Exploring the impact of Chuangguandong Movement on individualism in China based on Sina Weibo information

The voluntary frontier settlement hypothesis holds that frontier movements can promote the formation of individualism in the frontier area. The Chuangguandong Movement is one of China’s voluntary frontier movements that potentially had a positive impact on the formation of high individualism in the northeastern provinces. Previous studies used independent/interdependent measures of self-construal scale, symbolic self-inflation, nepotism tasks, and percentage of most common names, to examine the differences in the independence between Heilongjiang and Shandong residents, which may be related to the Chuangguandong Movement. However, these studies were limited by certain factors such as sample size and objectivity of materials acquisition. In this study, we obtained Sina Weibo big data for period 2010–2020 to overcome the limitation of previous work. Using text feature extraction and keyword word frequency calculation methods based on the individualism/collectivism dictionary, we found that the level of individualism in Northeast China was higher than that in Shandong Province, which was consistent with previous research. Through the discussion of the four representative theoretical frameworks of individualism, the voluntary frontier settlement theory was considered as a potential explanation for the high degree of individualism in Northeast China.