Love, Hate Thy Neighbour? Or Just Don’t Care Much about Them: A Sentiment Analysis of China-Related Posts and Comments on Reddit.Com

Lan He, Ming Yin and Yujia Shi
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Lan He: School of International Languages and Cultures, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, Kunming, People’s Republic of China. 526934738@qq.com
Ming Yin: School of International Languages and Cultures, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, Kunming, People’s Republic of China. ym6555@126.com
Yujia Shi: Kunming No. 1 High School International Education, China. syj030415@outlook.com

China Report, 2020, vol. 56, issue 2, 204-220

Abstract: Faced with the explosion of information about many other countries in the world on social media, the audience of a certain country may form different emotions, judgements and thoughts of such information, which are worthy of scrutiny. In this article, our aim is to examine Western users’ opinions towards China-related posts on Reddit.com through sentiment analysis of the comments following such posts. Using a statistical method, we collected and analysed the comments of 384 posts on China on Reddit.com, which were distributed in 36 subreddits. As the finding shows, the number of neutral comments exceeds the number of either positive comments or negative comments on China-related posts on Reddit.com. The results indicate that although most of the opinions on Reddit.com about China are neutral or irrelevant, they are largely neglected by the users or viewers who very much prefer negative or positive comments. Therefore, the perceptions on these opinions could be skewed due to this effect. In addition, for the citizens of any country, except for those who intentionally try to guide the direction of discussion on a topic, it is very unlikely for them to be really concerned or care about the events and incidents happening in another remote country.

Keywords: Social media; public opinion; sentiment analysis; China; international relations; Reddit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:chnrpt:v:56:y:2020:i:2:p:204-220

DOI: 10.1177/0009445520916874

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