Opinion | Thatcher tributes in Chinese social media focus on her China influences

Tributes online to Lady Margaret Thatcher were more reverential in China than elsewhere, a survey among immediate reactions to her death shows. Many comments revealed more about what netizens thought about China than about the former British prime minister's legacy.

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A fierce House of Commons debate shared on Youku, China's equivalent to YouTube, Photo: SCMP Pictures

Published: 1:22pm, 9 Apr 2013Updated: 4:13am, 29 Aug 2013

Tributes online to Lady Margaret Thatcher were more reverential in China than elsewhere, a survey among immediate reactions to her death shows. Many comments revealed more about what netizens thought about China than about the former British prime minister's legacy.

Keywords that dominated posts on Chinese blogs included positive words such as "historic", "wise" and "great," according to data compiled by the social media consultancy Meltwater. More than 130 comments on her passing appeared on Sina Weibo every minute in the first three hours after news of her death broke.

Many Weibo posts recalled Margaret Thatcher negotiating the handover of Hong Kong and some of her famous one-liners about discipline and perseverance. However, many of the posts focused more on China than on Thatcher.

"You don't have to worry about China, because China will not provide any new ideas to the world - not in the next few decades or century," Hangzhou-based lawyer Yuan Yulai said quoting Thatcher in a reaction that has since been shared 7,500 times.

Kai-fu Lee, the former head of Google China and one of the most influential voices on Weibo, shared the historic picture of her and Chinese counterpart Zhao Ziyang signing the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, the bilateral treaty which secured the July 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China.