Are Chinese Netizens More Hawkish Than Their Government?

Spoiler alert: Yes—at least when it comes to conflicts with the Philippines in the South China Sea.

Chinese social media is clearly more hawkish towards the Philippines than China’s (largely state-sponsored) news media, according to recent findings from Talisman, FilterLabs’ data platform. Our data reinforce recent survey-based research by Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Jessica Chen Weiss. 

Over the past two years, tensions between China and the Philippines have frequently run high. This spring alone there were several major issues: Chinese and Filipino ships raised competing flags in a show of force (point 8 in the graph above); Google Maps changed “South China Sea” to the “West Philippines Sea” after successful lobbying by the government of the Philippines, to the dismay of Beijing (6); and the Filipino government lifted a long-standing ban on officials traveling to Taiwan (7). To name but a few. 

As we tracked online discourse, using Talisman, we noticed that social media consistently registered more negative average sentiment around the Philippines than Chinese news. We found several themes that help explain the news outlet / social media divide:

• Conflicts, but sympathy, too. In the news media, sentiment in stories about flags and maps were mostly negative. However, the negativity was balanced out by positive stories that highlighted Philippines tourism launching Chinese language services and sympathy for victims of earthquakes in the region. 
• Territorial tensions. Chinese netizen sentiment toward the Philippines, on the other hand, was consistently negative, in large part because it focused mostly on touchy territorial issues, without the economic cooperation-related balance we saw in state-sponsored news coverage of the Philippines. 
• Bellicose netizens. Social media fixated on the military conflicts and perceived slights. For example, after the flag-raising controversy, some Weibo users called a Vancouver man a “hero” after he ran his van into a group of Filipino nationals. 

An unexpected clue in the data? One thing we noticed in the chart above was that positive sentiment trends in the state-affiliated press tended to precede upturns in social media sentiment—such as in mid-October 2024 and late March 2025. The exact reason was not immediately clear, but it is possible (perhaps even likely) that the state coverage of the Philippines does influence how Chinese netizens feel about their neighbor to the southeast. 

For now, it seems as though the Chinese Communist Party is including positive outlooks towards the Philippines in its news coverage, even during confrontational moments. This could be impacting social media sentiment in the short term, but in the longer term it seems that Chinese netizens, for whatever reason, latch onto more hawkish narratives.

GRAPH LEGEND
1. Joint U.S.–Philippines air patrols begin (February 4).
2. Aerial and maritime confrontations over resource access (February 18–19).
3. Mass arrest of Chinese nationals in Philippines over alleged illegal gambling rings (February 27).
4. Alleged Chinese spies arrested in Philippines (March 19).
5. Scarborough Shoal confrontation (March 24).
6. Google renames the region “West Philippine Sea” (April 15).
7. Major Philippine policy shift on official visits to Taiwan (April 21).
8. Symbolic flag demonstrations (April 25–27).

Explore the Data in Talisman

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