“It’s All About US vs THEM!”: Comparing Chinese Populist Discourses on Weibo and Twitter

Abstract

The recent resurgence of populism has led to renewed interest in the phenomenon, but it remains unclear how this phenomenon has manifested itself in non-Western settings like China. This article analyses Chinese populism and provides a systematic categorization of online discourses related to this phenomenon, including ideas about “the people,” “corrupt elites,” and “enemies.” The article is based on a collection of more than 100,000 Chinese online posts, collected from both Weibo and Twitter, that were classified as populist or not using natural language processing (NLP) models. We show how populism has manifested itself in Chinese online venues, and how populist discourses on Weibo and Twitter differ in topics, semantic content, and in who posts (agenda setters) and shares posts (audiences). The comparison demonstrates that different Chinese netizens take competing approaches to define the place of a rising China, and this also puts populism into the context of the peculiar Chinese way of rallying “the people” on behalf of the nation. Findings from this study contribute new insights into understanding populism in Chinese cyberspaces and provide a cross-platform perspective for understanding populist discourses in national and transnational contexts. The study also adds to computational methods in empirical research of populism in a comparative perspective.