Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Censor and Sensitivity: How China Handles US Embassy’s Public Diplomacy in Chinese Cyber Space

  • Research Article
  • Published:
Journal of Chinese Political Science Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This study examines how Chinese authorities distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable diplomatic discourse within China’s cyberspace. Using computer-assisted text analysis, we analyze a unique dataset comprising US Embassy social media posts on the Chinese platform Weibo between 2010 and 2020. Our findings challenge prevailing assumptions, revealing a degree of tolerance for posts that promote Western social life, human rights, and liberal democracy. Instead, the focus of the Chinese authorities is to curtail the US Embassy’s public engagement in discussing politically sensitive topics, particularly those related to China’s regime security. We contend that a hierarchical security framework can provide a more thorough understanding of China’s information control practices. This study extends previous research on China’s information control beyond the domestic context and provides a fresh examination of China’s domestic politics and foreign policy. It also highlights the potential and limitations of foreign public diplomacy in China’s cyberspace.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. According to a report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in 2018, 64% of censorship cases of foreign embassies’ accounts that occurred between November 2017 and January 2018 consisted of disabling the comment function on unfavorable posts.

  2. The jiebaR package is available at https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/jiebaR/index.html. Jieba’s algorithm is capable of accurate text segmentation. However, the US Embassy uses various Chinese translations when referring to certain political personalities, which may render jieba unable to recognize their names. For example, President Obama is sometimes translated to “欧巴马” by the Weibo account of the US Embassy, while the Chinese official translation is “奥巴马”, a homonym of “欧巴马”. We thus manually added some synonyms, such as “欧巴马”, as customized new words to ensure the automatic segmentation was done correctly.

  3. Stop-words are unnecessary words that should be removed in natural language processing. The Baidu stop-words, which are included in the quanteda package, are a list of meaningless Chinese words (such as “是”, “的”, and “有”) widely used in Chinese text analysis.

  4. DTM is a matrix whose rows are documents and columns are terms. A 26,778 *58,022 DTM means there are 26,778 Weibo posts with 58,778 unique Chinese words in our corpus.

  5. Covariates of textual data refers to any variable associated with a document. For Weibo data, the covariates could be posting time, author, number of replies, etc.

  6. We conducted an analysis to estimate the proportion of each topic and examined the change in topic proportion over a 10-year period, which we presented in Appendix D.

  7. We also applied the STM to our data on a yearly basis as a robustness check, with results detailed in Appendix F. These findings show that topics regarding US-China elite politics are always more likely to be censored than other topics, which is consistent with our main result.

  8. The X2 values of terms in commendable Weibo posts are signed negative for reference. A detailed explanation of keyness analysis can be found in Appendix C.

References

  1. Bamman, David, Brendan O’Connor, Noah Smith. 2012. Censorship and deletion practices in chinese social media. First Monday 17: 3–5.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Beckley, Michael. 2011. China’s century? Why America’s edge will endure. International Security 36(3): 41–78.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Benoit, Kenneth, Kohei Watanabe, Haiyan Wang, Paul Nulty, Adam Obeng, Stefan Müller, and Akitaka Matsuo. 2018. Quanteda: an R package for the quantitative analysis of textual data. Journal of Open-Source Software 3(30): 774.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Cabestan, Jean-Pierre. 2021. China’s foreign and security policy institutions and decision-making under Xi Jinping. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 23(2): 319–336.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Cairns, Christopher, and Allen Carlson. 2016. Real-world islands in a social media sea: nationalism and censorship on Weibo during the 2012 Diaoyu/Senkaku crisis. The China Quarterly 225: 23–49.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Chen, Yuyu, and David Y. Yang. 2019. The impact of media censorship: 1984 or Brave New World? American Economic Review 109(6): 2294–2332.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Creemers, Rogier. 2020. China’s conception of cyber sovereignty: Rhetoric and realization. In Governing cyberspace: Behavior, power, and diplomacy, ed. Dennis Broeders and Bibi van den Berg, 197 – 142. Washington, DC: Rowman & Littlefield.

  8. Dai, Binguo. 2010. State Councillor Dai Bingguo: Adhere to the path of peaceful development. 中国国务委员戴秉国: 坚持走和平发展道路. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, People’s Republic of China December 6. 中华人民共和国外交部. http://www.gov.cn/ldhd/2010-12/06/content_1760381.htm.

  9. Deibert, Ronald, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan L. Zittrain. 2008. Access denied: the practice and policy of global internet filtering. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  10. Doshi, Rush. 2021. The long game: China’s grand strategy to displace american order. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  11. Economy, Elizabeth. 2022. Xi Jinping’s new world order: can China remake the international system? Foreign Affairs 101(1): 52–67.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Erickson, Andrew. 2019. Make China great again: Xi’s truly grand strategy. War on the Rocks October 30. https://warontherocks.com/2019/10/make-china-great-again-xis-truly-grand-strategy/.

  13. Esarey, Ashley, Xiao Qiang. 2008. Political expression in the chinese blogosphere: below the radar. Asian Survey 48(5): 752–772.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Gabrielatos, Costas. 2018. Keyness analysis: Nature, metrics and techniques. In Corpus approaches discourse, eds. Anna Marchi, and Charlotte Taylor. 225–258. London, UK: Routledge Kegan Paul.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  15. Gamso, Jonas. 2021. Is China exporting media censorship? China’s rise, media freedoms, and democracy. European Journal of International Relations 27(3): 858–883.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Ghiselli, Andrea. 2021. Protecting China’s interests overseas: securitization and foreign policy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  17. Gill, Bates. 2020. China’s global influence: Post-COVID prospects for soft power. The Washington Quarterly 43(2): 97–115.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Greitens, Sheena Chestnut. 2017. Rethinking China’s coercive capacity: an examination of PRC domestic security spending, 1992–2012. The China Quarterly 232: 1002–1025.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Greitens, Sheena Chestnut. 2019. Domestic security in China under Xi Jinping. China Leadership Monitor 59: 1–19.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Greitens, Sheena Chestnut. 2022. Xi Jinping’s quest for order: security at home, influence abroad. Foreign Affairs October 3. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/xi-jinping-quest-order.

  21. Greitens, Sheena, Chestnut, and Rory Truex. 2020. Repressive experiences among China scholars: new evidence from survey data. The China Quarterly 242: 349–375.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Grimmer, Justin, and Brandon M. Stewart. 2013. Text as data: the promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts. Political Analysis 21(3): 267–297.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Guriev, Sergei, Daniel Treisman. 2022. Spin dictators: the changing face of tyranny in the 21st century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  24. Halper, Stefan A. 2010. The Beijing consensus: how China’s authoritarian model will dominate the twenty-first century. New York, NY: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Han, Rongbin, Li Shao. 2022. Scaling authoritarian information control: how China adjusts the level of online censorship. Political Research Quarterly 75(4): 1345–1359.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Han, Rongbin. 2023. Debating China beyond the great firewall: Digital Disenchantment and Authoritarian Resilience. Journal of Chinese Political Science 28(3): 85–103.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Hartig, Falk. 2016. How China understands public diplomacy: the importance of national image for national interests. International Studies Review 18(4): 655–680.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Huang, Haifeng. 2015. Propaganda as signaling. Comparative Politics 47(4): 419–444.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Huang, Haifeng. 2018. The pathology of hard propaganda. The Journal of Politics 80(3): 1034–1038.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Huang, Haifeng. 2022. Sound of silence: Championing democracy in an authoritarian society. Working Paper.

  31. Huang, Ying. 2023. and Maximilian Mayer. Power in the age of Datafication: exploring China’s Global Data Power. Journal of Chinese Political Science 28 (1).

  32. Jiang, Tianjiao. 2023. The Shift of China’s Strategic thinking on Cyberwarfare since the 1990s. Journal of Chinese Political Science 28(1): 127–149.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Jie, Dalei. 2020. The emerging ideological security dilemma between China and the US. China International Strategy Review 2: 184–196.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. King, Pan. 2013. and Roberts. How censorship in China, p. 326–343.

  35. King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. 2013. How censorship in China allows government criticism but silences collective expression. American Political Science Review 107(2): 326–343.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. King, Gary, Benjamin Schneer, and Ariel R. White. 2017. How the news media activate public expression and influence national agendas. Science 358(6364): 776–780.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. 2017. How the chinese government fabricates social media posts for strategic distraction, not engaged argument. American Political Science Review 111(3): 484–501.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Kitchen, Philip J., Anastasios Panopoulos. 2010. Online public relations: the adoption process and innovation challenge, a greek example. Public Relations Review 36: 222–229.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Kwon, Kyounghee, Monica Hazel, Chadha, and Feng Wang. 2019. Proximity and networked news public: structural topic modeling of global Twitter conversations about the 2017 Quebec mosque shooting. International Journal of Communication 13: 2652–2675.

    Google Scholar 

  40. Langhorne, Richard. 1992. The regulation of diplomatic practice: the beginnings to the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations, 1961. Review of International Studies 18(1): 3–17.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Liff, Adam P., and G. John Ikenberry. 2014. Racing toward tragedy? China’s rise, military competition in the Asia Pacific, and the security dilemma. International Security 39(2): 52–91.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Lindsay, Jon R. 2014. The impact of China on cybersecurity: fiction and friction. International Security 39(3): 7–47.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Link, Perry. 2002. The anaconda in the chandelier: chinese censorship today. The New York Review of Books 49(6): 1230–1254.

    Google Scholar 

  44. Lorentzen, Peter. 2014. China’s strategic censorship. American Journal of Political Science 58(2): 402–414.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Lu, Yingdan, Jack Schaefer, Kunwoo Park, and Jungseock Joo. 2022. and Jennifer Pan. How information flows from the world to China. The International Journal of Press Politics, Preprints.

  46. Luqiu, Luwei, Rose, and Fan Yang. 2020. Weibo diplomacy: foreign embassies communicating on chinese social media. Government Information Quarterly 37(3): 101477.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  47. Mimno, David, Hanna M. Wallach, Edmund M. Talley, and Miriam Leenders. 2011. and Andrew Mccallum. Optimizing semantic coherence in topic models. In Proceedings of the 2011 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing July, ed. Regina Barzilay and Mark Johnson, 262–272. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.

  48. Moore, Gregory J. 2023. Huawei, cyber-sovereignty and liberal norms: China’s challenge to the west/democracies. Journal of Chinese Political Science 28(1): 151–167.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  49. Munger, Kevin, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua Tucker. 2019. Elites tweet to get feet off the streets: measuring regime social media strategies during protest. Political Science Research and Methods 7(4): 815–834.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  50. Ng, Jason Q. 2013. and Pierre Landry. The political hierarchy of censorship: An analysis of keyword blocking of CCP officials’ names on Sina Weibo before and after the 2012 National Congress (S) election. In Eleventh Chinese Internet Research Conference June.

  51. Osnos, Evan. 2014. Age of ambition: chasing fortune, truth, and faith in the new China. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux.

    Google Scholar 

  52. Oxford Dictionary. 2023. Censorship. Retrieved April 14, 2023, from https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/censorship.

  53. Pu, Xiaoyu. 2022. National security and Chinese foreign policy. In CPC futures: The new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics, ed. Frank N. Pieke and Bert Hofman. Singapore, SG: National University of Singapore Press.

  54. Pu, Xiaoyu, and Chengli Wang. 2018. Rethinking China’s rise: chinese scholars debate strategic overstretch. International Affairs 94(5): 1019–1035.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  55. Repnikova, Maria. 2022. The balance of soft power: the american and chinese quests to win hearts and minds. Foreign Affairs 101(4): 44–51.

    Google Scholar 

  56. Roberts, Margaret E. 2018. Censored: distraction and diversion inside China’s Great Firewall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  57. Roberts, Margaret E. 2020. Resilience to online censorship. Annual Review of Political Science 23: 401–419.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  58. Roberts, Margaret E., M. Brandon, Dustin Stewart, Christopher Lucas Tingley, Jetson Leder-Luis, Shana Kushner Gadarian, and Bethany L. Albertson. 2014. and David G. Rand. Structural topic models for open-ended survey responses. American Journal of Political Science 58 (4): 1064–1082.

  59. Roberts, Margaret E., M. Brandon, Stewart, M. Edoardo, and Airoldi. 2016. A model of text for experimentation in the social sciences. Journal of the American Statistical Association 111(515): 988–1003.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  60. Roberts, Margaret E., M. Brandon, and Stewart, Dustin Tingley. 2019. Stm: an R package for structural topic models. Journal of Statistical Software 91: 1–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  61. Ruan, Lotus, Masashi Crete-Nishihata, Jeffrey Knockel, Ruohan Xiong, and Jakub Dalek. 2021. The intermingling of state and private companies: analyzing censorship of the 19th national Communist Party Congress on WeChat. The China Quarterly 246: 497–526.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  62. Rudd, Kevin. 2022. The avoidable war: the dangers of a catastrophic conflict between the US and XI Jinping’s China. New York, NY: Public Affairs.

    Google Scholar 

  63. Ryan, Fergus. 2018. Weibo diplomacy and censorship in China. Canberra, ACT: Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

    Google Scholar 

  64. Sanovich, Sergey, Denis Stukal, and Joshua Tucker. 2018. Turning the virtual tables: Government strategies for addressing online opposition with an application to Russia. Comparative Politics 50(3): 435–482.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  65. Shambaugh, David. 2015. China’s soft-power push. Foreign Affairs 94(4): 99.

    Google Scholar 

  66. Shao, Li. 2018. The dilemma of criticism: disentangling the determinants of media censorship in China. Journal of East Asian Studies 18(3): 279–297.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  67. Shen, Zhihua, and Yafeng Xia. 2020. A misunderstood friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, and sino-north korean relations, 1949–1976: revised Edition. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  68. Shepardson, David. 2018. US condemns China for “Orwellian nonsense” over airline websites. Reuters May 6. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-airlines-china-exclusive-idUSKBN1I60NL.

  69. Shirk, Susan L. 2011. Changing media, changing China. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  70. Shirk, Susan L. 2022. Overreach: how China derailed its peaceful rise. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  71. Stockman, Daniela, Ting Luo. 2017. Which social media facilitate online public opinion in China? Problems of Post-Communism 64(3–4): 189–202.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  72. Stukal, Denis, Sergey Sanovich, Richard Bonneau, and Joshua Tucker. 2022. Why botter: how pro-government bots fight opposition in Russia. American Political Science Review 116(3): 843–857.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  73. Sun, Taiyi. 2023. Disruptions as opportunities: governing chinese society with interactive authoritarianism. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  74. Taddy, Matthew A. 2012. On estimation and selection for topic models. In Artificial Intelligence and Statistics March, eds. C. Peter, Cheeseman, R. Wayne, and Oldford. 1184–1193. New York, NY: Springer Science & Business Media.

    Google Scholar 

  75. The White House, National Security, and Strategy. 2020. 2022. White House October. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf.

  76. Wallace, Jeremy. 2016. Juking the stats? Authoritarian information problems in China. British Journal of Political Science 46(1): 11–29.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  77. Wallach, Hanna M., Iain Murray, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and David Mimno. 2009. Evaluation methods for topic models. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning June: 1105–1112.

  78. Wang, Chengli, Haifeng Huang. 2021. When fake news becomes real: the consequences of false government denials in an authoritarian country. Comparative Political Studies 54(5): 753–778.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  79. Wang, Chengli, Jiangnan Zhu, and Dong Zhang. 2023. The Paradox of Information Control under authoritarianism: explaining Trust in competing messages in China. Political Studies.

  80. Weiss, Jessica, and Chen, Jeremy Wallace. 2021. Domestic politics, China’s rise, and the future of the liberal international order. International Organization 75(2): 635–664.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  81. Xi, Jinping. 2014. A holistic view of national security. In The Governance of China. Vol 1, ed. Xi Jinping. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

  82. Xinhua. 2020. Xi Focus: Xi stresses building holistic national security architecture. Xinhuanet December 12. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-12/12/c_139584669.htm.

  83. Xinhua. 2021. June 1. Xi Focus: Xi stresses improving China’s international communication capacity. Xinhuanet. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-06/01/c_139983105.htm.

  84. Zhu, Feng. 2017. China’s North Korean liability. Foreign Affairs July 11. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2017-07-11/chinas-north-korean-liability.

  85. Zhu, Jiangnan, and Chengli Wang. 2021. I know what you mean: information compensation in an authoritarian country. The International Journal of Press/Politics 26(3): 587–608.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors express their gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers and editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science; the workshop of Chinese Foreign Policy held at University of Nevada, Reno for their valuable comments on this article. They also thank Ja Ian Chong, Allison Evans, Ian Hartshorn, Todd Hall, Haifeng Huang, Taiyi Sun, Robert Ostergard, Taiyi Sun, and Min Ye, for their helpful suggestions. Authors also thank the excellent research assistance of Guo Li.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nevada, Reno, USA

    Xiaoyu Pu

  2. Department of Government and Public Administration, University of Macau, Faculty of Social Sciences Building, Room 4026, Avenida da Universidade, Taipa, Macau, China

    Chengli Wang

  3. Kobe University, Kobe, Japan

    Yuan Zhou

Authors
  1. Xiaoyu Pu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Chengli Wang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Yuan Zhou
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chengli Wang.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

Manuscript title: “Censor and Sensitivity: How China Handles the US Embassy’s Public Diplomacy in Chinese Cyber Space”. The authors whose names are listed in the “Authors details and affiliation” certify that they have NO affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest (such as honoraria; educational grants; participation in speakers’ bureaus; membership, employment, consultancies, stock ownership, or other equity interest; and expert testimony or patent-licensing arrangements), or non-financial interest (such as personal or professional relationships, affiliations, knowledge or beliefs) in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary Material 1

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Pu, X., Wang, C. & Zhou, Y. Censor and Sensitivity: How China Handles US Embassy’s Public Diplomacy in Chinese Cyber Space. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-023-09868-w

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-023-09868-w

Keywords

Search

Navigation