Leader of the Pack? Changes in Twitter ‘Wolf Warrior Diplomacy’

• In Event: Digital Authoritarianism in the Communist and Post-Communist World

Abstract

This paper aims to measure changes in the content of China’s Twitter public diplomacy after Xi Jinping seemed to call for an adjusted strategy in a May 2021 collective study session of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo. Combining hand-coding and quantitative text analysis, we develop a measure of “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy” rhetoric and apply this measure to over 200,000 tweets from nearly 200 institutional and diplomatic Twitter accounts. We employ a difference-in-difference research design to evaluate if Xi’s statement led to a noticeable change in the tweets of OECD-based and non-OECD-based diplomats after the announcement. In the following four months PRC diplomats in the OECD moderated their tweets in comparison to non-OECD diplomats. These findings have relevance for scholars of Chinese foreign policy, nationalism, and public diplomacy. The paper shows how states' digital authoritarianism is not restricted to the domestic sphere but rather transcends borders. However, in doing so the state's digital authoritarianism cannot rely as much on traditional censorship as its domestic counterpart and must respond to changing circumstances using other methods.

Authors

• Samuel Brazys, University College Dublin

• Alexander Dukalskis, University College Dublin

• Stefan Müller, University College Dublin