President Xi Jinping is students’ favourite: online study
Researchers find that 96 per cent of students who mentioned Chinese leader on Weibo over the past two years showed a positive attitude towards him
President Xi Jinping is the most popular among a group of 15 commonly discussed public figures, a study of more than 1,700 college students has found.
About 96 per cent of those students who mentioned the Chinese president or shared posts about him on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, over the past two years showed a positive attitude towards him, a study by a Fudan University research team found.
Though criticism of state leaders or the government is often quickly removed on social media platforms, which could have affected the result, researchers said it was still notable that so many students described Xi using favourable expressions.
The researchers selected 15 commonly discussed public figures online and studied the posts of the 1,700 students on Weibo over the past two years to see who had been mentioned the most. They also studied how well liked each personality was, among those students who had mentioned them.
“When mentioning the president, the words ‘Xi Dada’, which has positive connotations and bears a sense of closeness, was the most frequently used, rather than ‘Xi’ or ‘President Xi’, which are neutral,” said one of the researchers.
Han Han, the author and racing driver; Wang Sicong, the outspoken son of one of the mainland’s richest men; and Jack Ma, the Alibaba founder, were the three most talked about public figures.
Ma was the second most popular public figure after Xi.
