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The Internet in China: New Methods and Opportunities

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Abstract

This chapter reviews methodological advances in Internet studies in Chinese politics. First, automated text analysis reduces the time and cost of examining texts, and makes it possible to conduct a large-scale analysis of textual data like social media posts. Tools of automated text analysis, such as supervised classification, ReadMe, and topic models, have been applied in Internet studies in Chinese politics. Second, the new methods also bring new opportunities for developing rigorous research designs: (1) the Internet can serve as a platform for online field and survey experiments; (2) in some cases, in particular natural experiments, big data make it easier to conduct causal inference; (3) and with big data, there is potential to make inference with regard to a broader context.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Grimmer and Steward (2013) provides a thorough review of automated text analysis methods for political texts.

  2. 2.

    The Jieba Chinese word segmentation tool can be downloaded from the following website: https://github.com/fxsjy/jieba.

  3. 3.

    The WeiboScope project, maintained by the Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong, constantly tracks the posts of influential Weibo users (Fu et al. 2013). Another interesting study based on the WeboScope data is Nip and Fu (2016).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China

    Yang Zhang

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  1. Yang Zhang
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Affairs, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

    Jianxing Yu

  2. Department of Political Science, and Center for US-China Policy Studies, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Sujian Guo

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Zhang, Y. (2019). The Internet in China: New Methods and Opportunities. In: Yu, J., Guo, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Local Governance in Contemporary China. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2799-5_23

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