The Initial Digitalization of Chinese Diplomacy (2019–2021): Establishing Global Communication Networks on Twitter

The way in which Chinese diplomats communicate has changed recently, from being mostly reactive and pragmatic to being rhetorically more combative. This has generated strong academic, media, and policy interest. However, less academic attention has been devoted to the employment of social media for China’s new diplomatic communication strategy. By analyzing the recent employment of Twitter by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), this article explores the initial digitalization of China’s public diplomacy from November 2019 to February 2021. Approaching Twitter as both a virtual network structure and an interactive strategic communication process, we collected 61,000 tweets from Chinese diplomats plus 282,000 tweets from Chinese official media and applied data analytics to examine how the MFA augmented its diplomatic digital presence by responding, reposting/retweeting, mentioning, and hashtagging. We also used discourse analysis to investigate how Chinese diplomats selected topics to generate, diffuse, and affect hegemonic discourses. We argue that China’s MFA initially adopted Twitter using a centrally controlled structure of topic, rhetoric, and discourses as well as cohesive dissemination and augmenting strategies. These communication structures created a self-referencing network closely aligned with Chinese official media on Twitter.