Wolf Warrior Strategy and China’s Covid-19 Digital Public Diplomacy
Résumé
This study aims to question China’s “Warrior-wolf” digital public diplomacy practices during the Covid-19 pandemic. For the Chinese Vice-Minister of MFA, “wolf-warrior public diplomacy” is an essential way to construct and enhance its global discourse power, providing opportunities for Beijing to promote a new international order in the context of international political uncertainty (Le 2020). Thus, on the one hand, this project attempts to use the cognitive analysis method of public policy to understand how the “warrior-wolf” identity influences the definition, conceptualization, and institutionalization of public diplomacy with Chinese characteristics. On the other hand, through a one-year observation of Chinese diplomates’ online communication regarding the Covid-19 pandemic on Twitter toward the U.S., the U.K., France, and Russia (Permanent members of the UN Security Council), this study intends to shed light on different narrative tactics that Beijing mobilized to “telling the stories of China’s fight against the epidemic”.