ORCID
- Clive E. Sabel: 0000-0001-9180-4861
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Optimal crisis management depends on how much the public can tolerate stringent measures. Using large-scale Weibo microblog data and two sentiment analysis models, this study investigated and compared public sentiment responses during the COVID-19 lockdowns in Wuhan and Shanghai, focusing on how residents’ emotional expressions evolved across different stages of the pandemic. Binary and six-emotion sentiment analysis models based on bidirectional encoder repre-sentations from transformers (BERT) were employed to examine how the two cities developed distinct emotional trajectories. Emotional responses in Wuhan followed emotional Phases of Disaster, with sharp tran-sitions from shock to solidarity, followed by disillusion-ment. Conversely, Shanghai’s residents displayed sta-ble emotional fluctuations with sustained management-oriented discourse. Word frequency analysis revealed that Wuhan citizens emphasized community self-help and mutual support, while Shanghai residents focused on systematic management processes, reflecting their approach to the crisis as an administrative challenge rather than an unprecedented disaster. These dif-ferences suggest that temporal positioning within the entire pandemic timeline fundamentally shapes how cities emotionally process extended health crises. In the early stage, the public responded primarily to the health threat itself, while in the later stage, they responded predominantly to the societal disruptions caused by containment policy. This study contributes to the crisis-management literature by providing methods to gauge public sentiment and demonstrating how temporal positioning influences public emotional responses during extended crises; and to the social-sensing literature by advancing methods for large-scale sentiment tracking.
DOI Link
Publication Date
2026-10-01
Publication Title
Journal of Disaster Research
Volume
21
Issue
5
ISSN
1881-2473
Acceptance Date
2026-06-21
Deposit Date
2026-10-09
Additional Links
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
First Page
1019
Last Page
1034
Recommended Citation
Pei, X., Isoda, Y., Nakaya, T., & Sabel, C. (2026) 'Timing Matters: Contrasting Public Sentiment During Wuhan’s and Shanghai’s COVID-19 Lockdowns', Journal of Disaster Research, 21(5), pp. 1019-1034. Available at: 10.20965/jdr.2026.p1019
