Wolf Warrior Spreads Superior: The narrative and effectiveness of Chinese public diplomacy behaviours on Twitter

Abstract

Since 2013, when President Xi Jinping pioneered the concept of "telling China's stories well," the number of senior Chinese diplomats and state-affiliated media accounts on Twitter has increased. Different from the vague and evasive diplomatic parlance, some diplomats defend the policies of China in a relatively aggressive way, even sometimes resulting in online disputes with foreign politicians. They are labeled as "wolf-warrior diplomats," a term coined from the record-breaking Chinese nationalist action movie series Wolf Warrior. This paper investigates the effectiveness of China's "wolf warrior diplomacy" on audience engagement on Twitter and significant factors impacting communication effectiveness. Through the utilization of advanced offensive and humor detection algorithms, counterintuitively, this study finds that the wolf-warrior tweets improve Twitter audience engagement, though prior research pointed out that these tweets may bring out adverse feelings in some audiences. Moreover, it also unveils that providing more information and posting humorously on Chinese diplomatic Tweets can enhance their reach and dissemination.