Portrayals of Chinese companies in American and British economic news tweets during China's macroeconomic transitions 2007–2023

This study investigates portrayals of China-headquartered companies in American and British economic news tweets and their relationship to China’s macroeconomic fluctuations from 2007 to 2023. Using a corpus of 55,394 tweets (934,155 words) from prominent US/UK outlets, the analysis incorporates China’s quarterly GDP and monthly PMI to contextualize media sentiment. Guided by van Dijk’s ingroup/outgroup ideological framework, RoBERTa-based transformer models assessed sentiment and emotions, and large language models annotated evaluative targets (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats). Positive and negative sentiments were significantly (p < 0.01) correlated with China’s macroeconomic indices. As the economy shifted from expansion to contraction, positivity declined and negativity increased, indicating movement from ingroup to outgroup portrayals. US tweets were most positive at economic balance and most negative during downturns; UK tweets were most positive during stability or early recovery and most negative when a downturn was anticipated. Positive sentiment increasingly emphasized external opportunities alongside strengths as conditions worsened, while negative sentiment shifted from internal weaknesses to external threats. Multiple regressions showed several emotions significantly (p < 0.0001) influenced sentiment shifts. Findings illuminate how economic changes and journalistic factors shape ideological representations of Chinese firms on social media.

Meng Ye, Eric Friginal