Chinese Social Media Users' Perception of Europe: The Survey Findings from Weibo Research Report

Executive Summary

In the post-Cold War Era, the subjects of constructing and evaluating national image have become more diverse, and online public opinion reflects how people feel about a country. This project focuses on user-active Sina Weibo, and it employs a big data approach to explore how Chinese social media users perceive Europe. Using natural language processing, automatic text analysis, sentiment analysis, and visualization, this study investigates the patterns and trends of Chinese social media users’ perceptions of Europe in order to promote mutual understanding between the two sides.

Main findings

·    Overall, Chinese social media users have a stable and moderate sentiment orientation toward Europe, but they may react strongly to specific events and topics.

·      Chinese social media users care more about European social issues than they do about political and economic issues.

·   The attention and sentiment orientation of Chinese social media users toward specific topics fluctuate in response to the occurrence of specific events.

·   Chinese social media users have varying sentiment orientations toward various topics, with a neutral to negative orientation toward political and social topics and a neutral to positive orientation toward economic topics.

·   Users of different social media platforms have varying perceptions of Europe. Individuals' demographic characteristics, as well as the political and socioeconomic context, influence their choices of social media platform and attitudes toward Europe.

0406Chinese Social Media Users’ Perception of Europe(1).pdf

0406当代中国互联网社交媒体用户的欧洲观.pdf