# How People Perceive The Dynamic Zero-COVID Policy: A Retrospective Analysis From The Perspective of Appraisal Theory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09324 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09324/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [How We Express Ourselves Freely: Censorship, Self-censorship, and Anti-censorship on a Chinese Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13748/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Can AI automatically analyze public opinion? A LLM agents-based agentic pipeline for timely public opinion analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11401/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Dynamic Zero-COVID Policy in China spanned three years and diverse emotional responses have been observed at different times. In this paper, we retrospectively analyzed public sentiments and perceptions of the policy, especially regarding how they evolved over time, and how they related to people's lived experiences. Through sentiment analysis of 2,358 collected Weibo posts, we identified four representative points, i.e., policy initialization, sharp sentiment change, lowest sentiment score, and policy termination, for an in-depth discourse analysis through the lens of appraisal theory. In the end, we reflected on the evolving public sentiments toward the Dynamic Zero-COVID Policy and proposed implications for effective epidemic prevention and control measures for future crises.