6:20 PM - 6:40 PM
[D5-05] The Public Sentiment During the Covid-19 Lockdowns in China: A
Comparison of Wuhan and Shanghai
Keywords:Covid, Sentiment, Policy study
Since 2020, COVID-19 has been spreading over the world.China's unique "Zero" policy (Lockdown Policy) has been instrumental in containing the outbreak. This paper uses the Bert model to investigate the public reaction in Wuhan and Shanghai during the Lockdown. The result shows that the public in Wuhan has more positive reactions than those in Shanghai (Binary). After discovering this result, we expanded the positive and negative into six emotions, and both results are consistent. Six emotions show the happy posts in Shanghai, mainly about encouraging each other and expressing gratitude to all sections of society for their assistance. Most unhappy posts like fear, angry, and sad in Shanghai concern unequal resources, high-frequency PCR testing, etc. Compared with the phase of disaster model, we can find the similarity trends in Wuhan but not in Shanghai. Lockdown as a disease avoidance measure, disease-worried persons naturally isolate themselves from intimacy. The result in Wuhan is clear collectivism, and the upbeat sentiment band has risen steadily during the lockdown, but Shanghai is incompatible with the phase-of-disaster model.