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.
INTRODUCTION
The world of today is increasingly becoming a ‘global village’ (McLuhan 1962), where people from different social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds are able to interact with each other on a daily basis thanks to the pervasive information and communication technologies. Countries in this ‘village’ are analogous to the individual households, and the other countries are simply their neighbours in the same community. Just as gossips spread fast in a community, major news events in every country are inevitably disseminated to the rest of the world through social media in a short time span of a few minutes or a couple of hours. The boundary between domestic news and international news is increasingly blurred, and it seems that everyone in the global village is fully aware of their neighbours’ conduct. Faced with this explosion of information about many other countries in the world, the audience of a certain country or countries may form different emotions, judgements and thoughts of such information, which are worthy of scrutiny.
In this process, social media, especially those with large numbers of international users, are proxies for international relations and people-to-people relations between countries. The positive or negative feelings or even no feelings of the audience on social media regarding a news event of a certain country, in aggregation, could be a useful index for deciphering the attitude of the populace on the social media towards the said country. Therefore, social media provides a potentially rich corpus that can be tapped by policy makers, businesses and their support agencies.
Researchers in social sciences have long been analysing human languages to gauge public opinions (Krippendorff 2012). Sentiment analysis or opinion mining are now widely studied research fields connecting computational linguistics, social psychology, marketing, international studies, political science and mass media (Qazi et al. 2017). Sentiments refer to opinions, attitudes, thoughts, judgements and emotions, which are private states of individuals expressed by means of subjective expressions (Quigley 2008; Thet et al. 2010; Yu and Hatzivassiloglou 2003). The analysis of sentiments expressed as postings, comments and reviews online is usually conducted either by automated machine learning or manual annotation, where either a computer program or human annotator determines if a segment of text is positive, negative or neutral (Chen and Zimbra 2010; Mohammad et al. 2015; Murdough 2009; Rosenthal et al. 2015). The different approaches to perform sentiment analysis include machine learning as well as lexicon-based, keyword-based and concept-based modes (Cambria 2016). The unit of analysis is usually text, while in recent years, analyses based on audio and visual files have also been conducted (Cambria and Hussain 2012; Poria et al. 2015). In addition, early research predominantly applied sentiment analysis on longer texts such as movie reviews and blogs. With microtexting gaining popularity on social media, Bermingham (2010) found that it was easier to identify and classify sentiment in microtexts as compared to longer documents.
Recent studies with sentiment analysis comprise three main themes: business and marketing, computational linguistics and political opinions. For the first theme, researchers have been adopting sentiment analysis to improve the effectiveness of marketing practices, evaluate products and sales as well as promote certain business campaigns. Brooner and Hoog (2012) analysed the relationship between social media and consumer choice, pointing out that online marketing needs to focus less on complaints and more on leveraging positive aspects that are reported in social media. Uren et al. (2016) explored the connection between social media and sentiment in bioenergy consultation and argued that sentiment analysis was a viable methodology for bioenergy companies to measure public opinion in the consultation process.
For the second theme, the studies conducted mostly focused on enhancing the accuracy of automated sentiment analysis using computer technology. Dhaoui et al. (2017) compared the effectiveness of lexicon versus machine learning methods used in social media sentiment analysis, which indicated that the two approaches were similar in accuracy. Khoo et al. (2012) conducted a case study of appraisal theory of online news text and suggested that a linguistic framework of appraisal theory be adopted in manual as well as automatic sentiment analysis of news text. In addition, Su et al. (2015) combined human- and computer-based content analysis methods to effectively analyse defined communication sentiment and topics from large-scale social media data sets.
For the third theme, Ceron et al. (2015) applied sentiment analysis to monitor electoral campaigns in the United States and Italy, which demonstrated that sentiment analysis provided a better interpretation of the texts and more reliable aggregated results compared with traditionally employed alternatives. Klinger (2013) and Skovsgaard and van Dalen (2013) analysed the interaction between social media and the election campaign in Switzerland and Denmark respectively. Bakliwal et al. (2013) conducted sentiment analysis on political tweets and evaluated the accuracy of the classification of the attitudes of a tweet using a lexicon lookup. Another sentiment analysis on Twitter was carried out by Ceron et al. (2014), which concluded that social media had a remarkable ability to forecast electoral results. The application of sentiment analysis in measuring political opinions is a relatively new application of such analysis. However, a fair share of criticism is present towards this method. Researchers have found that sentiment analysis is accompanied by a number of constraints, both regarding its technical limitations and concepts (Puschmann and Powell, 2018). In addition, Gunter et al. (2014) calls for caution in the application of computer software in measuring opinions through sentiment analysis.
Nonetheless, the importance and effectiveness of sentiment analysis in shedding light on the otherwise murky public opinion and attitudes of the populace are both increasing. Political scientists equipped with this new method are able to gain a better understanding of the populace and to even predict the outcome of certain political movements or events (Bermingham and Smeaton 2010; O’Connor et al. 2010; Tumasjan et al. 2010). This article is also closely related to the third theme discussed above, and the focus is on examining the attitude of Reddit users on China-related topics.
The extant literature on the public opinion of one country’s citizens towards another country has been quite limited. As Goldmann (1993) pointed out, the strategic and substantive weakness of public opinion, especially when it comes from abroad, rules out the possibility of using it as an effective index for international relation, as foreigners are often considered incapable of understanding the situation and responsibility of those they are meant to influence. However, with the development of international tourism and the Internet, international public opinion does matter in domestic affairs and international relations. Schlipphak (2013) conducted a research on the international public opinion towards the European Union (EU) and predicted that there could be more negative global public opinions towards the EU. Ji et al. (2016) analysed the public attitude in China towards India by looking into the public opinion in Chinese media. Kraidy (2017) discussed the public reaction towards the Islamic State’s (IS) image warfare and argued that IS’s visual warfare is best understood through the notion of ‘projectilic image’. Nonetheless, currently there are very few studies focusing on the public opinion of Western countries on China, although this has been a heatedly debated topic on print media, social media, political sphere and academic circles.
Based on the above review, it is easy to see that most of the sentiment analysis of opinions on social media, especially those in the political field, mainly focus on the users’ attitudes to their domestic affairs instead of international events. In addition, the key platforms for the analysis are usually Twitter or Facebook, which, although undeniably the most popular social media platforms, may possess certain features not suitable for examining public opinion towards foreign countries. For example, in both Twitter and Facebook, all posts are not open to the general public but are displayed based on the preferences and selection of the users. This process of self-selection filters out users who could be potentially interested in a certain post and keeps them only focusing on a narrow selection of news and information. For example, it will be very unlikely for the citizen of one country to select or follow the topics on another country on Twitter or Facebook. By contrast, social media such as Reddit.com encourage open discussion by setting up various online communities where users have adequate interaction and communication within and among different communities. Therefore, the community-based social media could be a more adequate platform for studying users’ attitudes towards international events.
In this article, we attempt to look into Western users’ opinions towards China-related posts on Reddit.com through sentiment analysis of the comments following such posts. Our aim is to infer the attitudes of the citizens of one country towards another country as demonstrated by their comments online and to reveal the relation between the key players in the world or ‘neighbours’ in the global village. In the next section, we will provide a brief introduction of reddit.com as the background of this study, followed by proposing the hypotheses to be tested. Then the research methods and results will be presented before the discussion and conclusion sections at the end of the article.
REDDIT.COM
Reddit.com was founded by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman in 2005. It calls itself ‘home to thousands of communities, endless conversation, and authentic human connections’ (Reddit 2018). Different topics on reddit.com are grouped into online communities named as ‘r/subreddit’. For example, a community that focuses on the topics on China will be named r/China. Reddit.com is open to both registered users and unregistered users where everyone may pick any community he or she is interested in through search, suggestions and discovery and view the posts and comments in these communities, but only registered users are able to post or make comments. The posts can be either text or links, and the links can be to a number of formats including articles, photos and videoclips. The contents posted as well as the comments following them can be ‘upvoted’ or ‘downvoted’ by the users either by clicking on an up arrow or a down arrow. The number of upvotes and downvotes is displayed under each post and comment. The algorithm of the reddit system automatically pushes the most popular posts with the greatest number of upvotes and/or downvotes to the top of the page in every community. In addition, under every post, the number of comments is also displayed (Anderson 2015). In 2013, there were 41 million posts, 404 million comments, 56 billion page views and 731 million unique visitors to reddit.com (Reddit, 2014). These features of reddit.com provides researchers with a rich resource for content analysis and opinion mining as there is a large number of opinions expressed towards a certain topic.
Recent reports by statista.com (Statista.com 2019) indicate that the percentage of US adults who used Reddit as of February 2019, by age group, was 22 per cent for the age group of 18–29, 14 per cent for the age group of 30–49, 6 per cent for the age group of 50–64, and 1 per cent for the age group of 65+. In addition, percentage of US adults who used Reddit as of February 2019, by gender, indicates that there were twice as many male users than female users. The percentage of US adults who used Reddit as of February 2019, by annual household income (in US dollars), shows that during that period, 6 per cent of respondents earning 30,000 dollars or less used the social networking site, 14 per cent of respondents earning between 30,000 dollars and 74,999 dollars used reddit.com and 15 per cent of respondents earning over 75,000 dollars used this site. The percentage of US adults who used Reddit as of February 2019, by ethnicity, indicates that 14 per cent of the respondents were Hispanic, 12 per cent were white and 4 per cent were Black. The data on the regional distribution of desktop traffic to reddit.com as of April 2019, by country, shows that the United States generated 38.07 per cent of desktop traffic to the forum site, followed by the UK (7.37 per cent), Canada (5.93 per cent), Germany (3.26 per cent) and Australia (3.19 per cent). Therefore, the opinions on reddit.com can be viewed as roughly representing the attitudes of young male citizens of Western countries. Here we may define the Western users of Reddit as those from the United States, UK, Canada, Germany and Australia as represented by Hispanic, white and black, and Asian who have resided in the above countries for most of their lives.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND HYPOTHESES
One of the most prominent theories on the interaction between public opinions and international relations is the ‘Almond–Lippmann consensus’ proposed by Holsti (1992). Almond (1950) and Lippmann (1925) both supported the argument that public opinion is volatile or irrational, lacks structure or consistency, so much so that many have described people as possessing non-attitudes, devoid of interest and susceptible to manipulation. The original argument of the ‘Almond–Lippmann consensus’ was that public opinion should not be regarded as a reliable basis for foreign policy. However, this theory also aptly analysed and pointed out the inherent irrationality and inconsistency of public opinions, which will serve as the basis for this study.
Recent research has also pointed out the divergence in public opinion regarding a certain topic. Lewis (1999) found that the opinion poll discourse is a fairly ‘open’ text, signifying a far wider range of political ideas than is found in mainstream political discourse, that is the public’s opinions are narrowly represented in mainstream media. Therefore, social media could be a more accurate representation of public opinion compared to more traditional, mainstream media. In addition, a market consultancy report indicated that up to 40 per cent of all Twitter messages are ‘pointless babble’ (Pearanalytics 2009). Schlipphak (2013) found that the international opinion towards a certain country is determined by contextual and personality factors and whether or not an individual has a supranationalist attitude will exert a substantial impact on citizens’ feelings.
Building upon the extant theoretical foundation, in this research, we propose that on reddit.com, with most users being young citizens of Western countries, the majority of the opinions towards China-related topics or posts will be ‘neutral’, that is either no attitude or with mixed feelings of both positive and negative attitudes, which is captured by our hypotheses as follows:
H0: The number of neutral comments is smaller than the number of either positive comments or negative comments on China-related posts on reddit.com. H1: The number of neutral comments exceeds the number of either positive comments or negative comments on China-related posts on reddit.com.
The purpose of this research is to test and find out if we can reject the null hypothesis and to determine if most of the young adults in Western countries are really concerned about the affairs of China.
METHOD
We compiled a corpus of Reddit posts and comments on China-related topics by searching the term ‘China’ and ‘Chinese’ on reddit.com between October 2016 and December 2018. Admittedly, the world has undergone rapid changes during this time, and some of the data collected back then may not be able to accurately account for the current situation. Therefore, we only intend to capture a snapshot of the public opinion on reddit.com towards China-related topics during this time. This study is not intended to be an all-encompassing reflection of the long-term or panoramic picture of all the public opinions expressed on reddit.com. As the search results showed, China-related topics can be identified in 36 subreddits or communities. We then selected 384 posts with more than 20 comments using stratified random sampling to ensure the sample selected was representative of the population and the sample size was adequate (Saunders et al. 2012). For each post in the sample, we collected the top 20 comments that received the most upvotes.
The comments were then annotated as either positive, negative, or neutral by two Chinese annotators with a good command of English (with IELTS scores of 8.0 or above) and in-depth knowledge of the political, economic, social and cultural landscape of China and the Western countries. When disagreement arose between the two annotators, a third annotator looked into the issue at hand and provided a solution. The annotation was conducted with the following tags:
POSITIVE:
Comments which demonstrate positive sentiment towards China
NEGATIVE:
Comments which demonstrate negative sentiment towards China
NEUTRAL:
Comments which do not demonstrate any sentiment towards China, or only demonstrate mixed sentiments towards China or which are merely irrelevant to China.
Several issues could potentially influence the outcome of the annotation, and those need to be clarified here. The first issue has to do with the definition of ‘positive’, ‘negative’, or ‘neutral’ to China and how to define ‘China’. Apparently, there are comments that are against Chinese political system but support the Chinese people; or comments that applaud ancient Chinese culture but despise its modern culture. In this study, we would consider ‘China’ as a whole package including its political regime, social customs, culture, geography, history, language and other aspects. Any positive feelings towards any of these aspects will be viewed as a ‘positive’ comment and vice versa. If there is a partially positive emotion towards some aspects of China as well as negative feelings about other aspects, such comments will be categorised in the ‘neutral’ group.
Second, we adopted manual annotation instead of machine learning as the basis of sentiment analysis for this project as human annotation has always been regarded as the gold standard for sentiment analysis. Human annotation is often assigned an accuracy score of 1 to indicate that it is perfectly accurate as compared to the decimal scores of automated computer opinion mining. However, due to the observer’s paradox that is prevalent in qualitative analysis as well as the inevitability of human errors, we do not claim that the annotation is totally accurate. Nonetheless, this manual approach reveals important knowledge that is the closest representative of reality, especially when compared to computer programs. In addition, it is often difficult for a computer software to identify the attitude in sarcasm, mocking and other rhetoric use of human language, while human annotators fully understand them and can easily distinguish the tones in them.
Third, the tag of ‘neutral’ also included comments that were irrelevant to China, which is slightly different from other studies where irrelevant texts are just excluded from the data set. Nonetheless, in this research, we would like to include such comments under the umbrella category of ‘neutral’ to differentiate them with the positive or negative attitudes which are loaded with emotions. Therefore, the category of ‘neutral’ attitude should be understood in the broadest possible sense of the word for the purpose of this study.
Fourth, when distinguishing what counts as a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ comment, the annotators reached the following consensus: When discussing China, ‘bashing’ another country does not necessarily amount to a positive comment about China unless it conspicuously stated as such. For example, in a topic on China’s new social credit system, someone else commented that another country had a similar system and started to complain about it without mentioning anything about China. This comment will be tagged as ‘neutral’, as it is irrelevant to the topic at hand. However, if another user responded by saying that China’s social credit system is nowhere comparable to that of another country (a type of sarcasm), then this comment will be tagged as ‘positive’.
Fifth, the majority of the users on reddit.com are presumably from Western countries. However, we cannot fully rule out the possibility that there are Chinese users who are writing comments. But most of these users are overseas Chinese and thus should be categorised as Westerners as they have lived outside of China for most of their lives. In addition, this is a website based on English language, and the Chinese users who responded to a post need to be versed in English and Western culture, which was another feature distinguishing them from the ‘real’ Chinese users residing in China. The number of such users is also very small, and therefore, the confounding effect of the existence of such users is very small and can be neglected.
Another problem has to do with the questions of similar topics, that is reposts and duplicates. In this research, we did remove reposts and duplicates from the sample. However, we cannot fully rule out the possibility that a few posts could be centred on different aspects of the same topic. This said, we still believe it represents the actual distribution of the posts in the population of all posts and thus did not try to remove such posts. For example, in our sample, there are several posts on the slowdown of China’s economy in 2018. But one post focused on China’s GDP, while the other one looked at the issue from the angle of the real estate market. We treated these two posts as independent of each other as they looked at the same issue from different angles. And the fact that there are several posts on a same topic also indicates that this is an important topic on reddit.com.
A possible problem involves the following aspect of the data. On Reddit, many of the posts and comments are being monitored and sanitised by its ‘volunteers’ and administrators (admins). Posts that are extremely offensive, or contain illegal contents are deleted by the work of volunteers and admins, were not included in the data set. This arguably could have a potential effect on the results of the analysis. However, if we look into the deleted posts, many of them belong to the logic fallacy of ad hominem or simply exchanges of bantering, which again will be put into the category of ‘neutral’ as they are usually not related to the topic at hand but to the people who initiated the post or comment. Considering this possibility, then the inclusion of such posts will only add to the number of neutral comments which will then further strengthen our argument.
After the annotation was completed, a list of posts with the number of positive, negative, and neutral comments was input into SPSS and hypotheses testing was performed using this statistical tool.
RESULTS
DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS
The distribution of the posts for each theme is summarised in Table 1.
Distribution of Posts Based on Annotated Themes
For the 384 posts, we collected a total of 7,680 comments. The attitudes of the 7,680 comments are summarised in Table 2.
Distribution of Attitudes of All Comments
HYPOTHESIS TESTING
The results of the hypothesis testing are listed in Tables 3 to 6.
Descriptive Statistics for Positive and Neutral Attitudes
Results of t-test of Positive and Neutral Attitudes
As can be seen from Tables 3 and 4, there were more comments with a neutral attitude (M = 11.64, SD = 5.952) than those with a positive attitude (M = 3.6, SD = 3.833). The difference was significant, t(654.117) = 22.252, p < 0.05.
In Tables 5 and 6, we can see that there were more comments with a neutral attitude (M = 11.64, SD = 5.952) than those with a negative attitude (M = 4.76, SD = 4.644). The difference was significant, t(723.275) = 17.846, p < 0.05.
Descriptive Statistics for Negative and Neutral Attitudes
Results of t-test of Negative and Neutral Attitudes
Therefore, the results of the hypothesis testing show that the number of neutral comments exceeds the number of either positive comments or negative comments on China-related posts on reddit.com, and thus the null hypothesis is rejected.
In the next section, we will further analyse the possible factors behind the overwhelming number of ‘neutral’ comments on China-related posts on reddit.com.
DISCUSSION
When analysing public opinion, we cannot neglect the fact that the so-called ‘public’ is composed of many individuals with different backgrounds, experiences, mindsets and personalities. While ‘herd thinking’ still plays a significant role in the mentality of the populace, especially in East Asian countries, the world is increasingly characterised by individualism and the individual needs and wants are shaping the modern world (Greenfield 2009). In addition, in most of the Western countries, individualism is highly valued and is a prevalent social norm which enables the generation of multiple subculture groups and special interest groups. Therefore, just as in real life, there exist different types of people with varying political stances, and there are also left, right and centre on the Internet. Even on reddit.com, there is a salient dichotomy of political orientations and opinions regarding a certain topic. For example, a closer examination of the data presented in Table 1 reveals that more than half of the collected comments centred on the following aspects or themes: Chinese economy, Chinese media, Science and Technology in China, Chinese politics and China–US relations. As our analysis shows that most of the comments have a neutral attitude, it follows that the Reddit users’ opinions or comments for these five themes are mainly neutral. Interestingly, it is easy to see that these five themes are also where most of the debates and controversy lie in the world of today. For the Chinese economy, just as many users are amazed at its rapid development and huge transformational force, several users are very pessimistic about its future and sustainability. About Chinese media and the development of science and technology in China, answers vary to a great extent depending on a person’s political stance or background in education, life experiences and profession. This dichotomy or divergence in opinions are most saliently represented in the topics related to Chinese politics and China–US relations. For instance, there are subreddits including r/China which candidly criticise the drawbacks, problems and controversial issues about China; at the same time, r/Communism avidly applauds the achievement of China, or even sings high praise for the same topic that was frowned upon in r/China. For every pro-China post or comment, there seems to be another anti-China one somewhere else on this website. This dichotomy results in a similar distribution of positive and negative comments on Reddit regarding China.
At the same time, it is useful to view the social media users’ opinions as forming a spectrum instead of simply two polarising extremes. The overwhelming number of ‘neutral’ opinions in our results is an indication that most of the people are not so ‘black and white’ about the same issue. There is a lot of grey areas in between where someone may be very much into Chinese food while totally turned off by the air pollution in Shanghai. Alternatively, one may be cautiously optimistic about the job market in China but not totally confident about it. Indeed, according to our annotators, most of the comments that fall into the category of ‘neutral’ are comments with mixed feelings or attitudes.
Furthermore, due to the development of individualism in most of the Western countries, individuals tend to be more self-centric and are more interested in the events and incidents that happen to themselves or their own country. This is clearly demonstrated on Reddit by the large of number of irrelevant comments the main purpose of which is to either exchange banter, mock the other users, look for the fallacy of logic in other people’s opinions or just attack others ad hominem. Under a topic as serious as ‘What do you think of China says the US has launched the trade war’, most of the comments turned into a display of the users’ knowledge and expertise in economics, and the debate was centred on the nitty-gritty details of a certain model in economics. That is to say, the users are easily ‘side-tracked’ to other aspects of the topic that are totally unrelated to China even if they intended to engage in a discussion about China to begin with. This fact also somewhat reflects real-life communication, where people are more centred on themselves and one-on-one relationships instead of other more ethereal objects like a foreign country, international relations or political movements. This ‘narcissism’, as Leung (2013) accurately pointed out, is highly correlated with social media users’ online behaviour.
In addition, we also need to consider the contextual information when analysing the data. When the project first started in late 2016, very few comments on reddit.com regarding China were negative. It was all before the full-blown trade war between China and the United States. At the same time, the total number of posts and comments with regard to China had remained more or less constant. However, since the beginning of 2018, there has been a great increase in the number of China-related posts and comments, some of which exhibit strong negative sentiments and are directly related to China–US relations. Apparently, this change reflected a paradigm shift in the China–US relations as well as the greater economic and political ecology in the world from 2016 to 2018. However, even under this circumstance, most of the comments are still with a neutral attitude due to the above-mentioned factors.
CONCLUSIONS
Over the years, the public opinion of one country’s citizens towards another country has been described by the conspiracy theorists as either extremely positive or overwhelmingly negative depending on their different political stance. There is certain truth to this perception as both exceedingly positive or negative emotions expressed online gain more attention and are thus more salient than neutral opinions. People tend to focus their attention more on the two extremes of attitude instead of noticing the milder views on the Internet. This is comparable to people’s perception of the accident rate of aircraft and automobiles. 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, our perceptions on these opinions could be skewed due to this effect.
In addition, if we go back to the analogy of neighbours in the global village we proposed at the beginning of this article, we can see the similarity between neighbours in the community and the countries in the world. For any one household in any community, usually their neighbour’s opinion will be neutral except for a few of them holding either very positive or truly negative attitude toward this household. As every household engages in their daily routine and minding their own business, it is very unlikely that they will be bent on forming extreme emotions towards their neighbours. That is to say, they do not really love or hate their neighbour; they simply do not care what their neighbour is doing. Similarly, for the citizens of any country, except for those who intentionally try to guide the discussion on a topic, it is very unlikely for them to really be concerned or care about the events and incidents happening in another country.
Based on the above analysis, we may safely reach the conclusion that the believers of the conspiracy theory that the entire West is on a war against China or that many Internet users in the West have been brainwashed by China to support its position are both fallacies. Finally, we are simply residents of a community and are busy with our own work and private lives.
IMPLICATIONS OF THE STUDY
This research has several implications for policy makers, national government, social media operators, researchers and scientists who are interested in this field of study. The outcome of the research shows that the willingness of the public in a country to understand a foreign country in the highly interconnected world today is still quite limited especially when the latter shares very little in common with the public of the former. Knowledge and discussion of another culture, as well as concerns about and attention paid to a foreign country, are mostly confined to academic research and policy makers in foreign affairs. Therefore, for both researchers and scientists as well as policy makers, when analysing international relations and foreign policies, the attitude and opinion of the public may only be viewed as one of the many indices of the relations between the two countries.
In addition, one may want to ask whether the public’s indifference towards a foreign country’s affairs is harmful. As a matter of fact, such judgement will be unnecessary as nation-states are intrinsically independent entities which are hard-wired by their unique culture, social customs, history and tradition. It is unlikely that we could ever achieve a ‘consensus’ or ‘common values’ among the nations of the world, which is beneficial for maintaining diversity of the human society and prevent overconvergence of cultures.
Furthermore, we tend to think of the conflict between China and the Western countries as a battle of ideology or political system, while in fact, it is more of a cultural conflict which can also be found between the contact of many other countries. However, amid such a lot of disagreement, debates and discordance, we can still find the general public in most of the places in the world share a common personality, that is to focus on our own daily matters and improve ourselves which also partially explains the indifference in our attitude towards other countries.
Given the time and resource constraints, the outcome of this research can only be used as one of the indicators for measuring public opinion of one country towards another country, especially China in this case. Further studies may look at the same topic from the following perspectives to enhance the current research findings. For example, the time of data collection could have a potential effect on the distribution of attitudes on social media. A longitudinal study will be able to reveal the changes in public opinion over a period of time. Alternatively, other researchers may expand the number of target foreign countries to compare the public opinion towards different countries. In addition, applying qualitative analysis may also provide more in-depth knowledge about the comments on social media. We believe that with further development in this research area, we will be able to improve our knowledge on the interaction of social media, public opinion and international relations.
Footnotes
DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING INTERESTS
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
FUNDING
The authors gratefully acknowledge receipt of grant number 16YJCZH029 from the Humanities and Social Science Research Foundation of the Ministry of Education of China.