When Chinese Spokesperson First Tweets: Social Media Effects of Public Diplomacy

Public diplomacy refers to “purposive communication with foreign publics”, mostly by governments, “to advance foreign policy objectives or otherwise [supportive] cultivate conditions” (Sevin et al., 2019, p. 4815). Social media have become a key channel for such communication, allowing diplomats to directly communicate with a wider audience. This has been termed digitalization of public diplomacy, or digital diplomacy. Among others, Twitter is one of the most popular platforms of digital diplomacy used by governments across the globe, including the Chinese government.

A number of Chinese embassies and diplomats have created Twitter accounts to actively perform Twitter diplomacy. These diplomatic efforts have been a significant part of China’s recent shift of external communication strategy, namely from low-profile to proactive. Nevertheless, there is insufficient empirical research about the effectiveness of these activities.

To address this issue, this study conducted a longitudinal analysis on Hua Chunying, the first spokesperson of China’s Foreign Ministry who uses Twitter for diplomacy. We collected Hua’s covid-related tweets and comments within 2020 and 2022 through Python. By employing mixed methods (i.e., thematic analysis, machine learning, and social network analysis), this study assessed her communicative effectiveness from four dimensions: agenda formulation, presence expansion, emotional arousal, and interaction. We aim to understand Hua's agendas in digital diplomacy, the online dissemination of her tweets, the sentiments expressed by her audiences, and the interaction between Hua and the public.

Through an analysis of her first two months’ tweets, the results showed that China-US relations was an important element of her agendas. Four main agendas were identified. Most of her tweets were (1) appealing for anti-epidemic scientifically instead of politicizing the epidemic, and (2) appreciating support from the international community. These two themes were strongly related to China-US relations. Moreover, she also posted about (3) China’s willingness to share information and help other countries, as well as (4) China’s confidence in combating the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study also found that Hua was the absolute center of her communication network, but yet to establish strong relationships with the public. Most of her commenters were inactive users. Some users have played a bridging role to connect their own communities with Hua’s network. Moreover, it is worth noting that most of the active users and bridging users were ordinary users rather than opinion leaders. This suggests that Hua’s public diplomacy on Twitter may follow one-step flow communication rather than two-step flow communication.

Despite her efforts on Twitter, Hua’s communicative effectiveness may be limited. The sentimental patterns of her comments remained the same: the numbers of positive and negative comments were approximately equal. Among the agendas, the fourth one (i.e., China has the confidence to combat the pandemic) was the only one that received comments that were generally positive, whereas the first agenda (i.e., anti-epidemic scientifically) received the most negative comments.

Nevertheless, the current analysis is based on two months’ tweets posted by Hua and the comments. We will refine the findings through an analysis of her tweets and comments from the past two years.