeper understanding of the status and development of UK-China relations.