Attitudes Toward Local and National Government Expressed Over Chinese Social Media

📖 The Scoop

Psycholinguistic analysis of Chinese-language social media can help provide insight into the attitudes of Twitter and Sina Weibo users toward local government, national government, and Western companies. Because the issue of food safety engages important themes in Chinese domestic politics—including the watchdog role of the press and the challenges of effective oversight in an authoritarian system—this analysis focused on social media content discussing the July 2014 “Husi incident,” a food safety scandal involving expired meat in McDonalds and KFC. Results suggested that Chinese-language social media users expressed more anger and sadness—but also used more words indicating positive emotions or feelings of kinship—when discussing the national government than when discussing the local government. Discussions on openly accessible Chinese microblogging platforms may thus offer an avenue through which to gauge public opinion on issues of domestic politics, although their value may wane as a result of government attempts to curb the use of social media to mobilize individuals online into organized, politically motivated groups offline. This exploration of Chinese-language social media regarding food safety traces a preliminary road map to conduct such analysis, including a methodology for analyzing Chinese-language social media as well as a discussion of the promises and limitations of social media analysis in this unique context.

Genre: Cooking / General (fancy, right?)