A cross-platform comparison of China’s confrontational diplomatic communication

ABSTRACT

In recent years, increasingly confrontational diplomatic communication has become a concerning trend, marked by a rise in aggressive narratives between nations. This study explores the transformation of diplomatic communication in the digital age, focusing on the practices of Chinese wolf-warrior diplomacy on social media. By analysing Zhao’s social media posts on international (Twitter) and domestic (Weibo) platforms, we quantified his confrontational diplomatic narratives using structural topic modelling. We then investigate how social media affordances like micro-targeting and boundary spanning, combined with domestic social, political, and economic contexts, shape these confrontational narratives. Our findings demonstrate that Zhao’s communication style varies between platforms: it is reactive and defensive on Twitter, addressing international audiences, while being proactive and offensive on Weibo, targeting domestic audiences. This strategic use of social media serves not only diplomatic goals but also aligns with China’s nationalist sentiments and domestic policies. Our study reveals that China’s wolf-warrior diplomacy is both a result of and a contributor to the changing dynamics of international relations and domestic politics, offering a novel framework for understanding confrontational diplomacy’s rise globally.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital diplomacy
• diplomatic communication
• social media affordances
• cross-media comparison
• structural topic modelling
• China

Acknowledgment

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Zhifan Luo for her support throughout this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Super hashtag, or super topic, is a Weibo function that allows users to create and join interest-based communities. It allows users to follow, engage, and contribute to a targeted topic in the massive flow of information on social media. Different from a regular hashtag, super-hashtag has a host who can filter out irrelevant content. Super-hashtag is commonly used by the fan group to increase their idols’ public exposure.

2 Machine translation has proven to be a valuable tool for handling multilingual data in social science research (De Vries, Schoonvelde, and Schumacher 2018) and has been widely used for comparative studies in political discourse (Lucas et al. 2015), such as China’s digital diplomacy (i.e., Huang and Wang 2021). To gain additional certainty for the translation results and examine if the sentiments and tonality of the posts are distorted in the translation, we randomly selected 300 Chinese posts and compared their original message with the translation. We found that the translation quality is satisfactory for this study’s purposes, preserving the essential meanings and tonalities of the original posts.

3 This time span starts with the first U.S. tariff sanction on China and ends with the signing of the phase one trade deal with the two powers.

4 China stopped publishing monthly GDP data from the early 2000s.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canada-China Initiatives Fund, York Centre for Asian Research.