It is not clear how large your target corpus for each period is. A reference is usually much larger than a target corpus.
Unless you have direct accesss to a balanced Chinese corpus covering a comparable period - e.g. the corpus developed by the National Language Committee of China - you do not have many choices.
If your target corpus for each of the three periods is less than one million tokens, you can compare your target corpora with LCMC. Because the same reference corpus is used to extract keywords for the three periods, the keywords extracted are comparable and your decision can be easily justified.