Signaling and Censorship: US Embassy in China’s Social Media

• In Event: Chinese Politics Mini-Conference: China And The World

Abstract

In international relations, embassies have important signaling function through conducting traditional and public diplomacy. They engage both the general public and elites of their host nations through various platforms. In conducting public diplomacy, embassies typically enjoy some freedom and privileges protected by international law and diplomatic norm. However, due to political reasons, some host nations might monitor or even censor foreign embassies' social media. In this context, the relationship between signaling and censorship is an important yet under-studied topic in international relations. As the international community is increasingly concerned about China's growing censorship, US embassy's social media platform in China provides an extremely interesting case to test the boundary of Beijing's growing censorship. While previous studies investigate the patterns and motivation of China's censorship in domestic context, there are increasing debates regarding weather China is "exporting" its censorship to the international domain. Using the first large scale and unique original dataset, we examine China's censorship on US embassy's social media outlet. To do this, we have devised an algorithm to locate, download, and analyze the contents of all posts that the U.S. embassy released on Chinese social media Weibo since 2010. We identify some patterns when and why one type of information is more likely to be censored than other types of information. In contrast to conventional impression, our preliminary analysis indicates that information promoting western values (such as human rights and democracy) is not necessarily more likely to be censored. Instead, information related to uniquely sensitive topics are more likely to be censored. To explain the patterns and motivations of China's censorship of foreign embassies, we further investigate the political and security logics of contemporary China, combining insights from both domestic politics and international relations. Our study contributes to the growing research on domestic-international interactions in political science.

Authors

• Xiaoyu Pu, University of Nevada, Reno

• Chengli Wang, University of Macau

• Yuan Zhou, Kobe University