Quantifying the Causal Effect of COVID-19 on the Significant Decline in American Online Attitude Toward China

11 Pages Posted: 16 Mar 2023

See all articles by Junming Huang

Junming Huang

Princeton University

Bozhidar Stankovikj

Peking University

Yu Xie

Princeton University

Abstract

The American public’s perception of China, an important aspect of the relationship between the world’s two largest economies, has become unfavorable in recent years, with a sudden decline in 2020 after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the attitude decline was concomitant with the pandemic, it is not easy to establish a causal relationship between them, given other parallel events in this time period, such as the US–China trade war. Identifying the causal effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the American public’s perception of China will help understand how Americans evaluate a foreign country. In this study, we examine the mediating role of social media in shaping the American public’s opinion in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. We empirically analyze a large-scale dataset of 2.2 million posts on the social networking platform Twitter in a 12-month window and identify that the outbreak of COVID-19 triggered American social media users to become more negative toward China, when posts related to COVID-19 begin spreading in their “cyber neighborhood”. This analysis is performed with a deep neural network model, BERT, to quantify American attitudes toward China, and a before-and-after event analysis and a difference-in-difference analysis to show the causal relationship between COVID-19 and declining favorability toward China. This finding confirms the mediating role of social media in shaping American public opinion on China.

Keywords: social network, public opinion, COVID-19, attitude toward China

Suggested Citation

Huang, Junming and Stankovikj, Bozhidar and Xie, Yu, Quantifying the Causal Effect of COVID-19 on the Significant Decline in American Online Attitude Toward China. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4380148 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4380148

Junming Huang (Contact Author)

Princeton University ( email )

22 Chambers Street
Princeton, NJ 08544-0708
United States

Bozhidar Stankovikj

Peking University ( email )

No. 38 Xueyuan Road
Haidian District
Beijing, 100871
China

Yu Xie

Princeton University ( email )

22 Chambers Street
Princeton, NJ 08544-0708
United States

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