“Climate Change” or “Global Warming”? The (Un)Politicization of Climate in Chinese Social Media Platform

Though previous research shows the terminology and framing way that political elites choose can influence public climate attitudes, the association between term preferences and politicization of climate change is understudied. This study focuses on how different social groups in China use terminologies and frames and how the wording and framing choices affect public climate opinions. Using manual and computer-assisted content analysis of the highest viewed videos and users’ comments on Bilibili, we found government accounts tended to use climate change (CC) and associated climate problems with politics, while individuals were likely to use global warming (GW) and understood climate mainly from its potential impacts. Post-video comments under the CC-titled videos were about climate politics, while comments under the GW-titled videos focused on humanity and earth. Meanwhile, users’ comments to specific video frames had certain emotional patterns. We characterized the differences of CC- and GW-titled videos and comments as politicization and unpoliticization respectively. Our findings suggest that the preferences of terminologies and associated frames among different social groups can affect public opinions and facilitate (un)politicization of climate change in China. This study sheds light on how communication strategies could significantly spin public understanding of important public issues.