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Since 2019, the pursuit of vegetarianism on social media has reached an unprecedented height. Chinese netizens began to advocate vegetarianism for the sake of health, environment and ethics. Influenced by social media, 54% of Chinese netizens have started to publish status information about vegetarianism ("Year of Vegetarianism”, 2019). In the prosperous field of vegetarianism research, the main focus and published works are western, and the literature on vegetarianism mainly comes from the recognised western culture (CAO, 2018, p.2). In recent years, the research results on Chinese vegetarianism are limited.

This research will study what kind of views of vegetarianism is dominant on Weibo by analysing the texts from users' posts.

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Thematic analysis is used to classify the meanings that the participant or reader embodies in a text (Gavin, 2008).

Sample: about 25 to 30 articles on Weibo from June 2019  to July 2019.

Searching terms “Su Shi”, ”Su Shi Zhu Yi” or their variants in Chinese.

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60.7% gives a positive representation of veganism or vegetarianism.

28.6% gives a negative representation of veganism or vegetarianism.

10.7 % gives a neutral representation of veganism or vegetarianism.

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The research findings show that the positive views of veganism or vegetarianism are dominant on Weibo.

The most common of these representational themes is ‘Aspirational’, which reflects the growing popularity of vegetarianism in the public, and its benefits to human health.

Negative views are present more than the neutral views, with harmful stereotypes of ‘unhealthy’ and ‘fad’ vegans are still used occasionally.

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Authoritative publications call 2019 the "Year of Vegetarianism”, (2019, February 7), cctv.com. http://news.cctv.com/m/v/index.shtml?videoID=VIDEzPSDiLFQBvkTNRpiOGrC190207

CAO, D. (2018). Chinese Takeaways: Vegetarian Culture in Contemporary China. Cambridge Journal of China Studies, 13 (4), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.42327

Gavin, H. (2008). Thematic analysis. In Gavin, H. Understanding research methods and statistics in psychology (pp. 273-281). London: SAGE Publications Ltd doi: 10.4135/9781446214565

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“Aspirational” is the most prevalent theme found in this analysis, which accounts for 32.1%. This theme describes vegetarianism from a positive perspective, but does not mention its benefits to the environment and animal welfare.

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In view of the large number of netizens using Weibo, my sample size may not be large enough to summarise what opinions are dominant on Weibo in a limited time.

I hope that some institutions can take up the responsibility in the future to study which veganism or vegetarianism views on Weibo have been dominant for a longer period using the thematic analysis.