Discourse Around Cohabitation on Chinese Social Media

Abstract-Among the wave of the Second Demographic Transition, cohabitation becomes a new trend in China. There is preliminary knowledge about the attitude towards cohabitation, but not the exact content and context of how people talk about cohabitation. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate the discourse around cohabitation on Chinese social media. Social media has become a new public sphere with abundant discussions available for analysis. This study employs quantitative methods of K-means and network analysis to investigate the content from social media posts related to cohabitation. The result shows that the word cohabitation still carries the meaning of an objective description of the living arrangement rather than necessarily implies intimate relationships. The comparison between cohabitation and marriage is also on the rise among the discourse on social media posts. This study might provide insights into how Chinese people express their views about cohabitation on social media, the modern public sphere.