Abstract
As one of the early COVID-19 epidemic outbreak areas, China attracted the global news media’s attention at the beginning of 2020. During the epidemic period, Chinese people united and actively fought against the epidemic. However, in the eyes of the international public, the situation reported about China is not optimistic. To better understand how the international public portrays China, especially during the epidemic, we present a case study with big data technology. We aim to answer three questions: (1) What has the international media focused on during the COVID-19 epidemic period? (2) What is the media’s tone when they report China? (3) What is the media’s attitude when talking about China? In detail, we crawled more than 280 000 pieces of news from 57 mainstream media agencies in 22 countries and made some interesting observations. For example, international media paid more attention to Chinese livelihood during the COVID-19 epidemic period. In March and April, “progress of Chinese vaccines,” “specific drugs and treatments,” and “virus outbreak in U.S.” became the media’s most common topics. In terms of news attitude, Cuba, Malaysia, and Venezuela had a positive attitude toward China, while France, Canada, and the United Kingdom had a negative attitude. Our study can help understand China’s image in the eyes of the international media and provide a sound basis for image analysis.
摘要
中国作为新冠肺炎疫情早期爆发地区之一, 在2020年初就引起全球新闻媒体关注. 疫情期间, 中国人民团结一致, 积极抗击疫情. 然而, 在国际公众眼中, 有关中国疫情的报道并不乐观. 为更好了解国际公众如何看待中国, 特别是在疫情期间, 我们利用大数据技术进行了案例研究. 我们主要想回答3个问题: (1) 新冠肺炎疫情期间, 国际媒体关注的焦点是什么? (2) 媒体报道中国时的立场是什么? (3) 媒体谈论中国时的态度是什么? 具体来说, 我们从22个国家的57家主流媒体中收集了28万则以上相关新闻, 从中分析出一些有趣现象. 例如, 新冠肺炎疫情期间, 国际媒体更加关注中国民生; 在3月和4月, “中国疫苗进展” “特定药物和治疗” “美国病毒爆发” 成为媒体最常见话题; 在新闻态度方面, 古巴、 马来西亚、 委内瑞拉对中国持正面态度, 而法国、 加拿大、 英国则持负面态度. 我们的研究有助于理解中国在国际媒体眼中的形象, 并为形象分析提供良好依据.
Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at http://203.195.140.107/dataset/download.
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Yi FENG, Mingqi LAI, Rui ZHANG, Mohan ZHANG, Yu LI, and Haoshuang CAO for their efforts devoted to this project.
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Contributions
Hong HUANG and Xuanhua SHI designed the research. Zhexue CHEN, Chenxu WANG, and Zepeng HE processed the data. Hong HUANG, Zhexue CHEN, and Chenxu WANG drafted the manuscript. Hai JIN, Mingxin ZHANG, and Zongya LI helped revise the manuscript. Hong HUANG finalized the paper.
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Hong HUANG, Zhexue CHEN, Xuanhua SHI, Chenxu WANG, Zepeng HE, Hai JIN, Mingxin ZHANG, and Zongya LI declare that they have no conflict of interest. This study is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant.
Additional information
Hong HUANG, first author of this invited paper, is an associate professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan China. She received her PhD degree in computer science from the University of Göttingen, Germany in 2016, and her ME degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 2012. Her research interests include social network analysis, social influence, and data mining.
Xuanhua SHI, corresponding author of this invited paper, is currently a professor with the School of Computer Science and Technology, HUST, Wuhan, China. He is the deputy director of the National Engineering Research Center for Big Data Technology and System (NER-CBDTS). He published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in conferences and journals such as ASPLOS, VLDB, ACM Trans Comput Syst, and IEEE Trans Parall Distr Syst. He is a corresponding expert of Front Inform Technol Electron Eng. He received research supports from several governmental and industrial organizations, such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education, and the European Union. His current research interests include cloud computing, big data processing, and AI systems.
Hai JIN received his PhD degree in computer engineering from HUST, Wuhan, China, in 1994. He worked at the University of Hong Kong from 1998 to 2000, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA from 1999 to 2000. He is currently the Cheung Kung Scholars Chair Professor of Computer Science and Engineering with HUST. He has coauthored 15 books, and published over 700 research articles. He is now serving as an editor of Front Inform Technol Electron Eng. He was awarded the German Academic Exchange Service Fellowship to visit the Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany in 1996, and was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China for Distinguished Young Scholars in 2001. He is a Fellow of China Computer Federation (CCF) and a Life Member of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). His research interests include computer architecture, virtualization technology, cluster computing and cloud computing, peer-to-peer computing, network storage, and network security.
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Huang, H., Chen, Z., Shi, X. et al. China in the eyes of news media: a case study under COVID-19 epidemic. Front Inform Technol Electron Eng 22, 1443–1457 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1631/FITEE.2000689
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1631/FITEE.2000689
Key words
- Country image
- COVID-19 epidemic
- Topic mining
- Entity
- Tone of news
- Emotion
关键词
- 国家形象
- 新冠肺炎
- 主题挖掘
- 实体
- 新闻立场
- 情感
CLC number
- TP311.13