We’re writing something for the Chinese Internet Research Conference and were looking for the first post on Sina Weibo to refer to a particular recent and gruesome incident, the killing of Qian Yunhui (钱云会). 53 year-old Qian was the elected head of Zhaiqiao village outside Yueqing City, near the major port of Wenzhou in Zhejiang, one of China’s rich coastal provinces. His horrible death by being crushed under a construction truck made rounds on the Chinese Internet, but went a little under the radar (for me, at least) because it occurred on Christmas Day. The WSJ talked about it, and it’s reported freely enough on various online domestic media, including the Southern Weekend, Xinhua (video) and Global Times.
Now to do what we are interested in, namely find the first post on Sina Weibo, and see how it went viral from there, we could not use Sina Weibo’s web-based search, because you can’t search by date and old results are naturally pushed to the very bottom (like on Twitter search), or Google, because Sina Weibo requires that you log in with your account in order to see anything beyond the first page. Basically, we had to use the Sina Weibo API to do what we wanted to accomplish.
The API has a statuses search function, which lets users (generally through an app that plugs into Sina Weibo) search on the microblogging network based on criteria such as province, city, with a start and end time (converted in UNIX time).
You must first sign up your Sina Weibo account on the developer network at open.t.sina.com.cn, and then create a dummy app. This will get you your APPKEY. My end time is set to December 28th at 00:00:00, and I put the count to its maximum of 200 search results. The following search URL looks like this:
http://api.t.sina.com.cn/statuses/search.json?source=APPKEY&q=钱云会&endtime=1293408000&count=200
I won’t reveal our APPKEY, so as a result this url will not actually work. But it basically will give you this file (JSON format). If you are a programmer like I am, you may try to read the file by eye. Otherwise, an online JSON parser might be very helpful.
From there, I now have the earliest posts containing the term “钱云会” (Qian Yun Hui) and make the assumption that nothing was deleted/censored by hand. It’s not an issue affecting the central govt, so my common sense thinks it’s not worth the time of censors to delete posts (but the images are really shocking). I will store the status on our database using the scripts posted on our JMSC HKU’s social media project GitHub, and then perform various analyses, like tracing the reposts.
Incidentally, after playing with the UNIX endtime in the search URL, we find that the earliest post with the term was at 11:37:00 on December 26th, which is about a day after the incident occurred (see JSON file).
This post was not reposted at all and came from an everyday girl. She restated that she heard that Qian Yunhui was held down by some men to be crushed under the truck (听说浙江省乐清市蒲歧镇寨桥有个人叫钱云会（前几年告国家干部贪污没成功被关起来，但是他誓不罢休要继续告发他们），就在寨桥路口，几个人把他活生生地按在地上让浙能电厂的工车压死了。).
This is it for now. We’ll keep you posted as things move ahead.
