China’s Twitter Diplomacy in Germany: Practices, Reactions, and Discrepancies

ABSTRACT

China’s digital public diplomacy on social media and the ways in which Chinese diplomats communicate have received international attention and generated academic interest. As the first study to conduct country-specific investigation on how Chinese diplomats in Germany practice digital public diplomacy on Twitter, this article examines their communication strategies based on Twitter data collected from verified accounts of Chinese diplomats in Germany during the part of the pandemic from January 2020 to February 2021. The study also identifies discrepancies between the actual practices of China’s Twitter diplomacy in Germany and media perception of China’s Twitter diplomacy represented by relevant news articles from two German mainstream newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2020. The discrepancies, the author claims, can be attributed to the process of othering China, i.e. framing China as the other, that eventually compromises the effectiveness of China’s communication strategies. Seeing China’s Twitter diplomacy as network-centric public diplomacy with Chinese characteristics, this article depicts the ways in which the case of Germany contributes to the understanding of the global communication network of China’s public diplomacy on Twitter by showing its country-specific communication strategies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

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⁴² Thunø and Nielbo in this Special Section.

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⁴⁶ Chinesische Botschaft in Deutschland, ‘China hält am multilateralen Handelssystem mit der.

@WTO als Herzstück fest und wird auch in Zukunft Hände reichen statt loslassen, Mauern einreißen statt neue errichten’.(Twitter, 4 Mar 2020)

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@Handelsblatt ein Gastkommentar vom Botschafter Wu Ken’.(Twitter, 26 Mar 2020)

<https://twitter.com/search?q=Heute%20erscheint%20im%20%40Handelsblatt%20ein%20Gastkommentar%20vom%20Botschafter%20Wu%20Ken.%20Die%20Kernaussage%20lautet&src=typed_query > accessed 30 Apr, 2022; Chinesische Botschaft in Deutschland, ‘Eine wichtige Lehre aus dem Pandemieausbruch ist, dass die Welt mehr Kooperation braucht denn je’. (Twitter, 2 Apr 2020) <https://twitter.com/ChinaEmbGermany/status/1245287528451760128 > accessed 30 Apr, 2022.

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Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Aarhus Universitet [AUFF-E-2020-9-1].