31 October 2025 (Update) | 16 October 2025 | Shenzhen

I am pleased to announce that the first paper collaboratively authored by Professor NING Xuan’s team, particularly Ms Li Ruonan, a Senior Year Undergraduate in the Digital Social Sciences programme at BNBU, and me has been accepted for publication in the prestigious SCI/SSCI Q1 journal Frontiers in Public Health in October 2025. This achievement is the result of the team’s dedicated efforts over the past two years. 

This project is funded by the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation （国家自然科学基金-青年科学基金项目）. Professor NING Xuan is the principal investigator of this project. Read: BNBU News

You may read the details of the article here:

Abstract: China had been implementing stringent dynamic policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. In late 2022, China made a sudden policy shift from its three-year dynamic zero-COVID to the re-opening policy, which resulted in a divergence of online public opinions and varying sentiments. However, few research has been done to explore the public’s sentiment changes toward this abrupt policy shift. To better inform effective health communication regarding governments’ change of policies for future initiatives, this study aims to analyze public’s sentiment changes toward the launching of China’s re-opening policy by using Weibo data. Our study examined 1, 423, 694 Weibo posts during the period from November 11, 2022 to January 11, 2023 to conduct a fine-grained emotion extraction. This study also used the LDA topic model to extract potential topics in Weibo posts to align topics and corresponding emotions for generating in-depth understanding. Fluctuations of different emotions during these two months were profoundly analyzed and interpreted by taking cultural, social, and policy-related reasons into consideration. Notably, the average proportion of “disgust” (24.0%) exceeded that of “like” (22.8%) after mid-December, while “happiness” exhibited a gradual increase to 12.0%. Results of this study will be essential to informing the government’s effective health communication in the time of public health crisis, facilitating pandemic control and prevention, and enlightening on the maintenance of public’s well-being.

Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Policy
Volume 13 – 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1692166

Public Sentiment Dynamics in Policy Transitions: A Sentiment Analysis Based on Weibo Data

Authors: Xuan Ning¹Ruonan Li^1*Dewei Lan¹Chaofan Chen²Yupeng Li³

• ¹Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University, Zhuhai, China
• ²The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR China
• ³Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR China