Big-data reveals online interest in political sessions

Many may suspect that people living in the Chinese capital are more interested in the ongoing political sessions than those in Guangdong, but are unable to prove it. Now there is a quantitative report to back up that theory, thanks to big-data technology. According to real-time results generated by Baidu Index, an analysis tool developed by China's leading search engine Baidu, the number of search queries for "two sessions" from Beijing in the past three days is more than twice that of Guangdong, an economically developed province in the south. Baidu said that its index is based on the massive online data generated by the country's 600-million-plus internet users. Other findings on the "two sessions" queries have shown that 75 percent of web users conducting those searches are male and 79 percent of them are aged between 20 and 40. The system provides a list of "most searched" keywords related to the two sessions, which include "what are the two sessions," "hot issues in the two sessions," and "when do the two sessions open/close." Those questions may seem too simple or obvious for average Chinese, but the public still turns to the search engine for direct answers. In response, China's mainstream media have published cartoons and simplified charts to explain the basics of the two sessions through various social media platforms. Social media has also been helpful in analyzing two sessions-related Internet behavior. A popular "Two Sessions ABC" chart has been reposted over 10,000 times on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like micro-blogging service used mainly by Chinese speakers. During the past week, Weibo has recorded over 1.4 million entries with a "two sessions" tag, which helped it appear on a list of hot topics. Both the Baidu Index and Weibo's hot topic lists are freely accessible to the general public.