The art of cultural diplomacy: Analyzing Chinese national identity in global China’s promotional videos

In today’s globalized media landscape, the portrayal of national identities through promotional videos has become a crucial tool for cultural diplomacy. This research specifically investigates the representation of Chinese identities in videos disseminated via the People’s Daily official account on Bilibili.com, platform popular among Chinese youth globally. Anchored in cultural studies and a prominent video-sharing media analysis, the study examines the role of these videos in shaping international perceptions of China worldwide. The dataset comprises five official promotional videos, including the topics, such as ‘One Belt, One Road-BR’, ‘People’s Republic of China-PRC’, and ‘China’s military, Peace Loving Army-PLA’, translated into 15 languages respectively and targeted at diverse international audiences. Spanning from September 2022 to March 2024 with total 50.33 minutes, these five videos generated as the corpus for a multimodal content analysis. Drawing on a social semiotic analysis approach (e.g., van Leeuwen, 2005), the study frames Chinese identities as evaluative attributes, realized through various semiotic resources and shaped by broader socio-cultural contexts. Findings reveal that these videos employ explicit and implicit evaluative strategies, using verbal and visual choices to create a compelling narrative of rapidly developed Chinese national identity.