Description
States have powerful incentives to present positive images of themselves abroad. Doing so helps them in a variety of ways, including enhancing their political security, achieving foreign policy goals, and persuading international allies to help change international norms. In times of crisis these incentives become acute and may see states mobilize resources and networks to change the narrative about a particular event. Covid-19 presents one such crisis point. The pandemic has challenged the ability of countries everywhere to present an image of competence and control. Because the virus first emerged in Wuhan, China late 2019, however, the origins of the virus and the Chinse government’s response have been near the center of the global conversation during the pandemic. Consistent with its practices in the Xi Jinping era, the Chinese government has proactively sought to influence global discourse about its responsibility for the outbreak, the measures it took to control the virus at home, and the assistance and model that it provided to governments abroad looking to cope with Covid-19. Previous research suggests that China’s response will be tailored to different regional and linguistic audiences, eschewing a one-size-fits-all external propaganda approach.
However, the Chinese government cannot control independent media in foreign countries and must try other methods to shape its image, ranging from social media to public diplomacy. A key indicator of how well these efforts work is the presentation of China in the international media. To investigate this question, we turn to quantitative text analysis.
We create a novel multilingual text corpus consisting of over 1,000,000 online newspaper articles mentioning China and Covid-19 between January and December 2020. From these articles we extract all mentions of China and their immediate context of ±30 words. Afterwards, we combine human coding and Latent Semantic Scaling, a semi-supervised scaling method relying on word embeddings, to position each text on a scale from China being described as a culprit to being presented as a saviour. Having merged these scores with the daily number of Covid-19 cases and deaths in each country, we analyse how the assessment of China has changed over time, and test how changes in the number of cases and deaths in a country correlate with the coverage of China.
This research contributes theoretically by illuminating questions in three areas. First, it highlights the limits of China’s external propaganda by illuminating the variation in presentation of China in media outlets it does not control. Second, it links the practices of authoritarian image management directly to outcomes, with Beijing clearly wishing to influence how its covid response was perceived and this article providing the tools to measure how effective that was. Third, the paper accentuates our knowledge of China’s external propaganda output, which is a key advance as scholars debate ongoing changes in the international normative environment.
