The COVID-19 (Coronavirus) epidemic quickly spread across China and many countries around the world in early 2020. Later the epidemic became a pandemic engulfing more than 200 countries in the world. A great many countries have suffered a lot due to this unprecedented global health disaster. They have suffered thousands of deaths and seen social turbulence borne huge economic losses. As for China, it acted swiftly to contain the transmission of the Coronavirus very early on. The city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, was put under lock-down at 10 o’clock on January 23rd, and China’s prime minister Li, Keqiang visited Wuhan on January 27th to guide the prevention of the epidemic. The timely preventive measures have effectively slowed down the transmission of the virus in the country, however, the war against COVID-19 has just started. The epidemic is still in the early stage as the numbers of confirmed cases are still rising and there is no clear sign of inflection point yet. The epidemic not only has seriously affected the normal life of the Chinese people but also led to the emergence of online waves of public opinion in the political sphere. People have widely used various social networking tools such as Weibo to discuss the impact of the COVID-19. It is of great theoretical and practical significance to study the change and developments in Chinese public opinion in this early phase of the epidemic. Therefore, this paper aims to study the characteristics of public opinion in China in the early stages of the outbreak. It selects articles and their comments on Weibo as analysis objects. Then the paper uses Gooseeker software tools for data collection and visualization. Finally, it extracts the developmental changes and the characteristics of network public opinion. It finds that the dominant tone of Chinese public opinion is positive, which expresses people's wish to overcome the epidemic. In the early stage, public opinion in China has gone through a process of emotional fluctuation. People released their emotions reasonably through Weibo comments. Also, the public opinion is under control, and the people in China and the government system didn’t fall into Chaos. However, further attention should be paid to the timely capture and active guidance of public opinion's development trend.