China has been of particular interest to me ever sense I took a class on Modern China during my time at Grand Valley State University.
In fact, a good portion of the books I've read over the past year has centered on learning more about the history China since Deng Xiaoping launched 'Reform and Opening'. (*insert Henry Kissinger quote about the importance of understanding China??). My favorite author so far while exploring the intricacies and complexities of China's history has been Ezra Vogel whose specific works I've read "Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China" and "China and Japan: Facing History". Other notable works I've read include "Chinese Politics in the Hu Jintao Era" by Willy Wo-Lap Lam and "The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State" by Elizabeth C. Economy.
After gaining a broad understanding of China's history, I wanted to explore the contemporary policies and actions of Xi's 5th generation leadership core. One of the most consequential projects that Xi's government has undertaken is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI was one Xi's answer to increasing China's stature on the global stage by providing massive infrastructure investment funds to countries looking for alternatives to the United States and Western backed lending organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. There's certainly been lots of talk about China's BRI and whether it's a 'debt trap' or another way for countries to get much needed funding for domestic projects. This public perception of the BRI is something I wanted to explore further so I figured this was a good project to learn about data scrapping and sentiment analysis!
I scrapped tweets about China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) off Twitter from 2014-2023 to gauge public opinion (from an English-speaking audience) on a staple policy of the Xi administration's push to increase China's soft power and global credibility. To gauge opinion from these tweets, I conducted a sentiment analysis using the Bing, Afinn, and NRC lexicons. To increase the number of words recognized by each lexicon I lemmatized each word from every tweet to its most basic form. Also, I took this opportunity to see how Chinese State Media English language outlets tried to influence the conversation/narrative regarding the BRI on English twitter feeds.
"It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice." - Deng Xiaoping