Catching Fire: How National Humiliation Spreads Hostile Foreign Policy Preferences on Chinese Social Media.

This article investigates how group-based emotions, specifically national humiliation, spread through emotional contagion on Chinese social media and influence foreign policy preferences. Using a large dataset of over 1.6 billion Sina Weibo posts from 2009 to 2014, the study finds that users' posts expressing national humiliation increase the likelihood that their followers also post about national humiliation and support hostile policies such as military force and maintaining territorial disputes. The findings support a theoretical approach that emotions can rapidly and broadly cascade across identity groups without face-to-face interaction, thereby shaping public opinion and potentially exerting pressure on policymakers. While the study focuses on expressed preferences rather than direct policy outcomes, it highlights the role of emotional narratives in mobilizing nationalist sentiment and influencing foreign policy attitudes in China.