What does China think? No question, perhaps, is more relevant in our day and age.
This is not just because of China’s economic importance, or because of her increasingly prominent geopolitical role. It is also, and most importantly, because of her role as a force of cultural innovation. The word innovation should not surprise us: after all, China has been a regional centre of innovation—perhaps the centre where many of the world’s philosophies, religions, and schools of thought converged, were reformulated, and then re-exported to the rest of East Asia—for thousands of years. It should not surprise us, then, that this is the role she is reclaiming today.
And yet, we know very little about China. We know little about her history, her art, her natural philosophy, and her political science. With so little knowledge of the subject as a whole, how can we hope to infer what the Chinese people think? Part of the difficulty undoubtedly lies in the Chinese language which, mysterious and fascinating as it is, has always seemed distant and cryptic, undecipherable to most non-Chinese readers. But the difficulty of the task does not diminish the importance of its goal; if anything, it magnifies it.
It has traditionally been the duty of sinologists—whether translators, philosophers or art historians—to study the corpus of Chinese knowledge and interpret it for foreign audiences. But the job of a sinologist has become increasingly difficult in the 21st century. The very subject of study is changing before our eyes. In fact, it could be argued that no place on Earth has changed as rapidly as China has in the past hundred years. And as Chinese society continues to evolve, it becomes ever harder for sinologists to maintain a clear understanding of what China is.
This is where the call for data scientists to study China arises. Not because computer nerds necessarily understand the world better than humanists do (I once believed so myself, only to be proven wrong countless times by life). But because data are, as in the well-known fable, the breadcrumbs humanity leaves behind in the deep, dark forest of the Internet. And in our era, it is only by following these crumbs that we can hope, eventually, to find our way home…
Welcome to China Media Insights — a blog dedicated to exploring trends in Chinese media through the use of data.
Here, I analyse the breadcrumbs left by the online discussion of films, books and other cultural products, with the aim of offering clear, data-backed insight on what China thinks — or at least, on what she posts about.
Thank you for stopping by — feel free to follow me on Medium or Substack to be updated on my work.
About the author. Yuxuan (宇轩) is a professional data scientist with a passion for Chinese language, history and culture. In the past, he has lived in Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo and London.
