Imagining China in online reviews: A discourse analysis of Amazon consumer reviews on China-related books

Imagining China in online reviews: A discourse analysis of Amazon consumer reviews on China-related books | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Article Imagining China in online reviews: A discourse analysis of Amazon consumer reviews on China-related books Qiang Geng, Siyi Qiu This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-6774493/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Under Review Version 1 posted 7 You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract Research on the image of China that emerges from Amazon online reviews is wanting. Scholarship here can greatly benefit from leveraging the potential of quantitative analysis. The present study addresses this gap by drawing on an integrated framework of discourse analysis and a combined approach of distant and close reading to examine the image of China constructed by the discourse of Amazon consumer reviews on the most popular China-related books. By examining the metadata of 43 China-related books and a corpus consisting of 48,895 online consumer reviews on these books, this study seeks to reveal the major topics conveyed, associated stances and attitudes, and the values, assumptions, and perceptions shaping the discourse. As such, the study provides insight into future research on world perceptions of China through global digital media in terms of research content, theoretical frameworks, and research methods. Humanities/Language and linguistics Humanities/Literature China’s image Amazon (U.S.) online consumer review distant reading discourse analysis Figures Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Introduction This study examines how China’s image is constructed, overall, in the discourse of online consumer reviews, which serve as influential yet often overlooked grassroots perspectives. While previous research on the foreign images of China has largely centered on elite-mediated discourses such as mainstream media and professional critics, it often overlooks or dismisses grassroots perspectives. Even research that incorporates grassroots voices, such as studies on the reception of Chinese literature on Amazon, has tended to employ a source-oriented approach to cherry-picking data, which fails to fully leverage the potential of quantitative methods. Acknowledging the significance of grassroots voices and adopting a target-oriented perspective, this study collects 48,895 reviews from the 43 most-reviewed China-related books on Amazon. Drawing on the theoretical framework of discourse analysis, we combine distant reading, including a quantitative analysis of the metadata and the application of natural language processing (NLP) techniques, with corpus-assisted close reading to reflect on major topics, associated stances and attitudes, and the values, assumptions, and perceptions toward China held by online grassroots reviewers. This study reveals how the neglected grassroots voices, as a complement to elite and professional perspectives, construct China’s image. It also offers methodological implications for research on the overseas perceptions of China, the reception of Chinese literature on digital platforms, and previous discourse analysis studies that rely heavily on corpus-based methods. The findings lead to considerations on China’s global cultural influence and value dissemination, its cross-cultural communication strategies, and its image construction in the digital age. Literature review and research questions World perceptions of China have attracted much attention from a wide range of disciplines. The West, a fluid concept in these studies, normally refers to the countries of Western Europe, North America, and Australasia (Mackerras, 1989 ). In the Chinese context, the concept has long been used almost as an equivalent to traditional Europe and the United States. Edward Said’s ( 1979 ) seminal work Orientalism critiqued how the Western representations of the Orient as the Other are essentialized and homogenized by colonial powers to naturalize and legitimate the authority of the West over the East. This reveals the constructive nature of image and the power relations manipulating the construction. However, the Western stereotyping has often been met with self-orientalization and appropriation from China itself, thereby deepening the complexity of image-making in the formation of national identity (Yang, 2010 ). In historical studies, Mackerras ( 1989 ) and Spence ( 1998 ) traced shifting Western judgments of China from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries and observed a cycle of positive and negative images. The dominant images of most periods are argued to accord with the interests of the main Western authorities or governments of the day (Mackerras, 1989 , p. 263). Likewise, it is noted that the pendulum governing the image of China has swung from the pole of utopian imagination to that of ideological inclination (Zhou, 2006 ). In addition to images held by the West as a broad generalization, scholars have also examined perceptions by individual countries. For research in international relations, Liu ( 2007 ) observed the political, social, and economic needs of Japan to be reflected in its media reports regarding China. Drastic turns in relations between China and the United States, particularly as reflected in policy decisions, are argued to correspond with fluctuations in the national images and perceptions the two countries hold of each other, which have swung between the extremes of friends and enemies (Li & Hong, 1998 ). Scholars in communication and linguistics draw on framing theory (Sun & Cheung, 2022 ) and critical discourse analysis (Tang, 2021 ; Zhou, 2021 ; Xia et al., 2024 ; Zhou et al., 2025 ) to investigate China’s image constructed in out-of-China mainstream media, i.e., highly influential mass media outlets such as major newspapers. In particular, a corpus-based approach to critical discourse analysis has proved useful in several regards (Tang, 2021 ; Xia et al., 2024 ). First, it can reduce the researcher’s personal bias by examining large amounts of data, thus counteracting the “cherry-picking” critique often leveled at qualitative discourse analysis (Baker, 2006 , pp. 10–12; Gillings et al., 2023 , p. 1). Second, by revealing repeated patterns of language use, it uncovers hegemonic discursive patterns and counter-examples that small-scale studies are unlikely to detect (Baker, 2006 , pp. 13–15). Despite the diversity of studies on world visions of China, which are predominantly mediated through official discourses, a lack of research on China’s image constructed from grassroots perspectives persists. For instance, studies on the perception of China’s image in mainstream media may fail to reflect public opinion accurately, as professional journalists have faced criticism for being distant, elitist, and collectively pursuing a narrow agenda that reinforces the political status quo (Cushion, 2024 ). The focus on mainstream media neglects grassroots views voiced on other online or social media platforms. Also, in exploring world receptions of Chinese literature in the field of translation studies, previous studies tended to focus on so-called major agents in image-building, particularly professional critics (Liu & Zhu, 2015 ). In contrast, grassroots online reviewers are often subject to negative assessments regarding their significance in the construction of China’s image. For example, the comments of non-specialist readers are regarded as “superficial appreciation” of Chinese literature in contrast to the “in-depth exploration” by professional critics (Jiang, 2011 : 178). Also, compared with the “rational”, or specialized and scholarly interpretation by specialists, general readers’ reception of the works is even considered “irrational”, or lacking theoretical depth, since it is constrained by readers’ “educational backgrounds, personal interests, and the sway of mass media trends and political propaganda” (Yang, 2014 : 110). While common readers may not be as scholarly and insightful as professional critics, they nonetheless constitute a major force in the dissemination and consumption of Chinese cultural products, and their reviews offer insights into how China is perceived by real-life, grassroots audiences. Recent studies have increasingly recognized this vital yet largely overlooked role of social media comments by non-specialist readers in discursively shaping collective perceptions of China, especially given the context of the digital media age (Geng, 2021 ). One notable example consists in the consumer reviews on Amazon. Some reviews offer insight into prevailing international perceptions and attitudes toward China-related books, revealing shared assumptions, values, and popular stereotypes. Therefore, this study examines Amazon consumer reviews on China-related publications to reflect on how grassroots online voices, as a complement to elite and professional perspectives, construct the image of China. By exploring how an image of China emerges, overall, from grassroots online reviews, we also aim to develop a methodology for investigating the reception of Chinese cultural products through Amazon reviews. In translation studies, limited attention has been given to the discourse generated and circulated through digital media such as Amazon within the context of consumer culture (Huang & Xin, 2020 ). Among the few in-depth investigations, Kang ( 2015 ) examines the discourse about translation quality assessment formulated by online postings around a translated work, revealing readers’ discursive roles as well as their assumptions, perceptions, and even stereotypes toward translation. In other fields, Skalicky ( 2013 ) adopts genre theory and corpus-based discourse analysis to identify rhetorical patterns in Amazon consumer reviews, thereby uncovering the shared values of the Amazon discourse community. Combining different approaches from corpus linguistics, pragmatics, and narrative analysis, Vásquez ( 2014 ) conducts a discourse analysis of online customer reviews from platforms such as Amazon to examine common discourse features reviewers employ when evaluating a product or service. Amazon’s role in circulating Chinese cultural production has also attracted scholarly interest. A source-language-oriented, top-down paradigm dominates current scholarship. That is, scholars tend to select Chinese literary works or authors as case studies based on their research interests and then retrieve relevant Amazon reviews for analysis (Liu & Baer, 2017 ; Wei, 2022 ; Hu, 2023 ). For instance, Wu’s ( 2021 ) multidimensional investigation into the overseas reception of Yu Hua’s To Live , Jia Pingwa’s Turbulence , and Mai Jia’s Decoded employs Amazon reviews as a primary data source. In terms of research methods, while qualitative approaches prevail, quantitative techniques have emerged in recent years. Researchers increasingly employ corpus linguistics (Fu & Wu, 2021 ), Python-based NLP tools for sentiment analysis, semantic network analysis, or topic modeling (Li & Wang, 2020 ; Li & Wei, 2022 ; Wu et al., 2024 ; Zhu & Luo, 2024 ), as well as multidimensional text mining (Qin et al., 2020 ). These efforts, though important, have a disproportionate focus on individual cultural products. Such a source-language-oriented approach risks generating myopic perspectives that obscure a broader understanding of how online reviewers perceive Chinese cultural products. Consequently, a systematic view of the circulation and reception of China-related books on the platform remains largely underexplored. Also, a predominant focus on individual works or authors often constrains methodological advances. Numerous studies that claim to employ quantitative methods rely on limited datasets, thus failing to leverage the full potential of computational tools (Geng, 2021 ; Li & Wei, 2022 ). Paradoxically, works that attract extensive scholarly interest often receive strikingly minimal public attention on digital platforms, with Wang ( 2022 ) observing that such cases frequently garner minimal readership and feedback. If a cultural product receives only a few hundred reviews, qualitative methods tend to be more insightful than quantitative approaches. Many studies draw on very limited sets of data, such as consisting of a few dozen comments. Furthermore, most research on the matter lacks a theoretical framework for analysis and instead depends solely on selected illustrative examples to support their claims (Hu, 2020 ; Liu et al., 2022 ). Nevertheless, we do not seek to discount the inherent value of source-oriented paradigms. Instead, we emphasize that a target-oriented perspective adopted in this study can serve as a useful complement to the former. Specifically, this entails examining the reader reviews of China-related books on Amazon from a systematic perspective, rather than selecting unrepresentative texts. It enables grasping a more comprehensive image of China shaped on this platform, especially the underlying beliefs and assumptions embedded in the reviews, which can provide a macro-level reference context for future case studies on cross-cultural communication. Moreover, adopting a platform-wide data collection strategy allows for the effective application of quantitative methods to large-scale datasets for distant reading, thus uncovering meaningful discursive patterns (Geng & Zhou, 2023 ). This, in turn, advances a more systematic and refined approach to research on the international communication of Chinese culture and the overseas perceptions of China. By combining the methods of distant reading and close reading, this study also presents an initial attempt to offer methodological implications for previous discourse analysis studies that rely primarily on corpus-based methods. The present study adopts a target-oriented approach to data collection by focusing on comments from the most-reviewed books on Amazon, which reflect the prevalent, dominant attitudes of grassroots online reviewers toward China. By combining the methods of distant reading and close reading and drawing on the theoretical framework of discourse analysis, this article examines how the discourse of Amazon consumer reviews on China-related books constructs the image of China. This study seeks to address three research questions: What topics are constructed in the discourse of Amazon online consumer reviews on China-related books? What stances and attitudes are associated with the topics? What shared values, assumptions, and perceptions emerge from the reviews overall? To answer these questions, we start with a distant reading of reviews by performing a quantitative analysis of the metadata and applying NLP techniques (i.e., topic modeling and named entity recognition) to identify major topics in Amazon consumer reviews. Next, we conduct a close reading of the most salient semantic patterns using corpus-based methods to examine the stances and attitudes associated with these topics. Lastly, based on the findings, we seek to uncover the underlying assumptions, perceptions, and values toward China held by international grassroots reviewers. Data and methods Data collection. We collected, as metadata, 43 China-related books and a corpus consisting of 48,895 online consumer reviews on these books. Data was obtained on January 23, 2023, from Amazon’s official website ( www.amazon.com ). The selection of most-reviewed China-related books proceeds as follows: First, the search term “China” was applied to the “Books” category, with the results sorted by “Most Reviews”. This generated 75 pages with 16 entries per page. Next, the top 100 books were filtered according to their relevance to China. Specifically, we excluded titles that merely referenced matters related to China without substantive engagement with Chinese sociocultural themes. For example, we excluded narratives located in Chinese cities or regions like Taiwan and Hong Kong but lacking meaningful focus on Chinese people, historical events, or cultural artifacts. This yielded 52 titles. Then, duplicate editions were consolidated into single entries. For instance, the eight versions of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War , translated by Lionel Giles and Ralph D. Sawyer, and three editions of Weina Dai Randel’s The Last Rose of Shanghai: A Novel , were each integrated into one entry. After the screening process, the final corpus consisted of data from 43 different books. Two types of data were collected: online consumer reviews and bibliographic data, or metadata. Metadata included book titles, authors, translators, publishers, publication years, genre, keywords, and the geographical and temporal information of reviews. A total of 52,574 online consumer reviews on the selected 43 books were collected. After removing 3,679 non-English comments, the corpus of this study, containing 48,895 online consumer reviews, comprises 3,423,177 tokens and 44,454 types. The corpus predominantly features English-language originals (38 titles), with only five pieces of translated Chinese works: Sun Tze’s The Art of War , Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest , Zhang Ling’s A Single Swallow , and Yan Geling’s The Secret Talker . The original works include Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement , Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth , Jung Chang’s Wild Swans , and Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking . This distribution suggests that English originals have gained much more popularity than translated works on Amazon. In other words, the representation of China within this digital platform is primarily constructed through English original works rather than translated Chinese ones. Discourse analysis. This study employs an integrated approach to discourse analysis. Discourse analyses vary according to conceptualizations of discourse, theoretical foundations, research objects, and research methods. According to different research aims, scholars draw on a spectrum of analytical methods, from socio-linguistics (Downes, 1984 ) that studies discourse in the narrow linguistic sense, to Fairclough’s ( 1992 , 2003 ) critical discourse analysis and Foucault’s ( 1972 ) discursive power theory that extend discourse to a wide set of social practices, and to Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) discourse theory that further expands the concept of discourse to encompass all social phenomena (Torfing, 2005 , pp. 5–9). Here, we take an integrated approach to four different methods of discourse analysis, bringing together Foucault’s ( 1972 ) discourse theory and Fairclough’s ( 1992 , 2003 ) critical discourse analysis, Hall’s ( 1997 ) theory of representation, and corpus-based (critical) discourse analysis. We regard discourse as “a system of representation” (Hall, 1997 , p. 44), a “signifying” process through which meaning is produced or constructed (Hall, 1997 , p. 28). As such, we abide to some key assumptions of social constructionism (Burr, 1995 , pp. 2–5): a critical stance toward taken-for-granted knowledge and truth, the cultural and historical specificity of knowledge, the constructed nature of knowledge by social processes, and the interplay between knowledge and social action. Traditional discourse analysis predominantly utilizes qualitative methods to examine a selected fragment of a text, which is both an epistemological strength and a blind spot. Personal bias in sampling, for example, is a weakness to acknowledge (Widdowson, 2004 , p. 102). However, such rushed criticism may overlook the alignment of the objectives of qualitative research with hermeneutic epistemologies. We find that, for a quantitative analysis of texts, a post-positivist perspective that construes objectivity as impossible is best practice. In this optics, this study aims to provide a robust, multi-layered interpretation of data by combining quantitative methods like NLP techniques and corpus linguistics with qualitative discourse analysis. Procedure for data analysis. We analyzed two categories of data: (1) metadata of books and their reviews, including genre, automatically extracted review keywords, number of reviews, and geographical and temporal information of reviews; and (2) the textual content of reviews. In metadata analysis, the genre of China-related books was examined to explore the semantic framing of discourse. Genres of texts, or “typical forms of text that link kinds of producer, consumer, topic, medium, manner and occasion”, serve to “control the behavior of producers of such texts, and the expectations of potential consumers” (Hodge & Kress, 2001 , p. 295). Such is Amazon’s standardized page of book items, where each book is displayed in a uniform structure with consistent elements, including book cover, genre, pricing, professional reviews, reader ratings, keywords, book description, author profiles, and selected reader reviews. Supposing the genre of a book by default, as categorized by the platform, may bias readers’ interpretations. This is framing, namely an active rhetoric strategy that implies agency in the construction of reality (Baker, 2006 , p. 106). For instance, categorizing literary works that blend facts and fiction as non-fiction poses the risk of framing fictional elements as factual accounts, thereby suggesting wrong information about China. That is, genre guides and influences online readers’ consumption and reception of China-related books through framing. We regard genre as part of the book’s metadata, the analysis of which can reveal underlying patterns of knowledge and discourse. For the analysis of the review content, NLP techniques were first employed to conduct a distant reading to identify typical semantic patterns. Specifically, Python-based topic modeling and named entity recognition were utilized to detect major themes in the content. Second, a close reading of the review content was implemented with the aid of corpus-based analysis on the use of collocations and concordance lines. For instance, an investigation of adjectives and adverbs can provide insight into the basic stance and attitudes adopted by the reviewers towards China. Finally, based on the previous findings, we examined the relationship between discourse and ideology, namely, how discourse is constituted by the broader socio-cultural structures. Here, ideology refers to the set of values that is subject to power or hegemony. This part of the analysis aims to identify the typical values, stances, and assumptions maintained by various groups of reviewers toward a particular entity or subject, thereby revealing the overall values shared by international online reviewers toward China. In other words, by analyzing the reviews, particularly in light of insights gained from the first two steps of the analysis, we revealed how the broader society and culture shape the image of China in terms of stances, assumptions, and values. This examination was constantly situated in the specific cultural, political, and economic contexts in which the discourse is generated. Results and discussion Metadata analysis. Genre frames readers’ interpretation and consumption of a text. Amazon’s classification of genres, different from the concept in literary or narrative studies, categorizes a book in accordance with the ways it is expected to be used. A notable example is The Art of War , whose different editions were classified into various genres: three as “Philosophy”, two as “Management & Leadership”, two as “Schools & Teaching”, and one as “History”. This shows consumers’ diverse interpretations and applications of the text. While some Chinese scholars (Zha, 2019 ; Sun & Nie, 2022 ) critique Western readers’ tendency to interpret Chinese literary works through non-literary lenses, the multiple ways in which readers engage with a book can actually demonstrate its broad interpretive possibilities and, consequently, its appeal. That is, the diverse categorization of The Art of War reveals how classical Chinese philosophy permeates multiple social fields, illustrating the benefits traditional Chinese wisdom can offer to different societies and cultures in various manners. Table 1 presents a broad classification of the 43 China-related works based on their main category (e.g., science fiction and historical fiction were all considered as “Fiction”). As can be seen from the table, “Fiction” is the most prevalent category (26 titles), followed by the category of “History” (7 titles), which includes works such as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans , Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World , and Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking . An interesting example here is Wild Swans , a work that is best regarded as literary fiction blending autobiography and family memoir since the author narrated the stories of three generations of women (i.e., her grandmother, mother, and herself) based on her family’s experiences. Although history is often constructed from personal narratives, labeling this book as “History” may risk downplaying its literary and reflective dimensions, thus blurring the line between fictional elements and historical events. This frames reading, an effect further reinforced by the work’s recognized status as a worldwide best-seller and a reliable source for understanding Chinese history, society, and culture. Our contention is that this specific framing may lead to a distortion of the facts this book claims (or not). Table 1 Categories of selected China-related books on Amazon. Category Count Illustrative Cases Fiction 26 The Three-Body Problem (Liu Cixin) A Single Swallow (Zhang Ling) History 7 Wide Swans (Jung Chang) Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (Jack Weatherford) Philosophy, School, and Teaching 1 The Art of War (Sun Tzu) Biographies 3 Last Boat Out of Shanghai (Helen Zia) Beautiful Country: A Memoir (Qian Julie Wang) Motherhood, Travel, and Food Studies 3 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Amy Chua) The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Peter Frankopan) Politics and Government 1 Red-Handed (Peter Schweizer) Relationships, Buddhism 2 The Tibetan book of Living and Dyin g (Sogyal Rinpoche) The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Padmasambhava) R, an open-source programming language, was employed to provide descriptive analyses of other fields of metadata. Using the “tidyverse” package, we processed the metadata of books to examine the review keywords, which are typically 2-grams automatically generated by Amazon to offer a brief summary of reader comments. For example, the extracted review keywords of Weina Dai Randel’s The Last Rose of Shanghai involve phrases like “historical fiction”, “last rose”, “well written”, “world war”, “Japanese occupation”, “highly recommend”, and “beautifully written”. In total, the review keywords comprised 1,470 tokens and 602 types, with the ten most frequent words listed in Fig. 1 . As shown in the figure, positive content words, such as “recommend”, “well”, and “highly”, prevail. “Read” is the most frequent word, and collocates with adverbs such as “must” and “well”, forming a recurrent discursive pattern that conveys positive feedback. This suggests that China-related books garner predominantly positive assessments from Amazon readers. [Insert Fig. 1 here] To further investigate the patterns of these keywords, a frequency list of 2-grams was generated using the corpus tool of AntConc. As illustrated in Fig. 2 , the first seven 2-grams, such as “highly recommend”, “well written”, and “must read”, are typical discursive patterns indicative of positive or negative evaluations for the reference of other potential consumers. Other expressions, such as “Chinese culture”, “Chinese history”, “Hong Kong”, “Sun Tze”, and “cultural revolution”, are related to Chinese history, society, and culture, with a particular focus on modern China. These linguistic patterns provide insight into the overall semantic meanings of the reviews. [Insert Fig. 2 here] After examining the genre of books and automatically generated review keywords, we proceeded to analyze other fields of review metadata. Each observation of the 48,895 reviews contains these metadata fields: the title of the book reviewed, username, reviewer location, date of review, review title, and review text. A statistical analysis of these variables using R addressed the following aspects: (1) review frequency per book, (2) temporal review patterns, and (3) the distribution of reviewer locations. As illustrated in Fig. 3 , The China Study by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas Campbell, a book studying the relationship between Chinese diet and health outcomes, is identified as the most frequently reviewed book (4,821 reviews). Among the top 10 most-reviewed books, only two are translated Chinese works, i.e., The Art of War by Sun Tze (3,402 reviews) and The Three-Body Problem (3,316 reviews) by Liu Cixin, while the remaining are mostly English-language fiction. In our sample of 18 China-related titles with over 1,000 reviews, only three are translated Chinese works, among which Sun Tzu’s The Art of War has received the highest number of reviews. English-language originals account for the majority of highly reviewed titles and therefore may exert greater influence on Amazon readers’ perceptions of China, whereas the smaller share of translations of Chinese literature suggests they play a comparatively more marginal role in image construction. This finding again underscores the importance of investigating grassroots online reviewers’ perceptions of China through a comprehensive analysis of the most-reviewed China-related books, rather than focusing solely on individual translated Chinese works with limited comments. [Insert Fig. 3 here] The annual number of reviews is displayed in Fig. 4 . A noticeable increase in reviews from 2013 is evident. Overall, from 2013, the number of reviews has been substantially higher than previously and relatively stable, suggesting a growing interest in China-related topics. [Insert Fig. 4 here] Figure 5 presents the percentage of reviewer locations. According to the figure, countries contributing the most reviews are the United States and the United Kingdom, which account for 82.6% and 10.7% of the total, respectively. A secondary group of review sources includes Canada, India, and Australia. European countries account for a much smaller share. This suggests that reviewers from the United States and the United Kingdom contribute mostly to constructing China’s image on Amazon. While their dominance may reflect strong cultural exchange with China, it could also stem from higher platform adoption rates or more active reviewing cultures in those markets. [Insert Fig. 5 here] Distant reading using LDA topic modeling and NER. To uncover the major topics in Amazon reader reviews, we applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling. LDA is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that analyzes the co-occurrence patterns of words to identify latent topics in a large collection of documents and provides a set of topics, each with keywords ranked by the likelihood of belonging to the topic (Blei et al., 2003 ). Python libraries “nltk”, “gensim”, and “pyLDAvis” were employed for data preprocessing, topic modeling, and visualization. After producing and examining a range of topics, this study determined that a set of ten topics offered the best summarization of the reviews in terms of coherence, distinctiveness, and interpretability. Figure 6 illustrates the result of topic modeling visualized via LDAvis, an interactive, web-based visualization system. The ten circles of varying sizes on the left panel represent distinct topics, and the fact that they do not overlap demonstrates clear differentiation between them. The size of each circle is proportional to the relative prevalence of the topic in the corpus (Sievert & Shirley, 2014 ). This means that Topic 1, presenting the largest circle, is the most frequent topic, followed by Topic 2 to Topic 10. Additionally, the interactive feature enables us to hover over any circle and prompt the right panel to display the 30 most salient terms associated with that topic, ranked in descending order of frequency. [Insert Fig. 6 here] The meaning of each topic is our own, subjective, and informed interpretation. The top 30 terms of the 20 topics are presented in Table 2 . Table 2 Top 30 terms associated with the 10 topics of Amazon reviews. Topic Number Top 30 Terms topic 1 book, read, story, chinese, time, life, well, child, author, people, live, give, year, much, find, work, interesting, account, never, first, love, culture, hard, enjoy, put, death, day, world, different, political topic 2 family, daughter, way, parent, mother, parenting, kid, fascinating, look, bring, old, western, memoir, long, young, grow, keep, new, yet, prison, far, american, eye, home, call, school, era, lesson, money, wife topic 3 reader, period, leave, excellent, style, however, wonderful, beautiful, class, back, last, individual, interested, play, mean, actually, strong, allow, self, story, early, set, writer, often, lose, success, language, age, value, chapter topic 4 tell, personal, life, help, government, become, page, view, real, event, show, communist, point, war, perspective, courage, turn, practice, mind, bad, face, force, student, picture, husband, result, revolution, journey, situation, hong_kong topic 5 write, great, book, feel, learn, really, woman, thing, detail, country, still, person, friend, follow, suffer, beautifully, hand, especially, difficult, strength, story, half, detailed, one, heart, focus, break, course, glad, funny topic 6 change, generation, buy, incredible, method, study, art, japanese, nien_cheng, extremely, certainly, successful, decade, remain, ability, completely, simply, watch, million, trial, understanding, movie, courageous, china, title, confess, horror, fun, particular, message topic 7 history, read, book, experience, understand, move, love, worth, always, definitely, man, citizen, question, review, remember, realize, piece, grip, choose, like, autobiography, escape, push, emotion, current, biography, curious, month, red_guard, group topic 8 raise, happen, little, believe, ever, true, able, business, reading, bear, torture, let, finish, system, side, spend, freedom, speak, sad, agree, mom, return, problem, instead, talk, hour, brave, admire, highly, star topic 9 end, powerful, example, recent, enjoyable, less, sassoon, vivid, fantastic, capitalist, repeat, behavior, policy, interview, demand, brilliant, kadoorie, throw, complete, surprise, travel, reach, portray, exciting, enlighten, develop, comment, ordinary, though, deliver topic 10 interessant, goood, unputdownable, meh, artwork, astory, persona, suggestive, bitterness, sepia, socialism, tribute, priest, sidebar, cheng, charmingly, unveil, insanity, elegance, bonus, artfully, sensationalism, incarceration, annoyingly, agrandizing, familiarity, cure, traial, bookclub, boundless Some topics revolve around experiences and feelings of reading. Topic 1 centers on narratives of everyday Chinese experiences as indicated by the colocation of words like “Chinese”, “story”, “people”, and “life”. Terms like “book”, “read”, “author”, and “well” concern the discussion of authors and comments on the book, which display common discursive patterns of consumer reviews. The frequent occurrence of evaluative words like “much”, “interesting”, “enjoy”, and “love” further suggests a generally positive reception. Overall, Topic 1 reflects favorable reader responses to Chinese narratives. Topic 3 is mainly focused on the evaluation of writing and storytelling. Terms such as “reader”, “writer”, “style”, and “value” signal assessments of the author’s writing style and literary merit. A group of positive adjectives like “excellent”, “wonderful”, and “beautiful” appear together with words concerning the narratives of books, such as “individual”, “self”, and “story”, indicating an overall positive reception of China-related works. This also demonstrates typical discursive patterns of reviews. Topic 7 also centers on expressions of appreciation related to reading experiences, as indicated by words like “move”, “love”, “worth”, and “remember”. Topic 9 includes terms such as “enjoyable”, “vivid”, “fantastic”, and “powerful”, which likely reflect readers’ immediate emotional responses to the texts. Similarly, Topic 10 is marked by vivid expressions of enthusiasm for reading the books with such terms as “unputdownable” and “good”. Other topics are focused on the stories themselves, including plots, settings, and characters. Topic 2 displays a clear subject of family memoirs. Terms like “family”, “mother”, “daughter”, “parenting”, and “kid” are associated with family life, mother-daughter relationships, and child-rearing. Terms like “old”, “young”, “grow”, “home”, “school”, and “lesson” further indicate the connection with family, education, and personal growth. Words like “Western” and “American” seem to suggest the cultural setting of the narratives. Topic 4 focuses on personal life stories with an emphasis on authenticity as signaled by such top terms as “personal”, “life”, “real”, and “event”. The prevalence of words like “government”, “communist”, “war”, and “revolution” suggests that the key concern here is individual experiences in the context of historical upheavals. Topic 5 highlights praise for writing quality with “great” and “beautifully”. The main issue here is narratives possibly portraying the experiences of women amid national adversity, as indicated by words like “woman”, “country”, “suffer”, “difficult”, and “strength”. Topic 6 is focused on narratives related to the Sino-Japanese War or intergenerational relationships, as indicated by such words as “generation”, “Japanese”, and “China”. Topic 8 indicates personal suffering with the words “bear” and “torture” and references to good qualities with terms like “freedom” and “brave”. In conclusion, Amazon consumer reviews display two main aspects of meaning. On the one hand, it exhibits typical discursive patterns of consumer book reviews. This is often characterized by the usage of common or even slightly exaggerated adjectives to express praise for books and stories, such as “must read”, “beautifully written”, and “open my eyes”. What is at issue here is the depiction of mostly delightful reading experiences provided by China-related texts, discussed through aspects such as narrative style, perspective, characters, and events. On the other hand, the reviews also point toward real-life family relationships or reflections on the historical development of individuals, families, and nations. To further identify the key entities mentioned in the reviews, Named Entity Recognition (NER) was applied using the Python library “spaCy”. NER is a fundamental NLP technique that aims to automatically detect and classify named entities in text into predefined categories such as persons, organizations, locations, and dates. After examining the result, five entity types were found to be most relevant to our study: group (i.e., nationalities or religious or political groups), event, person, and geopolitical entity (i.e., countries, cities, states). The events concerning “war” and “revolution” appear in various expressions, which were grouped under unified categories for analysis. For instance, references such as “World War II”, “the Cold War”, and “the Opium War” were all categorized under the broader entity of “war”. The high-frequency named entities are presented in Table 3 . As can be seen in this table, entities under the category of work of art mainly concern the titles of books examined in this study, such as “The China Study” and “Snow Flower”. National groups and geopolitical references overwhelmingly centered on China, the U.S., and Japan, and events are mostly focused on “war” (including “World War I”, “World War II”, “the Nanjing Massacre”, “the Cold War”, “the Opium War”, “the Sino-Japanese War”, etc.) and “revolution” (including “the Cultural Revolution”, “the Communist Revolution”, etc.), demonstrating that the discussions tend to revolve around the history of modern and contemporary China, particularly the period spanning from the First Opium War in 1840 to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Table 3 High-frequency named entities in Amazon reviews. Type Entity Count Group Chinese 9302 Japanese 2024 American 1680 Geopolitical entity China/the People’s Republic of China 9166 America/the United States/U.S./USA 2343 Shanghai 1363 Japan 751 Event war 859 revolution 756 Person Amy Tan 1577 Mao/Mao Zedong/Mao Tse-Tung 1032 Work of art The China Study 655 Snow Flower 436 Based on the distant reading using LDA topic modeling and NER techniques, a preliminary conclusion can be drawn that the reviews largely center on Chinese history, society, and culture in the modern and contemporary era. More specifically, they tend to focus on individual experiences shaped by the broader political or revolutionary context, with personal suffering often intertwined with national fate. This analysis reveals several recurring themes worthy of further exploration, including war and revolution, politics and history, individuals and collectives, gender, as well as pain and love. Close reading using corpus-based methods. The distant reading of the data informs our further close reading, carried out to reveal in detail how commentators reflected on specific events, figures, and cultural artifacts. We selected some representative examples for detailed discussion. First, the keyword “Chinese” was examined to explore the general stances and attitudes of reviewers toward Chinese subjects. Using the corpus tool AntConc, collocates were retrieved within a five-word span, with a minimum frequency threshold of five, and sorted by likelihood ratio in descending order. As Fig. 7 illustrates, the collocates of “Chinese” mostly consist of collective or plural nouns, such as “culture”, “American”, “history”, “women”, “immigrants”, “people”, “mothers”, and “customs”, with limited references to individuals. Collocates ranked between the 20th and 50th positions include “mythology”, “revolution”, “woman”, “immigrant”, “names”, “civilians”, “parents”, “communist”, “exclusion”, “western”, “government”, “traditions”, “society”, “folklore”, “Americans”, and “century”, all of which further suggest that the semantic field of “Chinese” is closely associated with themes of history, culture, community, tradition, and politics, rather than individual identity. [Insert Fig. 7 here] Among these collocates, the high-frequency word “women” stands out as a group worth further exploration. Interestingly, a comparison between gendered terms reveals a significantly lower frequency of male-related words in the corpus. As shown in Table 4 , the results indicate a stronger focus on women. References to women, as indicated by a total frequency of 4,990 of the words “woman” and “women”, significantly surpass the 2,384 occurrences of “man” and “men”. Similarly, the female pronouns “she” and “her” appear 28,871 times in total, whereas their male counterparts “he”, “him”, and “his” only occur 15,471 times. This disparity in the frequency of gendered terms suggests that female characters, compared to male ones, receive more attention in the reviews. This finding, interestingly, stands in contrast to previous research on gender bias in language, which concludes that the frequency of the representation of females is often lower (Baker, 2014 ). Our analysis reveals that Amazon consumer reviews demonstrate a pronounced preference for female characters. Table 4 Comparison of word frequency between gendered terms. Token Frequency Sum women woman 3407 1583 4990 her she 17301 11570 28871 men man 935 1449 2384 his him he 7450 1353 6668 15471 A closer look at 3,407 concordance lines of “women” reveals five recurrent semantic patterns regarding how women are discussed. Evaluations of women’s representation are conveyed via the structure “noun + of + women + is/are”, such as referring to the depiction of women as “intriguing”, “fascinating”, or “moving”. The attributes of women are depicted using the pattern “women’s + noun”, like women’s “suffering”, “lives”, “voices”, “courage”, and “strength”, and the structure “women + who”, such as “women who are strong”, “women who are faithful”, and “women who endure and succeed”. Using the structure “women + and”, women are linked to their experiences (e.g., “struggles”, “difficulties”, and “hardships”), to other people (e.g., “families”, “men”, “children”, “girls”, and “daughters”), and to their qualities (e.g., “strength” and “courage”). Another noticeable pattern is “noun + of + women + in + location”. To capture a broader context, a − 25/+25 window was set to generate the concordances, with some examples shown in Table 5 . A close reading of all 127 concordances shows that Chinese women are depicted as encountering challenges and enduring pressures from family, society, and community in ancient history and harsh contemporary realities. Reviews focus on their lives, treatment, status, stories, generations, suffering, relationships, roles, pain, struggle, and oppression. Table 5 Examples of concordance lines of the word “women”. Left Context Hit Right Context 1 This book is so interesting, following the stories of 3 generations of women in China. I was absolutely spellbound by the ordeals they went through, their achievements in incredible adversity, and their indomitable spirit and humanity. A 2 Flower and the Secret Fan looks deeply into friendship in a way I have not seen many authors attempt, and deeply into the lives of women in this time period. I can’t recommend this highly enough, but bring tissues. 3 them and their struggle. She uses mother daughter relationships in an interesting way that is sure to provide insight to culture and the role of women in society. However, this book can get a bit confusing if you don’t pay attention to the changing narrator after every section. Overall, 4 her daughter, and the steamed pork dish Lindo makes and Rich dumps soy sauce over. Culture was also brought out when surrounding the treatment of women in China. The treatment of wives and widows was disturbing and yet the painful traditions that the women suffered through did not deter them 5 Tan is a skilled storyteller. She has the ability to empathize with her characters and the subject matter. The novel illustrates the humble status of women in Chinese society in the early twentieth century. Violet’s lack of control over her own life is contrasted with her mother’s ability 6 Generational story of women in Shanghai at the beginning of the century and their struggle to survive in a male dominated world.. 7 This book is Amy Tan’s response to Memoir of a Geisha. Characters were very well developed, especially the particular group of women in China who were not married, protected by men and family. The protagonist, Violet is brave and resourceful, making the most of the life 8 It is a moving story that shows us the insights of the lifestyle of women in China, the pain they suffer and the strength of woman. Loved it! 9 This is a deeply moving story, and one that shed light on the place of women in traditional Chinese society. Some of it (foot-binding) is horrific, but, true. In spite of the hardships, it shows positive sides of the 10 tell foreigners about the China’s recent 60 years. It described the history very clearly, with a very special perspective, which is from the fate of women in three generations. War, communism, massacre, famine, political suppress, all of these memories in the three generations revealed a very clear China then. Readers 11 they have raised over the years. The story evolves to tell of Lennea, their “current oldest daughter” and her struggle to overcome the oppression of women in China yet remain true to her family. It is a story of how our choices in life have a lasting effect whether good 12 ways only imagined by their mothers. I think it is an excellent example of the strength of the mother/daughter bond and the strength of women in general. 13 is the first, long-suffering wife, and hers is the Universal story of the hard working first wife. O-Lan embodies the classic tale of women in this society, but so does the second wife, with her bound feet and her cloistered life. They are both sad lives, but O- 14 I've read many novels about the terrible trials of women in China during wars and internal upheaval which have made me deeply appreciate being born in the West. This book is especially moving because 15 A beautifully written book showing the valour of women in China, accounts of secretive traditions to more openness in changing times, all viewed through the lives of three women who experience the changes As shown in the following examples, the fact that Chinese women in the stories strive to make a living despite hardships often evokes readers’ empathy and emotional resonance. Example 1: The tea-growing tradition was completely unknown, but I have loved learning about it through A-Ma and Li-Yan. This story of the strength of women transcends cultures. It is beautiful. (Excerpt from a review of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane , 2018) Example 2: In seeking to ameliorate the past and to make sense of her life, Chang delves into her family history, providing a brutally honest portrait of three generations of women. What is truly amazing about Chang’s family chronicles is the wealth of hardships Chinese women have had to endure. (Excerpt from a review of Wild Swans , 2008) Example 3: Ms. Chang, in putting together a significant piece of writing, managed to narrate a complete, engaging story of three generations of women who, right along with policies within China, developed and changed within a very intricate plotline. Feelings of compassion came easily when Chang vividly narrated graphic wartime scenes during the many hostile invasions of China. (Excerpt from a review of Wild Swans , 2002) Example 4: Exquisite portrait of women who loved and lived through a difficult time. Three generations of strong women who did what they must to survive and just live every day. (Excerpt from a review of The Valley of Amazement , 2017) In Example 1, the reviewer of Lisa Lee’s The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is moved by the strength of women that transcends different cultures and nations. Similar praises of women’s resilience to endure hardships can be observed in Example 2 and Example 3 for Wild Swans and Example 4 for The Valley of Amazement . These reviews, written for three works with different settings, characters, and storylines, exhibit consistency in the representation of Chinese women. This seems to reveal a recurring discursive pattern adopted by international readers and consumers of China-related literature that focuses on the suffering and struggle of women. The findings of this study challenge the simplistic and impressionistic claims circulating within sinology that American readers’ taste in Chinese literature is primarily centered on “politics and sex” (Ji, 2009 ). A distant reading comprising metadata analysis, LDA topic modeling, and NER analysis, combined with a close reading with corpus-based methods, has revealed that grassroots online reviews on China-related books center on the historical upheavals, traumas, and transformations of modern and contemporary China, usually in the context of war and revolution. Particularly, it is against such a backdrop that Chinese women navigate hardships and strive to survive, which displays admirable qualities such as resilience and courage. Such stories tend to move and deeply resonate with grassroots readers across different races and nationalities. Moreover, the findings of this study help counter the critique that China is often viewed in terms of “political dissidence or politics” (Tang, 2015 , p. 257), a view shaped by an overemphasis on elite and professional opinions. Such a focus overlooks the broader and more diverse ways in which China is perceived by the global public. Conclusion As Amazon facilitates a global circulation of books, it enables a wide exposure of China-related books. Providing a platform for discussion, it also generates powerful discourses through consumer reviews. Faced with the increasing volume of such data, scholars in the reception of Chinese literature and the image of China often either dismiss the value of non-specialist reviewers or adopt a source-oriented, top-down case study approach that selects examples to confirm preconceived conclusions. This often leads to a mismatch between research methods and the scale of data. Also, many studies have investigated how China is perceived by mainstream media or professional critics while neglecting grassroots perspectives, sentiments, and attitudes toward China as a valuable complementary source. In this direction, the present study examines grassroots online reviews of China-related books on Amazon in terms of their attitudes toward Chinese people, historical events, and cultural artifacts from a comprehensive perspective. As such, the study develops a novel methodological framework for discourse analysis by combining methods of distant and close reading with the use of NLP techniques and corpus linguistic tools. This study reveals that English-language original works, rather than translations, play the primary role in shaping international perceptions of China on the global platform Amazon. The topics of the reviews are diverse, ranging from personal growth and family relationships to love and suffering amid national traumas. Together, they construct an image of China that is deeply rooted in its modern and contemporary history, with war and revolution forming the central clue throughout the twentieth century. Amid these historical upheavals, Chinese women emerge as central figures who demonstrate noble qualities in the face of compounded challenges and hardships. While differences in cultures may seem difficult to bridge, inner emotions can often transcend them to foster empathy and resonance across borders. In post-revolutionary China, determining which Chinese narratives to disseminate and identifying the most effective ways of delivering them will become a key issue to consider. Declarations Author Contribution Qiang Geng wrote the main manuscript text and Siyi Qiu prepared data collection, cleaning, LDA modeling and figure 6. Acknowledgement Qiang Geng and Siyi Qiu disclose support for the research of this work from Funder [grant number 23JZD038] and Funder [grant number 2023DSYL005]. 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Also discoverable on Platform About Our Team In Review Editorial Policies Advisory Board Help Center Resources Author Services Accessibility API Access RSS feed Manage Cookie Preferences © Research Square 2026 | ISSN 2693-5015 (online) Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information {"props":{"pageProps":{"initialData":{"identity":"rs-6774493","acceptedTermsAndConditions":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"archivedVersions":[],"articleType":"Article","associatedPublications":[],"authors":[{"id":497067851,"identity":"cfb59b7a-a1c1-40eb-8dfa-6101503bdfb5","order_by":0,"name":"Qiang Geng","email":"data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAZAAAAAyAQMAAABI0h/eAAAABlBMVEX///8AAABVwtN+AAAACXBIWXMAAA7EAAAOxAGVKw4bAAAA60lEQVRIiWNgGAWjYBACfmbGxgcJP2zkGCQYG0ACEBIfkGxvbjb42JNmTLwWgzPH2yRnsB1ObJCACBDWwnAjsU2ah+dw+vzZzc2feRhsZDccYH72AJ8OxhmJzdY8Fum5G+4cBOplSDPecIDN3ACfFmaJxMbbPDzWuRskEtuYeRgOJ244wMMmgU8Lm0RigzQPG3O6PNA6oMP+E9bCw3OwCeh95wSgp4B6GQ4Q1iLB3ggOZMMNwHCQnGOQbDzzMJsZXi32h9kfgqJSXn5G+uMPbyrsZPuONz/DqwUNgIKKmQT1o2AUjIJRMAqwAwAEMkt2HYYTLQAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==","orcid":"","institution":"Shanghai International Studies University","correspondingAuthor":true,"prefix":"","firstName":"Qiang","middleName":"","lastName":"Geng","suffix":""},{"id":497067852,"identity":"3bff1e94-23b6-4065-a1e7-6a203d602691","order_by":1,"name":"Siyi Qiu","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"Shanghai International Studies University","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Siyi","middleName":"","lastName":"Qiu","suffix":""}],"badges":[],"createdAt":"2025-05-29 08:38:13","currentVersionCode":1,"declarations":"","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-6774493/v1","doiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6774493/v1","draftVersion":[],"editorialEvents":[],"editorialNote":"","failedWorkflow":false,"files":[{"id":88950200,"identity":"1e496a78-6f7e-44af-b47f-b95dde8bf883","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-08-13 05:46:05","extension":"png","order_by":1,"title":"Figure 1","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":37241,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eTop 10 high-frequency words of automatically extracted keywords from Amazon reviews.\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"Fig1.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-6774493/v1/9597f5d1af57713d1bdc9677.png"},{"id":88951572,"identity":"b173ec0a-a4f1-45ee-89ff-168f16b54365","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-08-13 05:54:05","extension":"png","order_by":2,"title":"Figure 2","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":130741,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eTop 20 high-frequency 2-grams of automatically extracted keywords from Amazon reviews.\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"Fig2.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-6774493/v1/64e0e8d4f6c5793e00165220.png"},{"id":88950204,"identity":"3e7e5c3d-3bfd-45d6-8bec-38e8782d42b0","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-08-13 05:46:05","extension":"png","order_by":3,"title":"Figure 3","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":87239,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eTop 10 most frequently reviewed China-related books.\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"Fig3.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-6774493/v1/b22c7001115209ca4665ddbd.png"},{"id":88952168,"identity":"5a3a64d5-ed07-4131-8f15-cb0678e75df4","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-08-13 06:02:05","extension":"png","order_by":4,"title":"Figure 4","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":51399,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eThe annual number of Amazon reviews.\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"Fig4.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-6774493/v1/59096c4f801bdd699eca1e81.png"},{"id":88950205,"identity":"7e2da421-672d-428e-a7b0-96485683abb5","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-08-13 05:46:05","extension":"png","order_by":5,"title":"Figure 5","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":85276,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003ePercentage of different reviewer locations.\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"Fig5.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-6774493/v1/09013390ffbdea1ce835bccf.png"},{"id":88951575,"identity":"2d547c05-8dbd-4bef-8298-abff2d351a17","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-08-13 05:54:05","extension":"png","order_by":6,"title":"Figure 6","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":217796,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eVisualization of LDA topic modeling of Amazon reviews.\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"Fig6.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-6774493/v1/a341ae43ed347518c26aa8ac.png"},{"id":88950209,"identity":"96bcf536-01dc-4aaa-a0ac-b3a0a22d66a1","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-08-13 05:46:05","extension":"png","order_by":7,"title":"Figure 7","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":298516,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eCollocates of “Chinese” in Amazon reviews.\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"Fig7.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-6774493/v1/dbd7f571b9ca5eb574d276cb.png"},{"id":88952835,"identity":"012200f0-e1f9-4420-aaa7-83be9389c228","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-08-13 06:10:06","extension":"pdf","order_by":0,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"manuscript-pdf","size":1629384,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"manuscript.pdf","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-6774493/v1/25251d75-641e-4147-8287-54ee07b491be.pdf"}],"financialInterests":"No competing interests reported.","formattedTitle":"Imagining China in online reviews: A discourse analysis of Amazon consumer reviews on China-related books","fulltext":[{"header":"Introduction","content":"\u003cp\u003eThis study examines how China\u0026rsquo;s image is constructed, overall, in the discourse of online consumer reviews, which serve as influential yet often overlooked grassroots perspectives. While previous research on the foreign images of China has largely centered on elite-mediated discourses such as mainstream media and professional critics, it often overlooks or dismisses grassroots perspectives. Even research that incorporates grassroots voices, such as studies on the reception of Chinese literature on Amazon, has tended to employ a source-oriented approach to cherry-picking data, which fails to fully leverage the potential of quantitative methods.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAcknowledging the significance of grassroots voices and adopting a target-oriented perspective, this study collects 48,895 reviews from the 43 most-reviewed China-related books on Amazon. Drawing on the theoretical framework of discourse analysis, we combine distant reading, including a quantitative analysis of the metadata and the application of natural language processing (NLP) techniques, with corpus-assisted close reading to reflect on major topics, associated stances and attitudes, and the values, assumptions, and perceptions toward China held by online grassroots reviewers.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis study reveals how the neglected grassroots voices, as a complement to elite and professional perspectives, construct China\u0026rsquo;s image. It also offers methodological implications for research on the overseas perceptions of China, the reception of Chinese literature on digital platforms, and previous discourse analysis studies that rely heavily on corpus-based methods. The findings lead to considerations on China\u0026rsquo;s global cultural influence and value dissemination, its cross-cultural communication strategies, and its image construction in the digital age.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Literature review and research questions","content":"\u003cp\u003eWorld perceptions of China have attracted much attention from a wide range of disciplines. The West, a fluid concept in these studies, normally refers to the countries of Western Europe, North America, and Australasia (Mackerras, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR30\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1989\u003c/span\u003e). In the Chinese context, the concept has long been used almost as an equivalent to traditional Europe and the United States. Edward Said’s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR32\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1979\u003c/span\u003e) seminal work \u003cem\u003eOrientalism\u003c/em\u003e critiqued how the Western representations of the Orient as the Other are essentialized and homogenized by colonial powers to naturalize and legitimate the authority of the West over the East. This reveals the constructive nature of image and the power relations manipulating the construction. However, the Western stereotyping has often been met with self-orientalization and appropriation from China itself, thereby deepening the complexity of image-making in the formation of national identity (Yang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR48\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2010\u003c/span\u003e). In historical studies, Mackerras (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR30\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1989\u003c/span\u003e) and Spence (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR35\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1998\u003c/span\u003e) traced shifting Western judgments of China from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries and observed a cycle of positive and negative images. The dominant images of most periods are argued to accord with the interests of the main Western authorities or governments of the day (Mackerras, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR30\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1989\u003c/span\u003e, p. 263). Likewise, it is noted that the pendulum governing the image of China has swung from the pole of utopian imagination to that of ideological inclination (Zhou, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR52\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2006\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn addition to images held by the West as a broad generalization, scholars have also examined perceptions by individual countries. For research in international relations, Liu (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR28\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2007\u003c/span\u003e) observed the political, social, and economic needs of Japan to be reflected in its media reports regarding China. Drastic turns in relations between China and the United States, particularly as reflected in policy decisions, are argued to correspond with fluctuations in the national images and perceptions the two countries hold of each other, which have swung between the extremes of friends and enemies (Li \u0026amp; Hong, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR23\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1998\u003c/span\u003e). Scholars in communication and linguistics draw on framing theory (Sun \u0026amp; Cheung, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR37\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e) and critical discourse analysis (Tang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR38\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e; Zhou, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR51\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e; Xia et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR47\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e; Zhou et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR53\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e) to investigate China’s image constructed in out-of-China mainstream media, i.e., highly influential mass media outlets such as major newspapers. In particular, a corpus-based approach to critical discourse analysis has proved useful in several regards (Tang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR38\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e; Xia et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR47\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e). First, it can reduce the researcher’s personal bias by examining large amounts of data, thus counteracting the “cherry-picking” critique often leveled at qualitative discourse analysis (Baker, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2006\u003c/span\u003e, pp. 10–12; Gillings et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR14\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e, p. 1). Second, by revealing repeated patterns of language use, it uncovers hegemonic discursive patterns and counter-examples that small-scale studies are unlikely to detect (Baker, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2006\u003c/span\u003e, pp. 13–15).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDespite the diversity of studies on world visions of China, which are predominantly mediated through official discourses, a lack of research on China’s image constructed from grassroots perspectives persists. For instance, studies on the perception of China’s image in mainstream media may fail to reflect public opinion accurately, as professional journalists have faced criticism for being distant, elitist, and collectively pursuing a narrow agenda that reinforces the political status quo (Cushion, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR6\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e). The focus on mainstream media neglects grassroots views voiced on other online or social media platforms. Also, in exploring world receptions of Chinese literature in the field of translation studies, previous studies tended to focus on so-called major agents in image-building, particularly professional critics (Liu \u0026amp; Zhu, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR29\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2015\u003c/span\u003e). In contrast, grassroots online reviewers are often subject to negative assessments regarding their significance in the construction of China’s image. For example, the comments of non-specialist readers are regarded as “superficial appreciation” of Chinese literature in contrast to the “in-depth exploration” by professional critics (Jiang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR22\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e: 178). Also, compared with the “rational”, or specialized and scholarly interpretation by specialists, general readers’ reception of the works is even considered “irrational”, or lacking theoretical depth, since it is constrained by readers’ “educational backgrounds, personal interests, and the sway of mass media trends and political propaganda” (Yang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR49\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e: 110). While common readers may not be as scholarly and insightful as professional critics, they nonetheless constitute a major force in the dissemination and consumption of Chinese cultural products, and their reviews offer insights into how China is perceived by real-life, grassroots audiences.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRecent studies have increasingly recognized this vital yet largely overlooked role of social media comments by non-specialist readers in discursively shaping collective perceptions of China, especially given the context of the digital media age (Geng, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR12\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e). One notable example consists in the consumer reviews on Amazon. Some reviews offer insight into prevailing international perceptions and attitudes toward China-related books, revealing shared assumptions, values, and popular stereotypes. Therefore, this study examines Amazon consumer reviews on China-related publications to reflect on how grassroots online voices, as a complement to elite and professional perspectives, construct the image of China.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBy exploring how an image of China emerges, overall, from grassroots online reviews, we also aim to develop a methodology for investigating the reception of Chinese cultural products through Amazon reviews. In translation studies, limited attention has been given to the discourse generated and circulated through digital media such as Amazon within the context of consumer culture (Huang \u0026amp; Xin, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR19\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). Among the few in-depth investigations, Kang (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2015\u003c/span\u003e) examines the discourse about translation quality assessment formulated by online postings around a translated work, revealing readers’ discursive roles as well as their assumptions, perceptions, and even stereotypes toward translation. In other fields, Skalicky (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR34\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2013\u003c/span\u003e) adopts genre theory and corpus-based discourse analysis to identify rhetorical patterns in Amazon consumer reviews, thereby uncovering the shared values of the Amazon discourse community. Combining different approaches from corpus linguistics, pragmatics, and narrative analysis, Vásquez (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR41\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e) conducts a discourse analysis of online customer reviews from platforms such as Amazon to examine common discourse features reviewers employ when evaluating a product or service.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAmazon’s role in circulating Chinese cultural production has also attracted scholarly interest. A source-language-oriented, top-down paradigm dominates current scholarship. That is, scholars tend to select Chinese literary works or authors as case studies based on their research interests and then retrieve relevant Amazon reviews for analysis (Liu \u0026amp; Baer, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR26\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e; Wei, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR43\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e; Hu, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR16\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e). For instance, Wu’s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR46\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e) multidimensional investigation into the overseas reception of Yu Hua’s \u003cem\u003eTo Live\u003c/em\u003e, Jia Pingwa’s \u003cem\u003eTurbulence\u003c/em\u003e, and Mai Jia’s \u003cem\u003eDecoded\u003c/em\u003e employs Amazon reviews as a primary data source. In terms of research methods, while qualitative approaches prevail, quantitative techniques have emerged in recent years. Researchers increasingly employ corpus linguistics (Fu \u0026amp; Wu, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR11\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e), Python-based NLP tools for sentiment analysis, semantic network analysis, or topic modeling (Li \u0026amp; Wang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR25\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Li \u0026amp; Wei, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR24\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e; Wu et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR45\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e; Zhu \u0026amp; Luo, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR54\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e), as well as multidimensional text mining (Qin et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR31\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). These efforts, though important, have a disproportionate focus on individual cultural products. Such a source-language-oriented approach risks generating myopic perspectives that obscure a broader understanding of how online reviewers perceive Chinese cultural products. Consequently, a systematic view of the circulation and reception of China-related books on the platform remains largely underexplored.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlso, a predominant focus on individual works or authors often constrains methodological advances. Numerous studies that claim to employ quantitative methods rely on limited datasets, thus failing to leverage the full potential of computational tools (Geng, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR12\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e; Li \u0026amp; Wei, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR24\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e). Paradoxically, works that attract extensive scholarly interest often receive strikingly minimal public attention on digital platforms, with Wang (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR42\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e) observing that such cases frequently garner minimal readership and feedback. If a cultural product receives only a few hundred reviews, qualitative methods tend to be more insightful than quantitative approaches. Many studies draw on very limited sets of data, such as consisting of a few dozen comments. Furthermore, most research on the matter lacks a theoretical framework for analysis and instead depends solely on selected illustrative examples to support their claims (Hu, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR17\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Liu et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR27\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNevertheless, we do not seek to discount the inherent value of source-oriented paradigms. Instead, we emphasize that a target-oriented perspective adopted in this study can serve as a useful complement to the former. Specifically, this entails examining the reader reviews of China-related books on Amazon from a systematic perspective, rather than selecting unrepresentative texts. It enables grasping a more comprehensive image of China shaped on this platform, especially the underlying beliefs and assumptions embedded in the reviews, which can provide a macro-level reference context for future case studies on cross-cultural communication. Moreover, adopting a platform-wide data collection strategy allows for the effective application of quantitative methods to large-scale datasets for distant reading, thus uncovering meaningful discursive patterns (Geng \u0026amp; Zhou, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR13\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e). This, in turn, advances a more systematic and refined approach to research on the international communication of Chinese culture and the overseas perceptions of China. By combining the methods of distant reading and close reading, this study also presents an initial attempt to offer methodological implications for previous discourse analysis studies that rely primarily on corpus-based methods.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe present study adopts a target-oriented approach to data collection by focusing on comments from the most-reviewed books on Amazon, which reflect the prevalent, dominant attitudes of grassroots online reviewers toward China. By combining the methods of distant reading and close reading and drawing on the theoretical framework of discourse analysis, this article examines how the discourse of Amazon consumer reviews on China-related books constructs the image of China. This study seeks to address three research questions:\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003col\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat topics are constructed in the discourse of Amazon online consumer reviews on China-related books?\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat stances and attitudes are associated with the topics?\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat shared values, assumptions, and perceptions emerge from the reviews overall?\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/ol\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo answer these questions, we start with a distant reading of reviews by performing a quantitative analysis of the metadata and applying NLP techniques (i.e., topic modeling and named entity recognition) to identify major topics in Amazon consumer reviews. Next, we conduct a close reading of the most salient semantic patterns using corpus-based methods to examine the stances and attitudes associated with these topics. Lastly, based on the findings, we seek to uncover the underlying assumptions, perceptions, and values toward China held by international grassroots reviewers.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Data and methods","content":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eData collection.\u003c/b\u003e We collected, as metadata, 43 China-related books and a corpus consisting of 48,895 online consumer reviews on these books. Data was obtained on January 23, 2023, from Amazon’s official website (\u003cspan class=\"ExternalRef\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"RefSource\"\u003ewww.amazon.com\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"RefTarget\"\u003e). The selection of most-reviewed China-related books proceeds as follows: First, the search term “China” was applied to the “Books” category, with the results sorted by “Most Reviews”. This generated 75 pages with 16 entries per page. Next, the top 100 books were filtered according to their relevance to China. Specifically, we excluded titles that merely referenced matters related to China without substantive engagement with Chinese sociocultural themes. For example, we excluded narratives located in Chinese cities or regions like Taiwan and Hong Kong but lacking meaningful focus on Chinese people, historical events, or cultural artifacts. This yielded 52 titles. Then, duplicate editions were consolidated into single entries. For instance, the eight versions of Sun Tzu’s \u003cem\u003eThe Art of War\u003c/em\u003e, translated by Lionel Giles and Ralph D. Sawyer, and three editions of Weina Dai Randel’s \u003cem\u003eThe Last Rose of Shanghai: A Novel\u003c/em\u003e, were each integrated into one entry. After the screening process, the final corpus consisted of data from 43 different books. Two types of data were collected: online consumer reviews and bibliographic data, or metadata. Metadata included book titles, authors, translators, publishers, publication years, genre, keywords, and the geographical and temporal information of reviews. A total of 52,574 online consumer reviews on the selected 43 books were collected. After removing 3,679 non-English comments, the corpus of this study, containing 48,895 online consumer reviews, comprises 3,423,177 tokens and 44,454 types.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe corpus predominantly features English-language originals (38 titles), with only five pieces of translated Chinese works: Sun Tze’s \u003cem\u003eThe Art of War\u003c/em\u003e, Liu Cixin’s \u003cem\u003eThe Three-Body Problem\u003c/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eThe Dark Forest\u003c/em\u003e, Zhang Ling’s \u003cem\u003eA Single Swallow\u003c/em\u003e, and Yan Geling’s \u003cem\u003eThe Secret Talker\u003c/em\u003e. The original works include Amy Tan’s \u003cem\u003eThe Joy Luck Club\u003c/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eThe Valley of Amazement\u003c/em\u003e, Pearl S. Buck’s \u003cem\u003eThe Good Earth\u003c/em\u003e, Jung Chang’s \u003cem\u003eWild Swans\u003c/em\u003e, and Iris Chang’s \u003cem\u003eThe Rape of Nanking\u003c/em\u003e. This distribution suggests that English originals have gained much more popularity than translated works on Amazon. In other words, the representation of China within this digital platform is primarily constructed through English original works rather than translated Chinese ones.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eDiscourse analysis.\u003c/b\u003e This study employs an integrated approach to discourse analysis. Discourse analyses vary according to conceptualizations of discourse, theoretical foundations, research objects, and research methods. According to different research aims, scholars draw on a spectrum of analytical methods, from socio-linguistics (Downes, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR7\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1984\u003c/span\u003e) that studies discourse in the narrow linguistic sense, to Fairclough’s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR8\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1992\u003c/span\u003e, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2003\u003c/span\u003e) critical discourse analysis and Foucault’s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1972\u003c/span\u003e) discursive power theory that extend discourse to a wide set of social practices, and to Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) discourse theory that further expands the concept of discourse to encompass all social phenomena (Torfing, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR40\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2005\u003c/span\u003e, pp. 5–9). Here, we take an integrated approach to four different methods of discourse analysis, bringing together Foucault’s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1972\u003c/span\u003e) discourse theory and Fairclough’s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR8\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1992\u003c/span\u003e, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2003\u003c/span\u003e) critical discourse analysis, Hall’s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1997\u003c/span\u003e) theory of representation, and corpus-based (critical) discourse analysis. We regard discourse as “a system of representation” (Hall, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1997\u003c/span\u003e, p. 44), a “signifying” process through which meaning is produced or constructed (Hall, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1997\u003c/span\u003e, p. 28). As such, we abide to some key assumptions of social constructionism (Burr, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1995\u003c/span\u003e, pp. 2–5): a critical stance toward taken-for-granted knowledge and truth, the cultural and historical specificity of knowledge, the constructed nature of knowledge by social processes, and the interplay between knowledge and social action.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTraditional discourse analysis predominantly utilizes qualitative methods to examine a selected fragment of a text, which is both an epistemological strength and a blind spot. Personal bias in sampling, for example, is a weakness to acknowledge (Widdowson, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR44\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2004\u003c/span\u003e, p. 102). However, such rushed criticism may overlook the alignment of the objectives of qualitative research with hermeneutic epistemologies. We find that, for a quantitative analysis of texts, a post-positivist perspective that construes objectivity as impossible is best practice. In this optics, this study aims to provide a robust, multi-layered interpretation of data by combining quantitative methods like NLP techniques and corpus linguistics with qualitative discourse analysis.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eProcedure for data analysis.\u003c/b\u003e We analyzed two categories of data: (1) metadata of books and their reviews, including genre, automatically extracted review keywords, number of reviews, and geographical and temporal information of reviews; and (2) the textual content of reviews. In metadata analysis, the genre of China-related books was examined to explore the semantic framing of discourse. Genres of texts, or “typical forms of text that link kinds of producer, consumer, topic, medium, manner and occasion”, serve to “control the behavior of producers of such texts, and the expectations of potential consumers” (Hodge \u0026amp; Kress, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR18\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2001\u003c/span\u003e, p. 295). Such is Amazon’s standardized page of book items, where each book is displayed in a uniform structure with consistent elements, including book cover, genre, pricing, professional reviews, reader ratings, keywords, book description, author profiles, and selected reader reviews. Supposing the genre of a book by default, as categorized by the platform, may bias readers’ interpretations. This is framing, namely an active rhetoric strategy that implies agency in the construction of reality (Baker, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2006\u003c/span\u003e, p. 106). For instance, categorizing literary works that blend facts and fiction as non-fiction poses the risk of framing fictional elements as factual accounts, thereby suggesting wrong information about China. That is, genre guides and influences online readers’ consumption and reception of China-related books through framing. We regard genre as part of the book’s metadata, the analysis of which can reveal underlying patterns of knowledge and discourse.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor the analysis of the review content, NLP techniques were first employed to conduct a distant reading to identify typical semantic patterns. Specifically, Python-based topic modeling and named entity recognition were utilized to detect major themes in the content. Second, a close reading of the review content was implemented with the aid of corpus-based analysis on the use of collocations and concordance lines. For instance, an investigation of adjectives and adverbs can provide insight into the basic stance and attitudes adopted by the reviewers towards China. Finally, based on the previous findings, we examined the relationship between discourse and ideology, namely, how discourse is constituted by the broader socio-cultural structures. Here, ideology refers to the set of values that is subject to power or hegemony. This part of the analysis aims to identify the typical values, stances, and assumptions maintained by various groups of reviewers toward a particular entity or subject, thereby revealing the overall values shared by international online reviewers toward China. In other words, by analyzing the reviews, particularly in light of insights gained from the first two steps of the analysis, we revealed how the broader society and culture shape the image of China in terms of stances, assumptions, and values. This examination was constantly situated in the specific cultural, political, and economic contexts in which the discourse is generated.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Results and discussion","content":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eMetadata analysis.\u003c/b\u003e Genre frames readers\u0026rsquo; interpretation and consumption of a text. Amazon\u0026rsquo;s classification of genres, different from the concept in literary or narrative studies, categorizes a book in accordance with the ways it is expected to be used. A notable example is \u003cem\u003eThe Art of War\u003c/em\u003e, whose different editions were classified into various genres: three as \u0026ldquo;Philosophy\u0026rdquo;, two as \u0026ldquo;Management \u0026amp; Leadership\u0026rdquo;, two as \u0026ldquo;Schools \u0026amp; Teaching\u0026rdquo;, and one as \u0026ldquo;History\u0026rdquo;. This shows consumers\u0026rsquo; diverse interpretations and applications of the text. While some Chinese scholars (Zha, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR50\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e; Sun \u0026amp; Nie, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR36\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e) critique Western readers\u0026rsquo; tendency to interpret Chinese literary works through non-literary lenses, the multiple ways in which readers engage with a book can actually demonstrate its broad interpretive possibilities and, consequently, its appeal. That is, the diverse categorization of \u003cem\u003eThe Art of War\u003c/em\u003e reveals how classical Chinese philosophy permeates multiple social fields, illustrating the benefits traditional Chinese wisdom can offer to different societies and cultures in various manners.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTable\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e presents a broad classification of the 43 China-related works based on their main category (e.g., science fiction and historical fiction were all considered as \u0026ldquo;Fiction\u0026rdquo;). As can be seen from the table, \u0026ldquo;Fiction\u0026rdquo; is the most prevalent category (26 titles), followed by the category of \u0026ldquo;History\u0026rdquo; (7 titles), which includes works such as Jung Chang\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eWild Swans\u003c/em\u003e, Jack Weatherford\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eGenghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World\u003c/em\u003e, and Iris Chang\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eRape of Nanking\u003c/em\u003e. An interesting example here is \u003cem\u003eWild Swans\u003c/em\u003e, a work that is best regarded as literary fiction blending autobiography and family memoir since the author narrated the stories of three generations of women (i.e., her grandmother, mother, and herself) based on her family\u0026rsquo;s experiences. Although history is often constructed from personal narratives, labeling this book as \u0026ldquo;History\u0026rdquo; may risk downplaying its literary and reflective dimensions, thus blurring the line between fictional elements and historical events. This frames reading, an effect further reinforced by the work\u0026rsquo;s recognized status as a worldwide best-seller and a reliable source for understanding Chinese history, society, and culture. Our contention is that this specific framing may lead to a distortion of the facts this book claims (or not).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab1\" border=\"1\"\u003e\u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 1\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eCategories of selected China-related books on Amazon.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/caption\u003e\u003ccolgroup cols=\"3\"\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"char\" char=\".\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cthead\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eCategory\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eCount\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eIllustrative Cases\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/thead\u003e\u003ctbody\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eFiction\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e26\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Three-Body Problem\u003c/em\u003e (Liu Cixin)\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA Single Swallow\u003c/em\u003e (Zhang Ling)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eHistory\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e7\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eWide Swans\u003c/em\u003e (Jung Chang)\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eGenghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World\u003c/em\u003e (Jack Weatherford)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ePhilosophy, School, and Teaching\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Art of War\u003c/em\u003e (Sun Tzu)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eBiographies\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eLast Boat Out of Shanghai\u003c/em\u003e (Helen Zia)\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBeautiful Country: A Memoir\u003c/em\u003e (Qian Julie Wang)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eMotherhood, Travel, and Food Studies\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBattle Hymn of the Tiger Mother\u003c/em\u003e (Amy Chua)\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Silk Roads: A New History of the World\u003c/em\u003e (Peter Frankopan)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ePolitics and Government\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eRed-Handed\u003c/em\u003e (Peter Schweizer)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eRelationships, Buddhism\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Tibetan book of Living and Dyin\u003c/em\u003eg (Sogyal Rinpoche)\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Tibetan Book of the Dead\u003c/em\u003e (Padmasambhava)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/tbody\u003e\u003c/colgroup\u003e\u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eR, an open-source programming language, was employed to provide descriptive analyses of other fields of metadata. Using the \u0026ldquo;tidyverse\u0026rdquo; package, we processed the metadata of books to examine the review keywords, which are typically 2-grams automatically generated by Amazon to offer a brief summary of reader comments. For example, the extracted review keywords of Weina Dai Randel\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eThe Last Rose of Shanghai\u003c/em\u003e involve phrases like \u0026ldquo;historical fiction\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;last rose\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;well written\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;world war\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;Japanese occupation\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;highly recommend\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;beautifully written\u0026rdquo;. In total, the review keywords comprised 1,470 tokens and 602 types, with the ten most frequent words listed in Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e. As shown in the figure, positive content words, such as \u0026ldquo;recommend\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;well\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;highly\u0026rdquo;, prevail. \u0026ldquo;Read\u0026rdquo; is the most frequent word, and collocates with adverbs such as \u0026ldquo;must\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;well\u0026rdquo;, forming a recurrent discursive pattern that conveys positive feedback. This suggests that China-related books garner predominantly positive assessments from Amazon readers.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e[Insert Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e here]\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo further investigate the patterns of these keywords, a frequency list of 2-grams was generated using the corpus tool of AntConc. As illustrated in Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e, the first seven 2-grams, such as \u0026ldquo;highly recommend\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;well written\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;must read\u0026rdquo;, are typical discursive patterns indicative of positive or negative evaluations for the reference of other potential consumers. Other expressions, such as \u0026ldquo;Chinese culture\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;Chinese history\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;Hong Kong\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;Sun Tze\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;cultural revolution\u0026rdquo;, are related to Chinese history, society, and culture, with a particular focus on modern China. These linguistic patterns provide insight into the overall semantic meanings of the reviews.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e[Insert Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e here]\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfter examining the genre of books and automatically generated review keywords, we proceeded to analyze other fields of review metadata. Each observation of the 48,895 reviews contains these metadata fields: the title of the book reviewed, username, reviewer location, date of review, review title, and review text. A statistical analysis of these variables using R addressed the following aspects: (1) review frequency per book, (2) temporal review patterns, and (3) the distribution of reviewer locations.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs illustrated in Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig3\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e3\u003c/span\u003e, \u003cem\u003eThe China Study\u003c/em\u003e by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas Campbell, a book studying the relationship between Chinese diet and health outcomes, is identified as the most frequently reviewed book (4,821 reviews). Among the top 10 most-reviewed books, only two are translated Chinese works, i.e., \u003cem\u003eThe Art of War\u003c/em\u003e by Sun Tze (3,402 reviews) and \u003cem\u003eThe Three-Body Problem\u003c/em\u003e (3,316 reviews) by Liu Cixin, while the remaining are mostly English-language fiction. In our sample of 18 China-related titles with over 1,000 reviews, only three are translated Chinese works, among which Sun Tzu\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eThe Art of War\u003c/em\u003e has received the highest number of reviews. English-language originals account for the majority of highly reviewed titles and therefore may exert greater influence on Amazon readers\u0026rsquo; perceptions of China, whereas the smaller share of translations of Chinese literature suggests they play a comparatively more marginal role in image construction. This finding again underscores the importance of investigating grassroots online reviewers\u0026rsquo; perceptions of China through a comprehensive analysis of the most-reviewed China-related books, rather than focusing solely on individual translated Chinese works with limited comments.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e[Insert Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig3\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e3\u003c/span\u003e here]\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe annual number of reviews is displayed in Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig4\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e4\u003c/span\u003e. A noticeable increase in reviews from 2013 is evident. Overall, from 2013, the number of reviews has been substantially higher than previously and relatively stable, suggesting a growing interest in China-related topics.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e[Insert Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig4\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e4\u003c/span\u003e here]\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFigure\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig5\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e5\u003c/span\u003e presents the percentage of reviewer locations. According to the figure, countries contributing the most reviews are the United States and the United Kingdom, which account for 82.6% and 10.7% of the total, respectively. A secondary group of review sources includes Canada, India, and Australia. European countries account for a much smaller share. This suggests that reviewers from the United States and the United Kingdom contribute mostly to constructing China\u0026rsquo;s image on Amazon. While their dominance may reflect strong cultural exchange with China, it could also stem from higher platform adoption rates or more active reviewing cultures in those markets.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e[Insert Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig5\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e5\u003c/span\u003e here]\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eDistant reading using LDA topic modeling and NER.\u003c/b\u003e To uncover the major topics in Amazon reader reviews, we applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling. LDA is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that analyzes the co-occurrence patterns of words to identify latent topics in a large collection of documents and provides a set of topics, each with keywords ranked by the likelihood of belonging to the topic (Blei et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR4\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2003\u003c/span\u003e). Python libraries \u0026ldquo;nltk\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;gensim\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;pyLDAvis\u0026rdquo; were employed for data preprocessing, topic modeling, and visualization. After producing and examining a range of topics, this study determined that a set of ten topics offered the best summarization of the reviews in terms of coherence, distinctiveness, and interpretability. Figure\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig6\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e6\u003c/span\u003e illustrates the result of topic modeling visualized via LDAvis, an interactive, web-based visualization system. The ten circles of varying sizes on the left panel represent distinct topics, and the fact that they do not overlap demonstrates clear differentiation between them. The size of each circle is proportional to the relative prevalence of the topic in the corpus (Sievert \u0026amp; Shirley, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR33\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e). This means that Topic 1, presenting the largest circle, is the most frequent topic, followed by Topic 2 to Topic 10. Additionally, the interactive feature enables us to hover over any circle and prompt the right panel to display the 30 most salient terms associated with that topic, ranked in descending order of frequency.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e[Insert Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig6\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e6\u003c/span\u003e here]\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe meaning of each topic is our own, subjective, and informed interpretation. The top 30 terms of the 20 topics are presented in Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab2\" border=\"1\"\u003e\u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 2\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eTop 30 terms associated with the 10 topics of Amazon reviews.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/caption\u003e\u003ccolgroup cols=\"2\"\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cthead\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eTopic Number\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eTop 30 Terms\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/thead\u003e\u003ctbody\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003etopic 1\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ebook, read, story, chinese, time, life, well, child, author, people, live, give, year, much, find, work, interesting, account, never, first, love, culture, hard, enjoy, put, death, day, world, different, political\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003etopic 2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003efamily, daughter, way, parent, mother, parenting, kid, fascinating, look, bring, old, western, memoir, long, young, grow, keep, new, yet, prison, far, american, eye, home, call, school, era, lesson, money, wife\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003etopic 3\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ereader, period, leave, excellent, style, however, wonderful, beautiful, class, back, last, individual, interested, play, mean, actually, strong, allow, self, story, early, set, writer, often, lose, success, language, age, value, chapter\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003etopic 4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003etell, personal, life, help, government, become, page, view, real, event, show, communist, point, war, perspective, courage, turn, practice, mind, bad, face, force, student, picture, husband, result, revolution, journey, situation, hong_kong\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003etopic 5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewrite, great, book, feel, learn, really, woman, thing, detail, country, still, person, friend, follow, suffer, beautifully, hand, especially, difficult, strength, story, half, detailed, one, heart, focus, break, course, glad, funny\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003etopic 6\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003echange, generation, buy, incredible, method, study, art, japanese, nien_cheng, extremely, certainly, successful, decade, remain, ability, completely, simply, watch, million, trial, understanding, movie, courageous, china, title, confess, horror, fun, particular, message\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003etopic 7\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ehistory, read, book, experience, understand, move, love, worth, always, definitely, man, citizen, question, review, remember, realize, piece, grip, choose, like, autobiography, escape, push, emotion, current, biography, curious, month, red_guard, group\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003etopic 8\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eraise, happen, little, believe, ever, true, able, business, reading, bear, torture, let, finish, system, side, spend, freedom, speak, sad, agree, mom, return, problem, instead, talk, hour, brave, admire, highly, star\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003etopic 9\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eend, powerful, example, recent, enjoyable, less, sassoon, vivid, fantastic, capitalist, repeat, behavior, policy, interview, demand, brilliant, kadoorie, throw, complete, surprise, travel, reach, portray, exciting, enlighten, develop, comment, ordinary, though, deliver\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003etopic 10\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003einteressant, goood, unputdownable, meh, artwork, astory, persona, suggestive, bitterness, sepia, socialism, tribute, priest, sidebar, cheng, charmingly, unveil, insanity, elegance, bonus, artfully, sensationalism, incarceration, annoyingly, agrandizing, familiarity, cure, traial, bookclub, boundless\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/tbody\u003e\u003c/colgroup\u003e\u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSome topics revolve around experiences and feelings of reading. Topic 1 centers on narratives of everyday Chinese experiences as indicated by the colocation of words like \u0026ldquo;Chinese\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;story\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;people\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;life\u0026rdquo;. Terms like \u0026ldquo;book\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;read\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;author\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;well\u0026rdquo; concern the discussion of authors and comments on the book, which display common discursive patterns of consumer reviews. The frequent occurrence of evaluative words like \u0026ldquo;much\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;interesting\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;enjoy\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;love\u0026rdquo; further suggests a generally positive reception. Overall, Topic 1 reflects favorable reader responses to Chinese narratives. Topic 3 is mainly focused on the evaluation of writing and storytelling. Terms such as \u0026ldquo;reader\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;writer\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;style\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;value\u0026rdquo; signal assessments of the author\u0026rsquo;s writing style and literary merit. A group of positive adjectives like \u0026ldquo;excellent\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;wonderful\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;beautiful\u0026rdquo; appear together with words concerning the narratives of books, such as \u0026ldquo;individual\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;self\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;story\u0026rdquo;, indicating an overall positive reception of China-related works. This also demonstrates typical discursive patterns of reviews. Topic 7 also centers on expressions of appreciation related to reading experiences, as indicated by words like \u0026ldquo;move\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;love\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;worth\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;remember\u0026rdquo;. Topic 9 includes terms such as \u0026ldquo;enjoyable\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;vivid\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;fantastic\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;powerful\u0026rdquo;, which likely reflect readers\u0026rsquo; immediate emotional responses to the texts. Similarly, Topic 10 is marked by vivid expressions of enthusiasm for reading the books with such terms as \u0026ldquo;unputdownable\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;good\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOther topics are focused on the stories themselves, including plots, settings, and characters. Topic 2 displays a clear subject of family memoirs. Terms like \u0026ldquo;family\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;mother\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;daughter\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;parenting\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;kid\u0026rdquo; are associated with family life, mother-daughter relationships, and child-rearing. Terms like \u0026ldquo;old\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;young\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;grow\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;home\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;school\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;lesson\u0026rdquo; further indicate the connection with family, education, and personal growth. Words like \u0026ldquo;Western\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;American\u0026rdquo; seem to suggest the cultural setting of the narratives. Topic 4 focuses on personal life stories with an emphasis on authenticity as signaled by such top terms as \u0026ldquo;personal\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;life\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;real\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;event\u0026rdquo;. The prevalence of words like \u0026ldquo;government\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;communist\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;war\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;revolution\u0026rdquo; suggests that the key concern here is individual experiences in the context of historical upheavals. Topic 5 highlights praise for writing quality with \u0026ldquo;great\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;beautifully\u0026rdquo;. The main issue here is narratives possibly portraying the experiences of women amid national adversity, as indicated by words like \u0026ldquo;woman\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;country\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;suffer\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;difficult\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;strength\u0026rdquo;. Topic 6 is focused on narratives related to the Sino-Japanese War or intergenerational relationships, as indicated by such words as \u0026ldquo;generation\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;Japanese\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;China\u0026rdquo;. Topic 8 indicates personal suffering with the words \u0026ldquo;bear\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;torture\u0026rdquo; and references to good qualities with terms like \u0026ldquo;freedom\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;brave\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn conclusion, Amazon consumer reviews display two main aspects of meaning. On the one hand, it exhibits typical discursive patterns of consumer book reviews. This is often characterized by the usage of common or even slightly exaggerated adjectives to express praise for books and stories, such as \u0026ldquo;must read\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;beautifully written\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;open my eyes\u0026rdquo;. What is at issue here is the depiction of mostly delightful reading experiences provided by China-related texts, discussed through aspects such as narrative style, perspective, characters, and events. On the other hand, the reviews also point toward real-life family relationships or reflections on the historical development of individuals, families, and nations.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo further identify the key entities mentioned in the reviews, Named Entity Recognition (NER) was applied using the Python library \u0026ldquo;spaCy\u0026rdquo;. NER is a fundamental NLP technique that aims to automatically detect and classify named entities in text into predefined categories such as persons, organizations, locations, and dates. After examining the result, five entity types were found to be most relevant to our study: group (i.e., nationalities or religious or political groups), event, person, and geopolitical entity (i.e., countries, cities, states). The events concerning \u0026ldquo;war\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;revolution\u0026rdquo; appear in various expressions, which were grouped under unified categories for analysis. For instance, references such as \u0026ldquo;World War II\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;the Cold War\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;the Opium War\u0026rdquo; were all categorized under the broader entity of \u0026ldquo;war\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe high-frequency named entities are presented in Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab3\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e3\u003c/span\u003e. As can be seen in this table, entities under the category of work of art mainly concern the titles of books examined in this study, such as \u0026ldquo;The China Study\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Snow Flower\u0026rdquo;. National groups and geopolitical references overwhelmingly centered on China, the U.S., and Japan, and events are mostly focused on \u0026ldquo;war\u0026rdquo; (including \u0026ldquo;World War I\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;World War II\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;the Nanjing Massacre\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;the Cold War\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;the Opium War\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;the Sino-Japanese War\u0026rdquo;, etc.) and \u0026ldquo;revolution\u0026rdquo; (including \u0026ldquo;the Cultural Revolution\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;the Communist Revolution\u0026rdquo;, etc.), demonstrating that the discussions tend to revolve around the history of modern and contemporary China, particularly the period spanning from the First Opium War in 1840 to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab3\" border=\"1\"\u003e\u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 3\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eHigh-frequency named entities in Amazon reviews.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/caption\u003e\u003ccolgroup cols=\"3\"\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"char\" char=\".\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cthead\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eType\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eEntity\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eCount\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/thead\u003e\u003ctbody\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\" morerows=\"2\" rowspan=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eGroup\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eChinese\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e9302\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eJapanese\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e2024\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eAmerican\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1680\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\" morerows=\"3\" rowspan=\"4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eGeopolitical entity\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eChina/the People\u0026rsquo;s Republic of China\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e9166\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eAmerica/the United States/U.S./USA\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e2343\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eShanghai\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1363\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eJapan\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e751\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\" morerows=\"1\" rowspan=\"2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eEvent\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewar\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e859\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003erevolution\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e756\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\" morerows=\"1\" rowspan=\"2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ePerson\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eAmy Tan\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1577\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eMao/Mao Zedong/Mao Tse-Tung\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1032\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\" morerows=\"1\" rowspan=\"2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eWork of art\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe China Study\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e655\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eSnow Flower\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e436\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/tbody\u003e\u003c/colgroup\u003e\u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBased on the distant reading using LDA topic modeling and NER techniques, a preliminary conclusion can be drawn that the reviews largely center on Chinese history, society, and culture in the modern and contemporary era. More specifically, they tend to focus on individual experiences shaped by the broader political or revolutionary context, with personal suffering often intertwined with national fate. This analysis reveals several recurring themes worthy of further exploration, including war and revolution, politics and history, individuals and collectives, gender, as well as pain and love.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eClose reading using corpus-based methods.\u003c/b\u003e The distant reading of the data informs our further close reading, carried out to reveal in detail how commentators reflected on specific events, figures, and cultural artifacts. We selected some representative examples for detailed discussion. First, the keyword \u0026ldquo;Chinese\u0026rdquo; was examined to explore the general stances and attitudes of reviewers toward Chinese subjects. Using the corpus tool AntConc, collocates were retrieved within a five-word span, with a minimum frequency threshold of five, and sorted by likelihood ratio in descending order. As Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig7\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e7\u003c/span\u003e illustrates, the collocates of \u0026ldquo;Chinese\u0026rdquo; mostly consist of collective or plural nouns, such as \u0026ldquo;culture\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;American\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;history\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;women\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;immigrants\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;people\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;mothers\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;customs\u0026rdquo;, with limited references to individuals. Collocates ranked between the 20th and 50th positions include \u0026ldquo;mythology\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;revolution\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;woman\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;immigrant\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;names\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;civilians\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;parents\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;communist\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;exclusion\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;western\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;government\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;traditions\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;society\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;folklore\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;Americans\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;century\u0026rdquo;, all of which further suggest that the semantic field of \u0026ldquo;Chinese\u0026rdquo; is closely associated with themes of history, culture, community, tradition, and politics, rather than individual identity.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e[Insert Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig7\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e7\u003c/span\u003e here]\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAmong these collocates, the high-frequency word \u0026ldquo;women\u0026rdquo; stands out as a group worth further exploration. Interestingly, a comparison between gendered terms reveals a significantly lower frequency of male-related words in the corpus. As shown in Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab4\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e4\u003c/span\u003e, the results indicate a stronger focus on women. References to women, as indicated by a total frequency of 4,990 of the words \u0026ldquo;woman\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;women\u0026rdquo;, significantly surpass the 2,384 occurrences of \u0026ldquo;man\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;men\u0026rdquo;. Similarly, the female pronouns \u0026ldquo;she\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;her\u0026rdquo; appear 28,871 times in total, whereas their male counterparts \u0026ldquo;he\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;him\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;his\u0026rdquo; only occur 15,471 times. This disparity in the frequency of gendered terms suggests that female characters, compared to male ones, receive more attention in the reviews. This finding, interestingly, stands in contrast to previous research on gender bias in language, which concludes that the frequency of the representation of females is often lower (Baker, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR2\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e). Our analysis reveals that Amazon consumer reviews demonstrate a pronounced preference for female characters.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab4\" border=\"1\"\u003e\u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 4\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eComparison of word frequency between gendered terms.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/caption\u003e\u003ccolgroup cols=\"3\"\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"char\" char=\".\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"char\" char=\".\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cthead\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eToken\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrequency\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eSum\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/thead\u003e\u003ctbody\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ewoman\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3407\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e1583\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4990\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eher\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eshe\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e17301\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e11570\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e28871\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003emen\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eman\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e935\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e1449\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e2384\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ehis\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ehim\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ehe\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e7450\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e1353\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e6668\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e15471\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/tbody\u003e\u003c/colgroup\u003e\u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA closer look at 3,407 concordance lines of \u0026ldquo;women\u0026rdquo; reveals five recurrent semantic patterns regarding how women are discussed. Evaluations of women\u0026rsquo;s representation are conveyed via the structure \u0026ldquo;noun\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;of +\u0026thinsp;women\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;is/are\u0026rdquo;, such as referring to the depiction of women as \u0026ldquo;intriguing\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;fascinating\u0026rdquo;, or \u0026ldquo;moving\u0026rdquo;. The attributes of women are depicted using the pattern \u0026ldquo;women\u0026rsquo;s\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;noun\u0026rdquo;, like women\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;suffering\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;lives\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;voices\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;courage\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;strength\u0026rdquo;, and the structure \u0026ldquo;women\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;who\u0026rdquo;, such as \u0026ldquo;women who are strong\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;women who are faithful\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;women who endure and succeed\u0026rdquo;. Using the structure \u0026ldquo;women\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;and\u0026rdquo;, women are linked to their experiences (e.g., \u0026ldquo;struggles\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;difficulties\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;hardships\u0026rdquo;), to other people (e.g., \u0026ldquo;families\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;men\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;children\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;girls\u0026rdquo;, and \u0026ldquo;daughters\u0026rdquo;), and to their qualities (e.g., \u0026ldquo;strength\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;courage\u0026rdquo;). Another noticeable pattern is \u0026ldquo;noun\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;of +\u0026thinsp;women\u0026thinsp;+\u0026thinsp;in +\u0026thinsp;location\u0026rdquo;. To capture a broader context, a \u0026minus;\u0026thinsp;25/+25 window was set to generate the concordances, with some examples shown in Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab5\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e5\u003c/span\u003e. A close reading of all 127 concordances shows that Chinese women are depicted as encountering challenges and enduring pressures from family, society, and community in ancient history and harsh contemporary realities. Reviews focus on their lives, treatment, status, stories, generations, suffering, relationships, roles, pain, struggle, and oppression.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab5\" border=\"1\"\u003e\u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 5\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eExamples of concordance lines of the word \u0026ldquo;women\u0026rdquo;.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/caption\u003e\u003ccolgroup cols=\"4\"\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c4\" colnum=\"4\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cthead\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eLeft Context\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eHit\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eRight Context\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/thead\u003e\u003ctbody\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis book is so interesting, following the stories of 3 generations of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein China. I was absolutely spellbound by the ordeals they went through, their achievements in incredible adversity, and their indomitable spirit and humanity. A\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eFlower and the Secret Fan looks deeply into friendship in a way I have not seen many authors attempt, and deeply into the lives of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein this time period. I can\u0026rsquo;t recommend this highly enough, but bring tissues.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ethem and their struggle. She uses mother daughter relationships in an interesting way that is sure to provide insight to culture and the role of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein society. However, this book can get a bit confusing if you don\u0026rsquo;t pay attention to the changing narrator after every section. Overall,\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eher daughter, and the steamed pork dish Lindo makes and Rich dumps soy sauce over. Culture was also brought out when surrounding the treatment of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein China. The treatment of wives and widows was disturbing and yet the painful traditions that the women suffered through did not deter them\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eTan is a skilled storyteller. She has the ability to empathize with her characters and the subject matter. The novel illustrates the humble status of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein Chinese society in the early twentieth century. Violet\u0026rsquo;s lack of control over her own life is contrasted with her mother\u0026rsquo;s ability\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e6\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eGenerational story of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein Shanghai at the beginning of the century and their struggle to survive in a male dominated world..\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e7\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis book is Amy Tan\u0026rsquo;s response to Memoir of a Geisha. Characters were very well developed, especially the particular group of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein China who were not married, protected by men and family. The protagonist, Violet is brave and resourceful, making the most of the life\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e8\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is a moving story that shows us the insights of the lifestyle of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein China, the pain they suffer and the strength of woman. Loved it!\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e9\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is a deeply moving story, and one that shed light on the place of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein traditional Chinese society. Some of it (foot-binding) is horrific, but, true. In spite of the hardships, it shows positive sides of the\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e10\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003etell foreigners about the China\u0026rsquo;s recent 60 years. It described the history very clearly, with a very special perspective, which is from the fate of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein three generations. War, communism, massacre, famine, political suppress, all of these memories in the three generations revealed a very clear China then. Readers\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e11\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ethey have raised over the years. The story evolves to tell of Lennea, their \u0026ldquo;current oldest daughter\u0026rdquo; and her struggle to overcome the oppression of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein China yet remain true to her family. It is a story of how our choices in life have a lasting effect whether good\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e12\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eways only imagined by their mothers. I think it is an excellent example of the strength of the mother/daughter bond and the strength of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein general.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e13\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eis the first, long-suffering wife, and hers is the Universal story of the hard working first wife. O-Lan embodies the classic tale of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein this society, but so does the second wife, with her bound feet and her cloistered life. They are both sad lives, but O-\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e14\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eI've read many novels about the terrible trials of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein China during wars and internal upheaval which have made me deeply appreciate being born in the West. This book is especially moving because\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e15\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eA beautifully written book showing the valour of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ewomen\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ein China, accounts of secretive traditions to more openness in changing times, all viewed through the lives of three women who experience the changes\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/tbody\u003e\u003c/colgroup\u003e\u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs shown in the following examples, the fact that Chinese women in the stories strive to make a living despite hardships often evokes readers\u0026rsquo; empathy and emotional resonance.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eExample 1:\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe tea-growing tradition was completely unknown, but I have loved learning about it through A-Ma and Li-Yan. This story of the strength of women transcends cultures. It is beautiful. (Excerpt from a review of \u003cem\u003eThe Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane\u003c/em\u003e, 2018)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eExample 2:\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn seeking to ameliorate the past and to make sense of her life, Chang delves into her family history, providing a brutally honest portrait of three generations of women. What is truly amazing about Chang\u0026rsquo;s family chronicles is the wealth of hardships Chinese women have had to endure. (Excerpt from a review of \u003cem\u003eWild Swans\u003c/em\u003e, 2008)\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eExample 3:\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMs. Chang, in putting together a significant piece of writing, managed to narrate a complete, engaging story of three generations of women who, right along with policies within China, developed and changed within a very intricate plotline. Feelings of compassion came easily when Chang vividly narrated graphic wartime scenes during the many hostile invasions of China. (Excerpt from a review of \u003cem\u003eWild Swans\u003c/em\u003e, 2002)\u003c/p\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec8\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003eExample 4:\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eExquisite portrait of women who loved and lived through a difficult time. Three generations of strong women who did what they must to survive and just live every day. (Excerpt from a review of \u003cem\u003eThe Valley of Amazement\u003c/em\u003e, 2017)\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn Example 1, the reviewer of Lisa Lee\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eThe Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane\u003c/em\u003e is moved by the strength of women that transcends different cultures and nations. Similar praises of women\u0026rsquo;s resilience to endure hardships can be observed in Example 2 and Example 3 for \u003cem\u003eWild Swans\u003c/em\u003e and Example 4 for \u003cem\u003eThe Valley of Amazement\u003c/em\u003e. These reviews, written for three works with different settings, characters, and storylines, exhibit consistency in the representation of Chinese women. This seems to reveal a recurring discursive pattern adopted by international readers and consumers of China-related literature that focuses on the suffering and struggle of women.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe findings of this study challenge the simplistic and impressionistic claims circulating within sinology that American readers\u0026rsquo; taste in Chinese literature is primarily centered on \u0026ldquo;politics and sex\u0026rdquo; (Ji, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR20\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2009\u003c/span\u003e). A distant reading comprising metadata analysis, LDA topic modeling, and NER analysis, combined with a close reading with corpus-based methods, has revealed that grassroots online reviews on China-related books center on the historical upheavals, traumas, and transformations of modern and contemporary China, usually in the context of war and revolution. Particularly, it is against such a backdrop that Chinese women navigate hardships and strive to survive, which displays admirable qualities such as resilience and courage. Such stories tend to move and deeply resonate with grassroots readers across different races and nationalities.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMoreover, the findings of this study help counter the critique that China is often viewed in terms of \u0026ldquo;political dissidence or politics\u0026rdquo; (Tang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR39\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2015\u003c/span\u003e, p. 257), a view shaped by an overemphasis on elite and professional opinions. Such a focus overlooks the broader and more diverse ways in which China is perceived by the global public.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"Conclusion","content":"\u003cp\u003eAs Amazon facilitates a global circulation of books, it enables a wide exposure of China-related books. Providing a platform for discussion, it also generates powerful discourses through consumer reviews. Faced with the increasing volume of such data, scholars in the reception of Chinese literature and the image of China often either dismiss the value of non-specialist reviewers or adopt a source-oriented, top-down case study approach that selects examples to confirm preconceived conclusions. This often leads to a mismatch between research methods and the scale of data. Also, many studies have investigated how China is perceived by mainstream media or professional critics while neglecting grassroots perspectives, sentiments, and attitudes toward China as a valuable complementary source.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this direction, the present study examines grassroots online reviews of China-related books on Amazon in terms of their attitudes toward Chinese people, historical events, and cultural artifacts from a comprehensive perspective. As such, the study develops a novel methodological framework for discourse analysis by combining methods of distant and close reading with the use of NLP techniques and corpus linguistic tools. This study reveals that English-language original works, rather than translations, play the primary role in shaping international perceptions of China on the global platform Amazon. The topics of the reviews are diverse, ranging from personal growth and family relationships to love and suffering amid national traumas. Together, they construct an image of China that is deeply rooted in its modern and contemporary history, with war and revolution forming the central clue throughout the twentieth century. Amid these historical upheavals, Chinese women emerge as central figures who demonstrate noble qualities in the face of compounded challenges and hardships. While differences in cultures may seem difficult to bridge, inner emotions can often transcend them to foster empathy and resonance across borders. In post-revolutionary China, determining which Chinese narratives to disseminate and identifying the most effective ways of delivering them will become a key issue to consider.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Declarations","content":"\u003ch2\u003eAuthor Contribution\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eQiang Geng wrote the main manuscript text and Siyi Qiu prepared data collection, cleaning, LDA modeling and figure 6.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eAcknowledgement\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eQiang Geng and Siyi Qiu disclose support for the research of this work from Funder [grant number 23JZD038] and Funder [grant number 2023DSYL005].\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eData Availability\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eData will be provided at reasonable requests from interested audiences.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"References","content":"\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBaker P (2006) Using corpora in discourse analysis. Continuum, London\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBaker P (2014) Using corpora to analyze gender. 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Int Commun Gaz 85(3):1\u0026ndash;22. https://doi.org/10.1177/17480485251314373\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eZhu J, Luo X (2024) Jiyu zaixian duzhe pinglun shuju fenxi de Qingtong Kuihua yingyiben haiwai jieshou yanjiu 基于在线读者评论数据分析的《青铜葵花》英译本海外接受研究 (On the reception of the English version of \u003cem\u003eBronze and Sunflower\u003c/em\u003e\u0026mdash;an analysis of online comments). Shanghai fanyi 上海翻译 (Shanghai Journal of Translators) (4):69\u0026ndash;75\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e"}],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":true,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":false,"hideJournal":false,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":false,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":false,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":false,"isPdf":false,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"humanities-and-social-sciences-communications","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"palcomms","sideBox":"Learn more about [Humanities \u0026 Social Sciences Communications](http://www.nature.com/palcomms/)","snPcode":"41599","submissionUrl":"https://submission.springernature.com/new-submission/41599/3","title":"Humanities and Social Sciences Communications","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"stoa","reportingPortfolio":"Nature AJ","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":false},"keywords":"China’s image, Amazon (U.S.), online consumer review, distant reading, discourse analysis","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-6774493/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6774493/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"Research on the image of China that emerges from Amazon online reviews is wanting. Scholarship here can greatly benefit from leveraging the potential of quantitative analysis. The present study addresses this gap by drawing on an integrated framework of discourse analysis and a combined approach of distant and close reading to examine the image of China constructed by the discourse of Amazon consumer reviews on the most popular China-related books. By examining the metadata of 43 China-related books and a corpus consisting of 48,895 online consumer reviews on these books, this study seeks to reveal the major topics conveyed, associated stances and attitudes, and the values, assumptions, and perceptions shaping the discourse. As such, the study provides insight into future research on world perceptions of China through global digital media in terms of research content, theoretical frameworks, and research methods.","manuscriptTitle":"Imagining China in online reviews: A discourse analysis of Amazon consumer reviews on China-related books","msid":"","msnumber":"","nonDraftVersions":[{"code":1,"date":"2025-08-13 05:46:00","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-6774493/v1","editorialEvents":[{"type":"communityComments","content":0},{"type":"editorInvitedReview","content":"","date":"2026-03-24T13:33:18+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"190186653870871695479029834814723950986","date":"2026-03-15T05:51:11+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewersInvited","content":"","date":"2025-08-07T09:28:43+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorInvited","content":"","date":"2025-06-09T05:03:49+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorAssigned","content":"","date":"2025-06-09T05:03:18+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"checksComplete","content":"","date":"2025-06-03T06:29:52+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"submitted","content":"Humanities and Social Sciences Communications","date":"2025-05-29T08:24:37+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""}],"status":"published","journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"humanities-and-social-sciences-communications","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"palcomms","sideBox":"Learn more about [Humanities \u0026 Social Sciences Communications](http://www.nature.com/palcomms/)","snPcode":"41599","submissionUrl":"https://submission.springernature.com/new-submission/41599/3","title":"Humanities and Social Sciences Communications","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"stoa","reportingPortfolio":"Nature AJ","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":false}}],"origin":"","ownerIdentity":"7dd3f975-9bd7-4745-a26d-88829f1bf2b1","owner":[],"postedDate":"August 13th, 2025","published":true,"recentEditorialEvents":[],"rejectedJournal":[],"revision":"","amendment":"","status":"under-review","subjectAreas":[{"id":52802388,"name":"Humanities/Language and linguistics"},{"id":52802389,"name":"Humanities/Literature"}],"tags":[],"updatedAt":"2025-08-13T05:46:00+00:00","versionOfRecord":[],"versionCreatedAt":"2025-08-13 05:46:00","video":"","vorDoi":"","vorDoiUrl":"","workflowStages":[]},"version":"v1","identity":"rs-6774493","journalConfig":"researchsquare"},"__N_SSP":true},"page":"/article/[identity]/[[...version]]","query":{"redirect":"/article/rs-6774493","identity":"rs-6774493","version":["v1"]},"buildId":"8U1c8b4HqxoKbykW_rLl7","isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[84888],"gssp":true,"scriptLoader":[]}