Public perception of the Chinese president’s visit to Saudi Arabia and the China–Arab Summit: sentiment analysis of Arabic tweets

In recent years, China and Saudi Arabia have had frequent exchanges in the political and economic fields, and public opinion evaluation is an essential aspect of evaluating the two countries’ current relations. This paper analyzes tweets in Arabic discussing the Chinese president’s visit to Saudi Arabia and the summits that were held between China and several Arab nations during that visit. The analysis uses one of CAMeLBERT’s sentiment analysis models targeted toward dialectal Arabic and employs modified preprocessing steps to enhance the model’s performance. The study finds that the majority of the tweets are neutral, due to extensive media coverage of the visit, and that positive tweets significantly outweigh negative tweets, which reflects that these events are perceived positively by the Arab public. Further content analysis reveals that the positive tweets discuss topics related to the outcomes and potentials for cooperation and strategic partnership between China and the Arab nations. Despite being outweighed by neutral and positive tweets, the negative tweets provide insight into the challenges that might face this partnership in future. These negative tweets discuss a variety of themes. First, they criticize America and Iran’s strategies and highlight these countries’ responses to the visit; second, they show concern over the potential subservience to China; third, they express fear that China might put its interests over others. The findings of this study are fundamental for the development of China–Arab relations as they provide crucial information about the challenges that need to be addressed in the future.