| Abstract： |
COVID-19 has caused a global public health crisis, which has had a significant impact on the economy and daily life worldwide. This paper focuses on the period during which China implemented policy changes from lockdown to normalization, and analyzes the topics and predominant emotions expressed by users on China's largest social media platform, Sina Weibo. After preprocessing the raw data, the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling method was used to identify the main topics that users focused on in their posts. In addition, we calculated the proportion of different topics and analyzed the predominant emotional expressions conveyed by users in their posts. The study has three principal findings. Firstly, based on 91,239 collected Weibo posts in line with the criteria, we identified 17 topics and classified them into four topic categories: “Medical Resources, Infection, and Prevention”, “Changes in Epidemic Policies”, “Effects of Lifting COVID-19 Restrictions”, and “Policy Discussions and Individual Attitudes”. Secondly, among the 17 topics, “Personal Expectations”, “Policy Changes”, “Policy Discussions”, and “Virus Situation” had relatively high proportions. Thirdly, the emotions of “anticipation” and “trust” had a higher proportion, while the emotion of “fear” ranked behind them in terms of proportion. During the period when China was changing its three-year “zero infection”, the public expressed a strong expectation for the future, and they engaged in discussions and exchanges centered around the policy reform itself. Overall, the emotions expressed by the public were positive. Social media has provided a good communication bridge between the government and the public. The public can obtain information and engage in discussions through social media, while the government can timely understand the public's concerns and requirements, and respond to relevant issues of public concern during the process of policy implementation, providing a certain guarantee for the smooth implementation of policies. |
