Wolf Warriors and Their Pups: The PR of China’s Presence on Twitter

• In Event: Political Communications and International Relations in the Digital Era

Abstract

Despite the fact that Twitter is banned in the PR of China, Chinese officials and governmental organizations maintain a considerable number of accounts on that platform. Those accounts often assume a quite assertive stance, a behavior that fits into the “Wolf Warrior” strategy employed by the Chinese government in recent years. It is indeed under this header that most research on official Chinese Twitter accounts has been conducted so far. Such studies (e.g. Huang & Wang 2019, 2020, Brazys et al 2022 or Mattingly & Sundquist 2022) have focused on diplomatic Twitter accounts. This research is the first to try to identify all official Chinese Twitter accounts using a snowball-sampling approach and then study not just their behavior and interaction over the span of several years, but also their interaction with their surrounding social network, in particular identifying and examining their friends and followers. I find that in addition to the already known accounts of diplomats, Chinese state media, and their journalists, there is also a considerable number of local government accounts, which however mostly stay away from politics. In addition, I identify a considerable number of accounts followed by more ten Chinese governmental Twitter accounts that present as ordinary Chinese and foreigners supportive of the PRC government. Most of those accounts do not show any sign of being inauthentic, but they do have a relatively high chance (20%) of having been deleted one year later. By interacting with such accounts and retweeting them, the Chinese government amplifies those voices.

With regards to the followers of Chinese diplomatic accounts, a considerable number were created in batches on a few days and have other features that strongly indicate that they are not genuine users – generalizing findings by Schliebs et al (2021) for one particular account based in the UK. There is also a batch of accounts that follow only Chinese diplomatic accounts, appear to promote escort services and used the hashtags of locations of anti-lockdown-protests at the end of November 2022, possibly engaging in an attempt to flood such hashtags to dilute the protest message.

Sudden week-on-week jumps in the followership of diplomatic accounts appear coordinated for some clusters of accounts, but not across the board. These attempts at increasing the visibility of the Chinese presence on Twitter are thus likely not the result of a centralized effort, but instead of individual bureaucrats trying to raise their chances of a promotion.

The PRC’s communication strategy on Twitter thus appears built on a complex network of genuine and fake supporters, driven only partially by the Central Propaganda Department. While the latter maintains relatively tight control over the topics covered by the different accounts (as indicated by the joint use of hashtags relevant to Chinese Communist Party at a given time), the individual accounts are able to experiment with different strategies to increase visibility and different forms of interaction with the audience.

Author

• Franziska Barbara Keller, University of Bern