Leader of the Pack? Changes in ‘Wolf Warrior Diplomacy’ after a Politburo Collective Study Session

This research report measures changes in China's public diplomacy after a May 2021 collective study session of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo. The session examined the country's global communications strategy and fuelled speculation about what might change in China's external communications, particularly with regard to its “wolf warrior” diplomats. Combining hand-coding and quantitative text analysis, we develop and validate a measure of “wolf warrior diplomacy” rhetoric and apply it to over 200,000 tweets from nearly 200 institutional, media and diplomatic Twitter accounts. Using a difference-in-difference research design, we evaluate if the session led to a noticeable change in the tweets of diplomats based in OECD countries. After the announcement, PRC diplomats in the OECD moderated their tweets in comparison to non-OECD diplomats, but we do not detect a major re-orientation of PRC communication strategies. These findings have relevance for scholars of Chinese foreign policy, nationalism and public diplomacy. 此研究笔记观察中国公共外交的变化，特别在二零二一年五月中共中央政治局集体学习会议后。该会议探讨中国的国际传媒策略和加强舆论话语权，尤其关于「战狼」外交。我们结合手工编码及量化文本分析，开拓并证实一个估量战狼外交修辞的方法，将之应用于超过二十万条推特，这些推特分别取自于将近二百个制度性、传播性及外交性质的推特用户。我们主要采用差异中的差异法研究设计，来评估此集体学习到底有否引起经济合作与发展组织（OECD）国家的外交推特有明显变化。我们发现，中华人民共和国在 OECD 国家的外交推特相对柔化，非 OECD 国家的外交推特却非然，可是我们没有发现中华人民共和国的传播策略有重大的改航。以上结果与中国外交政策，民族主义以及公共外交研究相关。