Tweets from Chinese diplomats abroad, including Chinese Ambassador to the US Cui Tiankai (崔天凱), have opened a fresh front in Beijing’s increasingly assertive approach to diplomacy and propaganda, and might be a sign of things to come.
Cui sent his first tweets just last week from his newly opened Twitter account, including one about Taiwan, which China claims as its own, garnering thousands of comments.
“Taiwan is part of China. No attempts to split China will ever succeed. Those who play with fire will only get themselves burned. Period,” Cui tweeted, after China threatened sanctions on US firms selling weapons to Taiwan.
Over last weekend, a series of tweets defending China’s policies in Xinjiang by diplomat Zhao Lijian (趙立堅), deputy chief of mission at China’s embassy in Pakistan, lambasted the US for its own human rights problems and what he described as hypocrisy.
The spate of 240-character missives, a regular channel of communication with US President Donald Trump in his criticism of China, fit a newer, more aggressive type of diplomacy that Beijing is deploying globally, analysts have said.
University of Leeds media and communications lecturer Yuan Zeng (曾苑) said that the diplomat tweets were part of a clear shift in China’s strategy.
“For individual officials to get so openly expressive and assertive, this is really something new,” she said.
Twitter is blocked in China and the diplomats’ messages were in English and aimed at a foreign audience.
Chinese media, including the Chinese Communist Party’s leading propaganda organs — the People’s Daily and Xinhua news agency — have also targeted readers outside China’s so-called “Great Firewall.”
Zhao’s tweets were responding to a letter that 22 countries signed at the UN Human Rights Council last week calling on China to halt detentions in Xinjiang.
He criticized the US for its poor treatment of Muslims in places like Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, where al-Qaeda fighters are held.
He also tweeted a link to a Washington Post story about racial segregation in the capital and then proceeded to write a string of tweets about US gun violence, hate crimes and violence against women.
“If you’re in Washington, DC, you know the white never go to the SW area, because it’s an area for the black & Latin. There’s a saying ‘black in & white out,’ which means that as long as a black family enters, white people will quit, & price of the apartment will fall sharply,” he tweeted in English.
He then corrected himself, saying it was the southeast area.
The tweets put China’s diplomatic aggressiveness on full display and reach a larger audience than more conventional media might, but they might also come with a cost, Zeng said.
“I have doubts on how effective it could be to create a better international environment for China either to grow or to lead, as the government has been saying, to peacefully engage with the world,” she added.
China and the US have long sparred over human rights, and in the past few years China has produced its own annual rights report on the situation in the US, focusing on areas including racism and gun crime.
Cui’s Taiwan tweet received more than 2,000 comments, most of which were negative and many of which offered support for Taiwan, potentially highlighting a risk of expanding the propaganda battlefield.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying (華春瑩) encouraged officials to “clearly express China’s position and attitude,” to join foreign social media platforms and look for ways to cooperate in a deeper way with media.
“We are closer than ever to the center of the world stage,” she wrote last week in the Study Times, a publication of the Central Party School which trains Chinese officials. “But we do not have a full grasp of the microphone.”
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