Top-down or Bottom-up? A Network Agenda-setting Study of Chinese Nationalism on Social Media

The extent to which nationalist discourse is transferred between the authority and the people remains unclear. Taking Chinese nationalism on Weibo as a research context, this study differentiated Weibo accounts into (1) individual users, (2) influencers, and (3) organizational accounts, and it applied a network agenda-setting (NAS) approach to analyze how nationalist issues are transferred among different actors. Based on large-scale data, supervised machine learning was employed to identify issue categories, while semantic network analysis was completed to construct issue networks. The results indicate that media agenda influences individuals’ agenda while the construction of nationalism follows a bottom-up direction.