There are more than 1.4 billion Chinese people, there are 1.092 billion netizens as of 2023. Weibo (Chinese social media platform similar to X/Twitter) alone has 255 million daily active users and 588 monthly active users, that's about the same as X/Twitter but the latter has users from all around the world. Once we have that scale in mind, we can discuss the prevalence of specific opinions online. I will keep my discussion to Weibo as I use it more often than other platforms.
You can see all kinds of opinions on Weibo as long as they do not contain sensitive words, here's a partial list based on what I've seen:
- countries: pro/anti-(Palestine/Israel/Ukraine/Russia/DPRK/ROK/Japan/Vietnam/Thailand/USA/India)
- stereotypes and nicknames for certain groups of people: Americans/Anglo-Saxons/Caucasians/Jews/"Blacks" in Guangdong/"Blacks" in general/Indians/people from certain provinces/people of certain ethnic minorities/LGBTQ+
- government policies: pro/anti-(masks/covid-19 vaccine/peaceful reunification/One Country, Two Systems/anti-hegemony/two or three child policy/delayed retirement/gaokao)
- ideology: feminism (女权)/faux-feminism (女拳)/male chauvinism (大男子主义、男拳)/Han chauvinism (大汉族主义, 皇汉)/national chauvinism (民族/大国沙文主义)/Mao Zedong Thought/Deng Xiaoping Thought/Xi Jinping Thought
- conspiracy theories: US manned moon landings in the 1960's, 9/11 of 2001, covid-19 origins, flat earth theory
The list goes on and on.
If you see a certain opinion online very often (subjectively), does that mean that many (remember 1.4 billion) people in real life share that same opinion? More importantly, if some people do indeed share a certain opinion, are they going to act accordingly to that opinion, or is it just something they say now but act differently when the situation arises? I wouldn't trust any study about the prevalence of any online opinion unless the sample size is at least in the hundreds of thousands to a few million.
According to patriots today, the online environment for patriots and those who are pro-China and pro-CPC in the early 2000s up until a decade ago was nasty, that tells me that certain "intellectuals" (公知) are very outspoken and anti-China back in the day. Nowadays they keep a lower profile due to the positive change in online environment, but you can still find them around.
Forgot to explain the "wishing genocide on the people of Taiwan or Japanese people": The online opinion of Taiwan is that most people there are in favour of "Taiwan independence", thus the slogan 留岛不留人 (keep the island and not the people, which basically means "genocide") is popular among some people. I personally hope that peaceful reunification rather than non-peaceful reunification happens, I am also against this particular slogan.
As for Japan, keep in mind that China sustained at least 35 million casualties due to Japanese invasion, and the Japanese government remains unapologetic to this day. Japan is seen as a lapdog of the US like the ROK. I will not wish "genocide" upon the Japanese people, but if anyone does not understand the rage and hate some of our fellow countrymen have against the Japanese, I will show no respect to that person.