| Summary: | Given the central role of People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the global climate crisis, discussion and analysis of Chinese actions and pledges on decarbonization abound. However, less examined are the popular ‘demand’ side of climate change politics inside of China. Our article explores a new set of data to gauge public discourse in China related to climate change by looking at trending topics on the prominent social media platform, Sina Weibo. In over 348,000 trending topics on Weibo from June 2017 to February 2021, we find only 336 unique topics, that is 0.12%, related to climate change. Even in the rare occasions when climate-related topics start trending, we find a general lack of substantive engagement in Weibo posts.
|
|---|