Journal of Public Diplomacy

The Korean Association for Public Diplomacy (한국공공외교학회)
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Crossing the "Great Fire Wall": A Study with Grounded Theory Examining How China Uses Twitter as a New Battlefield for Public Diplomacy

  • Guo, Jing (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
  • Received : 2021.07.22
  • Accepted : 2021.12.14
  • Published : 2021.12.31
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Abstract

In this paper, I applied grounded theory in exploring how Twitter became the battlefield for China's public diplomacy campaign. China's new move to global social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, has been a controversial strategy in public diplomacy. This study analyzes Chinese Foreign Spokesperson Zhao Lijian's Twitter posts and comments. It models China's recent diplomatic move to Twitter as a "war of words" model, with features including "leadership," "polarization," and "aggression," while exerting possible effects as "resistance," "hatred," and "sarcasm" to the global community. Our findings show that by failing to gage public opinion and promote the country's positive image, China's current digital diplomacy strategy reflected by Zhao Lijian's tweets has instead constructed a polarized political public sphere, contradictory to the country's promoted "shared human destiny." The "war of words" model extends our understanding of China's new digital diplomacy move as a hybrid of state propaganda and self-performance. Such a strategy could spread hate speech and accelerate political polarization in cyberspace, despite improvements to China's homogenous network building on Twitter.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

The author would like to express her gratitude to the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the manuscript. The author also thanks Professor Saskia Witteborn and Professor Lokman Sui for their support and insightful comments on this study.

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