Social media and e-diplomacy in China: scrutinizing the power of Weibo

Abstract

Public diplomatic communication is transforming due to the boom of social media. There are more than 165 foreign governmental organizations in China that have embarked on the use of Weibo (a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter in China) to engage with Chinese citizens. Journalists and a handful of scholars in China started paying attention to foreign embassies’ use of Weibo; however, there has been no systematic study of the effectiveness and challenges of using Weibo for public diplomatic communication. Importantly, when it comes to incidents like the “Kunming terror attack” in China in March 2014, Chinese Weibo users tend to express severe nationalistic sentiments towards foreign countries’ statements, and those Weibo accounts of foreign embassies became targets. Those nationalistic comments left on foreign embassies’ Weibo pages, mainly criticizing those embassies’ “soft statements,” have caused the difficulties of e-diplomacy and are calling for immediate attention (Wu 2014). This book, based on systematic research of Weibo usage by embassies in China from September 2015 to March 2016, is the first in the academia to explore the challenges that the use of Chinese Weibo (and Chinese social media in general) posed for foreign embassies, and to provoke thoughts about better ways to use these or other tools. It is not intended as an argument against the use of local popular social media for public diplomacy purposes, but to encourage a critical look at its practice and encourage those employing it to better analyze it. This book doesn’t deny that social media provides the right channel to reach youth populations, which is one of the major goals of current public diplomacy efforts. Weibo does give embassies a great channel to listen to and understand China’s young populations’ thoughts, aspirations, information seeking, and other behaviors. But when it comes to using the spaces for interaction, increased engagement, and thus furthering the goals of public diplomacy, the power of Weibo might have been overestimated.