The writing process for academic publications seems designed to destroy every bit of joy. A good idea, fun data gathering and analysis quickly falls into strategic assessments of which journal and which framing and so forth. And then once submissions occur, the actual waiting is just beginning. There’s desk rejections and word limit changes and editorial management software to navigate. Obviously don’t get me started on that well-known star of horror, Reviewer 2. Even acceptance usually means interminable punctuation, formatting, and bibliographic edits. And once things are out, they tend to be ignored.
All that being said, it’s still very nice when actual new research does get unleashed on the world. I am proud to introduce:
What’s Not Trending on Weibo: China’s Missing Climate Change Discourse
Writing this paper with Chuxuan (Victoria) Liu was a joy. Here’s our abstract:
Given the central role of People's Republic of China (PRC) in the global climate crisis, discussion and analysis of Chinese actions and pledges on decarbonization abound. However, less examined are the popular 'demand' side of climate change politics inside of China. Our article explores a new set of data to gauge public discourse in China related to climate change by looking at trending topics on the prominent social media platform, Sina Weibo. In over 348,000 trending topics on Weibo from June 2017 to February 2021, we find only 336 unique topics, that is 0.12%, related to climate change. Even in the rare occasions when climate-related topics start trending, we find a general lack of substantive engagement in Weibo posts.
If you are wondering about whether to look for climate change in Weibo’s trending topics, I’d recommend searching elsewhere. Given the scale of Weibo, there is of course discussion of everything (everywhere all at once) — including climate change — but it just doesn’t rate. No bubbling up pressure coming to push the government to act, to criticize it during moments of climate-related crisis, or to praise it for successful pledges/actions. It just isn’t really here. Documenting the non-presence of something is a little weird, but its non-presence was so overwhelming that we made it work.
I hope that in future work we can dive a bit further into the substance of the real climate debates that are happening in China. Such discussions are mostly within technocratic, elite venues and operate inside of political walls, but WeChat might offer opportunities to find some popular discourse in this domain to analyze as well. Let me know what you think.