  In the face of the growing global influence and prevalence of Chinese
technology companies, governments worldwide have expressed concern and mistrust
toward these companies. There is a scarcity of research that specifically
examines the widespread public response to this phenomenon on a large scale.
This study aims to fill in the gap in understanding public opinion toward
Chinese technology companies using Reddit data, a popular news-oriented social
media platform. We employ the state-of-the-art transformer model to build a
reliable sentiment classifier. We then use LDA to extract the topics associated
with positive and negative comments. We also conduct content analysis by
studying the changes in the semantic meaning of the companies' names over time.
Our main findings include the following: 1) Notable difference exists in the
proportions of positive comments (8.42%) and negative comments (14.12%); 2)
Positive comments are mostly associated with the companies' consumer products,
such as smartphones, laptops, and wearable electronics. Negative comments have
a more diverse topic distribution (notable topics include criticism toward the
platform, dissatisfaction with the companies' smartphone products, companies'
ties to the Chinese government, data security concerns, 5G construction, and
general political discussions); and 3) Characterization of each technology
company is usually centered around a particular predominant theme related to
the company, while real-world political events may trigger drastic changes in
users' characterization.
