Domestic Audience?: How Were the Chinese Government’s Tweets Reposted Domestically?

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics of Post-Communist Countries & Politics and History
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Politics of Post-Communist Countries

Abstract

Students of international relations have long argued that the outbreak of international conflicts is sometimes related to concerns at home. In recent years, Chinese foreign ministry officials have been using wolf-warrior diplomatic jargon on Twitter. Many observers believe that this aggressive nationalist language is primarily intended for the Chinese domestic market in order to increase support for the regime. The Chinese people are led to believe that Chinese officials are actively defending their nation abroad. This article agrees with this observation, but we argue that there is a question left unanswered. Twitter is blocked in China; therefore, most Chinese people cannot view the actions of government officials there without a VPN. If domestic people are unable to read Twitter discourses directly, the purpose of rallying support for the dictatorship is lost. The Chinese media must repost these tweets domestically in order for the Chinese people to see them.
In order to answer this question, this article examines all of the tweets published by representatives of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and then checks one by one whether these comments have been reposted by Chinese domestic media. To understand the logic for reposting, we examine which kinds of tweets were reposted by Chinese domestic media and which ones weren’t. Specifically, we collect all the tweets from the account of Foreign Affairs Ministry spokespersons, including the Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson’s Office (@MFA_China), Hua Chunying (@SpokespersonCHN), and Zhao Lijian (@zlj517). This study gathers a total of 7954 original English tweets and responses after eliminating non-English tweets and retweets. Surprisingly, from February 14, 2020 to April 30, 2022, only 104 of these tweets were reposted to Chinese state media, of which 80 were reposted to central state media, and 24 went to local official media.
We use topic models to identify which topics were and were not reposted domestically. Our K-means clustering finds that Chinese officials’ tweets involved three topics: promoting the achievement of China’s current domestic development, attacking the US or specific US officials, and advertising China’s current foreign policy. Comparing whether these tweets have been reposted by domestic media, we find that tweets critical of the US have the highest rate of reposting, followed by tweets highlighting China’s recent domestic development, while tweets discussing China’s foreign policy have the lowest rate of reposting. Such findings show that the domestic Chinese media are most likely to repost the wolf warrior diplomacy remarks, demonstrating that the Chinese government uses such tweets for the domestic audience in order to bolster the support for the regime. On the other hand, as evidenced by the promotion of China’s present domestic development ranking second, the Chinese government wants its citizens to be aware that efforts are being made to promote China globally. The least-reposted foreign policy tweets reveal that foreign nations make up their primary audience, indicating that the Chinese government continues to utilize Twitter to promote its foreign policy and that the messages’ primary audience is external.

Author

• Chelsea C. Chou, National Taiwan University