Disapproval rating, VIX index, COVID-19 cases and Trump’s tweeting against China

ABSTRACT

The primary goal of this paper is to provide empirical evidence for how non-trade factors attribute to the China-US trade war. Trump’s tweets provide us with a unique perspective. After analysing 31,166 Trump’s tweets, we have the following findings: (1) It’s non-trade factors rather than trade-related factors that can significantly predict whether Trump posts negative tweets involving China’s economic and trade issues. For every 1$\mathrm{\%}$ increase in Trump’s disapproval rating and VIX index, the likelihood of Trump posting negative tweets involving China’s economic and trade issues increases by 0.61$\mathrm{\%}$ and 0.16$\mathrm{\%}$ respectively. (2) Tweeting against China sometimes becomes a tool to divert domestic criticism. After the COVID-19 outbreak, the higher growth rate of cumulative COVID-19 confirmed cases, the higher likelihood of Trump tweeting against China. (3) Tweeting against China can win public support and attention. Holding everything else constant, the number of likes and retweets of negative tweets about China are 10.2$\mathrm{\%}$ and 14.6$\mathrm{\%}$ more than those of positive tweets about China.

KEYWORDS:

• Trade war
• Twitter
• Trump
• text analysis
• COVID-19

Acknowledgments

We thank David Daokui Li, Hanhui Guan, Bing Li, Shaobo Long, Emily Finkelstine, Qi Kang, and Chuanrun Yi for providing helpful comments. All errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article

Notes

¹ We divide all tweets into six topics: domestic politics, crisis response, news media, economics and trade, security and diplomacy, and others.