News Media Sentiment Toward Chinese AI: a Comparative Analysis with Belt and Road Initiative Involvement and Public Opinion on China

This study evaluates different countries' news media’s sentiment towards Chinese AI, between May 2023 and May 2024, by using Microsoft Azure NLP Sentiment Analysis. The results are then compared with the country’s public opinion on China and its involvement in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). For this study 12 countries have been selected which are USA, Australia, Pakistan, Peru, Russia, Romania, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Philippines, Brazil, and Egypt. For each one, GNews Application Programming Interface (API), which has access to more than 60,000 global news sources, was used to aggregate relevant news articles based on queried keywords. The collected set of articles related to the topic of China+AI was compared with a set of aggregated articles related to AI, which was used as the control variable. The results showed no significant patterns between a country’s involvement with BRI or public opinion of China. This is contradictory to the theory of Commercial Liberalism and provides valuable insights regarding limitations of China’s soft power.