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Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands Dispute and Taiwan’s Netizens’ Sentiments Toward Japan and China

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Abstract

Senkaku/Diaoyu islands dispute has caused tensions among China, Japan, and Taiwan for decades. Although the Taiwanese government keeps a low profile on the dispute, the issue has flared up online discussion among Taiwan’s netizens. Many consider Taiwanese people more pro-Japan than other countries in East Asia, as elder generation living on the island shares nostalgia toward Japan, and as its younger generation charmed by Japanese manga and anime, let alone Taiwan being the top donor to Japan’s 311 earthquake. In this vein, Taiwanese people should accommodate well with Japan. However, Senkaku/Diaoyu islands dispute may tell another story. The act of Japanese government to nationalize Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in 2012 has provoked anger among its neighbor countries. Are Taiwanese people in favor of Japan’s stance on Senkaku/Diaoyu islands dispute due to the attachment for Japan or the other way round? This paper applies text mining technique and sentiment analysis to the digital data of Taiwan’s largest bulletin board system station—PTT—established by college students and extracts postings concerning Senkaku/Diaoyu islands dispute in the past 4 years (2009~2012). By this bottom-up approach, we aim to examine Taiwan’s netizens’ emotion toward the two hegemonies—i.e., Japan and China—and to see whether the strong attachment to Japan has any impact on netizens’ opinions on the dispute.

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Notes

  1. President Ma Ying-jeou announced that “Taiwanese Coastguard’s guarding of Senkaku/Diaoyu islands is a proclamation of sovereignty. This action is not one which is only carried out once every several years, but rather every year, every month. In particular, it is important for the Coast Guard to protect Senkaku/Diaoyuerman daily during the Senkaku/Diaoyuing season (editor’s note: every year from September to February). President Ma explained the first line of defense in confronting territorial problems was the Coast Guard, and the army was the second. This would allow peace for Taiwan according to Ma [36].

  2. The Arab Spring provides a significant example of an internet-led revolution.

  3. While the Gossip (Bagua) forum provides the most discussion essays, most of these are mixed.

  4. It was primarily reformation concerning the three evil customs of opium consumption, the tonsure, and feet binding.

  5. Cross-Strait Economic Statistics Monthly 2012

  6. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-04/02/content_14970915.htm. Accessed July 1st, 2015

  7. China Times 12 November 2007

  8. Department of Statistics, Ministry of the Interior, http://sowf.moi.gov.tw/stat/week/list.htm Accessed July 1st, 2015

  9. http://www.tisr.com.tw/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/TISR_TMBS_201301_22.pdf. Accessed July 1st, 2015

  10. With respect to special articles about Taiwan as a base for a Kuomintang revival, Shi proposes the notion of Taiwan as the base for a revival gradually declined after Taiwan started losing diplomatic status in the 1970s [28].

  11. PTT official website: http://www.ptt.cc/index.html; Asia digital Map: http://www.asiadigitalmap.com/2011/09/about-taiwanese-bbs/ Accessed 29 July 2015

  12. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a probabilistic topic model to estimate the topics in the corpus and the proportion of each article or post devoted to each topic [37, p.14].

  13. WordNet is a database of English words, which includes semantic relationships of words too. It includes synonym and antonym relationships. Chinese Wordnet was developed by Chu-Ren Huang and Shu-Kai Hsieh at National Taiwan University (Chinese Wordnet website: http://lope.linguistics.ntu.edu.tw/cwn/licence/). Accessed 29 July 2015.

  14. SentiWordNe is “a lexical resource for opinion mining. SentiWordNet assigns to each synset of WordNet three sentiment scores: positivity, negativity, objectivity” (http://sentiwordnet.isti.cnr.it/). Accessed 29 July 2015.

  15. Those keywords are “Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, Republic of China, Ishihara Shintaro, Tokyo city, Taiwan Coast Guard, Taiping islands, Taipei city, Japan Self-Defense Forces, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Law, Japan Coast Guard, The Fifteenth Day, Ownership, Pacific Ocean, Taiwan Retrocession Day, Lee Myung-bak, Jurisdiction, United Nations, Leaders, Defeated country.”

  16. Figure 3. Entropy in newspaper editorials, opinion forums¸ and PTT

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Political Science, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Boyu Chen

  2. Department of Information Management, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Republic of China

    San Yih Hwang

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  1. Boyu Chen
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  2. San Yih Hwang
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Correspondence to Boyu Chen.

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Chen, B., Hwang, S.Y. Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands Dispute and Taiwan’s Netizens’ Sentiments Toward Japan and China. East Asia 32, 385–399 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12140-015-9245-3

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