High-Engagement Chinese Digital Public Diplomacy on Twitter

Abstract

Digital public diplomacy has become a new method implied by the state to interact with foreign publics in the Internet era, particularly by utilizing social media. One of the most used social media by the state to carry out the interaction is Twitter. This phenomenon has also made communist states like China utilize Twitter in interacting with foreign publics. Therefore, this paper aims to examine how social media posts intended for public diplomacy can reach a high level of engagement and interact with a more significant number of the public abroad. This paper analyzes posts created by six Chines diplomats on social media Twitter by capturing their engagement, sentiment, as well as the subject. The focus of this paper is to discover that most high-engagement posts contain positive sentiment, that which subject becomes popular to rely on each account’s audience, and that some engagement takes the form of negative replies.