Mapping the online discourse on the BRI in social media: general context and religious factors

Post Author(s)

This data mining project investigates the changing and contested narratives of the BRI in social media, focusing on sentimental and networking characteristics in online communication platforms. In an interim outcome, this work has firstly framed a systematic approach to analyse the discourse on the BRI in social networking platforms; with further studies to focus on conversations related to the BRI’s transnational circulation of personnel, religion and cosmological values.

The targeted data period spans seven years between 1^st Jan 2013 to 31^st April 2020, exemplified by the worldwide social media platform Twitter. This work has retrieved more than 400,000 tweets with BRI related keywords mentioned in content or hashtags, applying the Boolean logic “OR” for following terms in Twitter’s advanced search mode: Belt and road, one belt one road, New silk road, silk road economic belt, maritime silk road, OBOR. Tweets are then documented with the name of the user, content, hyperlink, posted time, number of likes, retweets, replies, sentiment level of tweet, and geographical location provided by the user.

The methodology for data mining and sentiment analysis is based on the Python programming language with data scraping module to retrieve tweets from Twitter and VADER sentiment module (Hutto & Gilbert, 2014) to further classify the emotional level of each tweet within the range of -1 to +1 from most negative to most positive. The search language of terms is in English, which can be further expanded to other languages such as Chinese, Arab, Urdu, to cover a wider context of the BRI in different languages.

Until now, this sub-project has worked on five aspects of the BRI discourse in the Twittersphere:

Infrastructural and religious related postings
Trending topics/conversations of the BRI at different times
Sentimental dynamics of the BRI’s dialogue in global and local frames
Key opinion leaders and their networking characteristics
Comparative studies on the opinion field: China, United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong

(1). Postings about the BRI with terms related to religions, sects or sacred scriptures in Twitter reveal the general focuses on religious issues relating to the BRI.

(2). Topic modelling was employed to summarize tweets of the BRI from 2013-2020 into ten topics. which are generated by the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm in Python topic modelling coding (Blei et al., 2003).

(3). Visualizing the sentiment level of tweets on the BRI in monthly average.

(4). Ranking and networking the top 20 opinion leaders in a given year and in different countries by the number of retweets. Accounts include state media, research institutes, think tanks, news organizations, and individuals

(5). Comparison between users’ postings on the BRI in different countries.

Planned Publication

The Belt and Road Initiative in Social Media: Investigating the Discursive Landscape of International Relations through Sentiment and Social Network Analysis

Edward Man, Qian Junxi and David A. Palmer

ABSTRACT

Since the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was launched in 2013, diverse arguments and sentiments are growing online, concerning a promising but latently coercive Sino-centric order in future. In 2020, the discourse of the BRI has been prominently associated with Sinophobic opinions, correlated to the deterioration in Sino-American relations and suspicious transmission of COVID-19 through China backed overseas infrastructures. This brings into question how the shifting sentiments are driven by stakeholders’ engagements in dissemination of information online. This article quantified the communal cyberspace of the BRI as found on the social media platform, Twitter since 2013 to the third quarter of 2020. Text mining analytics are employed to spotlight the evolving discourse on the BRI in trending topics and sentiments; and to build upon the shifts in narrative to investigate Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs)’ online behaviours and influence by mapping out their social networking patterns. Using computational approaches to identify the evolution of the BRI narrative on social media, this work offers a vantage point to understand the online public opinion field in temporal dynamics and how different actors behave in reacting and adapting to changes in international affairs.

Parallels And Paradoxes: New Religious Formations In Response To The BRI In Sri Lanka

Since the end of the civil war in 2009, Sri Lanka has attracted significant volumes of foreign investment. The vast majority of this investment has come from Chinese companies, which have committed loans amounting to over US$ 7 billion so far. Much of this investment has been used to finance large-scale infrastructure projects, including the...

Buddhism At The Borders Of Trade: Colonial And Post-Colonial Discourses On Trans-Himalayan Economic Networks And Connectivity

The expansion of international trade exerted and continues to exert considerable influence on the negotiation of nation-state borders and on the formation of cultural, social, and religious identities. While the relationship between religion and trade is undeniably complex and multifaceted, it has been suggested that commercial connectivity has...

Alternative Healing Methods And China’s Health Silk Road: Chinese Muslim Medical Enterprises And Practitioners In Dubai

China has gained more prominence in terms of its global health leadership during the coronavirus pandemic. The state dispatched medical teams and supplies to many Belt and Road countries in the last six months. Sinopharm, a large state-owned Chinese pharmaceutical company, established its first overseas COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial program in...

Alternative Networks In Southeast Asia: One Sea One Temple, And The City Of A Thousand Temples

In response to the slogan One Belt One Road a small temple in Sibu, Sarawak came up with an alternative slogan – One Sea One Temple. They then built a network of over 100 Dabogong (Tudigong) temples in ports along the South China Sea and into the Indian Ocean. This covers much of the same territory as the BRI’s “Maritime Silk Road.” But rather...

Modern China And The Question Of Muslim Sectarianism In The Context Of Inter-Asian Religious Circulations

Sinophone Islam, as found in the Xibei (Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai and Ningxia), is characterized by sectarian (jiaopai) divisions among four groupings: the Qadim, the Sufi orders (menhuan), the Ikhwan, and the Salafis. With the exception of the latter, all of these sects adhere to a common doctrinal and legalistic tradition, shared by their...

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Sinophobia And Religious Nationalist Sentiments In Vietnam

President Xi Jinping’s launch of the One Bell One Road Initiative (OBOR or BRI) was met with a negative reaction in the Vietnamese public sphere, although the speedy development of infrastructure connecting Vietnam and China would stimulate a number of trade sectors. The discussion focused on whether part of Vietnamese sovereignty should be given...

BRI Mapbox: An Online Map Generating Database

The BRI Mapbox illustrates the spatial configuration between infrastructures and religious factors in the BRI region. This work maps out and correlates routes, borders, railroads, pipelines, ports and free trade zones with demographic, economic and geo-political data in both contemporary and retrospective timeframes. These spatial features form a...

Paving Portions Of The ‘One Road’ Across The Indian Ocean: China’s Highway And Bridge Projects In The Republic Of The Maldives

Our work examines the work of constructing domestic overland roads and bridges within the Republic of the Maldives. This archipelago of atolls stretches across 90,000 square kilometres, but of that vast territory only less than 300 square kilometres is comprised of dry land. The country includes within its territorial waters two major deep-water...

Spacializing the BRI in the History of Asian Imperial Imaginations

This subproject situates the contemporary mapping of the BRI within the history of the spacial imagination of Asia, using the notion of “empire” as a conceptual tool to interrogate how the connecting and separation of places through networks and infrastructures of trade and religion have been associated with different imaginations, juxtapositions...

Muslim Humanitarian Networks and Chinese Infrastructures in Northern Pakistan

This project investigates the intersection of Muslim humanitarian networks and Chinese-built infrastructures in Gilgit-Baltistan in northern Pakistan. The central aim of the project is to examine how at this meeting point of material and social entities that are often seen as disjointed new meanings emerge which alter the use and poetics of...