Western dominance of international communication (MacBride et al., 1980) manifested as a real diplomatic issue for China in the 1990s, after Western television news beamed images of the injured and dead next to rolling military tanks in the streets of Beijing in early June 1989 to the living rooms of audiences around the world. To counteract the negative image created by such reports – which China described as ‘demonisation’ (Li, 1998), and which resulted in punitive diplomatic measures by other countries – China strengthened its external communication in the decade afterwards. Resorting to the latest communication technologies, China launched its first externally targeted satellite television channel in 1992 before building a global satellite television network in the 2000s. It built foreign-language news websites from 1997 and accomplished the China National Network in 2001 (Zhang, 2009). As social media become an increasingly important source of news, China’s news media have lately embraced international social media platforms for external communication – although, ironically, many of these platforms are blocked from access by ordinary users in China. This paper focuses on this little-studied recent initiative. It examines the publishing activities of three of China’s state news media organisations on Twitter, analyses their news agenda, and observes user responses received by their accounts and tweets. To evaluate the effectiveness of China in counteracting Western dominance of international communication, it studies communication around the South China Sea dispute via the #southchinasea hashtag on Twitter.

If reactive defence explains China’s expansion of external communication in the 1990s (Zhang, 2009), its goals have since turned proactive. In the 2000s, China’s goal was to develop its cultural soft power to match its economic strength (People.com.cn, 2008; Hu, 2011). Under Xi Jinping’s administration, the focus has been to propagate ‘China’s voice’, which more recently has become ‘making China’s viewpoint the world’s vocabulary and international consensus’ (in Xinhuanet.com, 2016). Over the years, the target audience of China’s external communication has also shifted from overseas Chinese to the mainstream international audience, particularly the elite (Zhang, 2009). These changing aspirations have been supported by massive investments, notably in the 2001 ‘go-global’ electronic media project (Hu, Ji, & Gong, 2017), and the 2009 ‘going-out’ media policy (Hu & Ji, 2012). Strategies have included building communication infrastructure (Thussu, de Burgh, & Shi, 2017), gaining access to markets (Zhang, 2009; Sun, 2014; Birtles, 2017) and captivating the audience (He, 2010; Xinhuanet.com, 2016). In the expansion, centralised coordination has remained the main model of operation, as exemplified by the plan announced in March 2018 to create a flagship broadcaster through the merger of China’s three national broadcasters (China National Radio, China Radio International, and China Central Television) (CGTN America, 2018). News communication forms a key part of the expansion, and central-level state news media have played the pioneer role (Forbes, 2009), although more recently lower-level news media have joined the game (Tatlow, 2016; Qiu, 2017).

China’s expansion into global communication has not achieved resounding success. Few dispute that its news outlets lack credibility (Thussu, de Burgh, & Shi, 2017) and have small audiences (Zhang, 2010). Many consider China as possessing little cultural influence (Shambaugh, 2013; Nye, 2015), but some argue that it wields different and contradictory cultural resources and that in the long term its cultural influence will increase substantially (Pan, 2006; Sparks, 2016). China’s international image is improving only slowly, if at all (Globescan, 2017; Norman, 2018).

Recent developments in communication technologies have alerted the Chinese leadership to their ideological implications in a Western-dominated global communication order (Hu, 2008; Li, 2011). Critical public opinion formed on the domestic microblogging platform, Weibo (Nip & Fu, 2016) – which, for a time, struck fear into Chinese officials (People.com.cn, 2013) – convinced the Chinese authorities of the need to launch an ideological offensive against ‘Western anti-China forces … that target the thought and cultural spheres of the Chinese Communist Party’ to protect the ‘ideological security’ of the country (China Military, 2013). The strategy is to occupy the new spaces of public opinion formation and boost China’s power of global discourse to build a new order of international communication (Li, 2013).

China’s venturing into international public social media platforms is logical given the increased importance of social media as sources of news for consumers, as found in a 36-country study (Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, Levy, & Nielsen, 2017). This importance is rising in the US and UK (Newman et al., 2017): two-thirds of Americans report that they get some of their news from social media (Shearer & Gottfried, 2017). Since 2013, at least half of Twitter users in the US have used the platform as a news source. In late 2017 the figure was 74 per cent, up 15 per cent from early 2016, probably because of the Twitter activities of the US President Donald Trump (Newman et al., 2017). Internationally, Twitter is used as a news source by a higher percentage of its users than other social media, although Facebook and some apps designed for private communication are more popular news sources (Newman et al., 2017). The private communication on Facebook and privately -oriented apps, however, are not accessible to researchers for privacy reasons. This study, therefore, concentrates on the public communication on Twitter.

News media are the most retweeted (Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013) and most influential users on Twitter (Lee et al., 2010), but the influence of China’s news media on Twitter is rarely studied. There is one notable exception: Guo, Mays & Wang (2017) found that in 2011–14 most tweets about the South China Sea focused on China in a negative way, and that US newspapers were more influential than China’s newspapers in forecasting discussion of bilateral relationships between nations involved in the South China Sea dispute on Twitter.

Influence on Twitter is usually evaluated by the structural position of the user in the social network (common measures are page-rank and number of followers), or the extent of information adoption by others of the user’s messages (common measures being the number of retweets, comments, and mentions) (Lee et al., 2010), but these two types of measures do not necessarily correlate (Cha, Haddadi, Benevenuto and Gummadi, 2010; Lee et al., 2010). This study relies on the number of followers of the account, the Like and retweet counts of the tweets from Twitter’s user metrics, and the number of replies to the tweets that we collected as indicators of influence.

The design and interpretation of the study are sensitised by the knowledge that user metrics of social media are subject to manipulation. Cases of fake follower numbers on Twitter, including of Xinhua News, have been reported (Confessore, Dance, Harris, & Hansen, 2018; Grundy, 2015). Social bots have been found to manufacture tweets and tamper with human interaction on Twitter to amplify visibility of certain information or misinformation (Shao, Ciampaglia, Varol, Flammini, & Menczer, 2017). Seemingly manipulated accounts have been observed to conduct propaganda on Twitter by China and against China (Bolsover, 2017). In China, the requirement for real name registration of social media accounts means that similar manipulation of information often takes the form of hidden paid posters, known as the ‘Internet water army’ (shui jun, 水军) in the commercial context (Chen, Wu, Srinivasan, & Zhang, 2013), and the ‘fifty-cent army’ (wu mao dang, 五毛党) in the service of the government (Han, 2015; King, Pan, & Roberts, 2017).

Two Twitter datasets were collected – one of China’s state media accounts and one of the #southchinasea hashtag. The first dataset contains data from the following three public accounts on Twitter:

These three media are among the most important central-level media supported by the Chinese state to expand globally. Their Twitter accounts gather far larger followings than any other account listed above. On 13 April 2018, the Twitter user interface showed that @CGTNOfficial had 7.64 million followers, @PDChina 4.66 million, and @XHNews 12 million. The largest following of the other accounts of China’s news media was for China Radio International (CRI) (@ChinaPlusNews), with 597,000 followers, and China.org.cn (@chinaorgcn), with 531,000 followers. The three selected accounts are also associated with a number of regionally focused verified (e.g. @cgtnamerica, @XHJapanese) and unverified (e.g. @xinhua_hindi) accounts, and accounts that focus on individual programmes (e.g. @CGTNDCproducers) with smaller followings and which were not included in this analysis. Hence the three media outlets, which also hold accounts on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, are considered the most effective of China’s media on Twitter.

The South China Sea dispute was considered an appropriate case study because China’s expansive and competing territorial claims against neighbouring countries in Asia, which also threaten the navigational routes of several other countries, necessitates competition for supportive international public opinion.

The #southchinasea hashtag was selected as the field site of the dispute as it was far more popular than another hashtag focused on the issue, #south_china_sea, which was the only other similar hashtag identified through frequency analysis of hashtags of our #southchinasea dataset. Using TrISMA, a tool developed in Australia to track, store and process the entirety of public social media data posted by Australians (Bruns et al., 2016), we found that the number of Australian tweets containing the #south_china_sea hashtag was a tiny fraction of those containing #southchinasea. We assume a similar distribution would apply to the global dataset. The hashtag search was preferred to keyword-combination searches as it collects tweets tagged by their authors as focused on the South China Sea, making them more relevant for our purpose.

We started by using the DMI-TCAT (Digital Methods Initiative Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset), an open-source tool developed by the University of Amsterdam1 (which sources data from the Twitter streaming API in real time) to collect data. We supplemented the tweets and replies collected by capturing Like and retweet data directly from Twitter’s REST API for China’s media dataset on 25 October 2017, and for the #southchinasea dataset on 27 November 2017.

The period studied of China’s state media dataset was 1 October 2016 to 24 October 2017. The coverage of an entire year should give a clear overview of the activities of state media.

The period studied in the #southchinasea dataset was 13 December 2016 to 23 May 2017. The selection took into consideration the development of events in the South China Sea as reflected in Google Trends since 1 January 2009. Interest in ‘south china sea’ peaked on 12 July 2016, when a tribunal of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in the Hague ruled against China’s claim to historical territorial rights within the ‘nine-dash line’ (its self-declared territorial boundary) in the South China Sea. After that public interest in the issue declined until around 15 December 2016, when China seized a US drone. This also brought to light that China was installing weapons in the area, and had just started daily passenger flights to one of the disputed islands. Interest continued to decline until a very small peak around 19 May 2017, when China threatened to go to war with the Philippines over the dispute and a draft framework was then finalised among ASEAN countries about conduct in the South China Sea. We are satisfied that the selected period involves concerns at international and regional levels affecting multiple countries.

Twitter’s streaming API enforces restrictions on data scraping to a maximum of 1 per cent of the entire Twitter data stream at the moment of collection. This could potentially affect the #southchinasea dataset. We evaluated the comprehensiveness of the collected #southchinasea dataset by comparing the Australian messages collected in the dataset to those collected by TrISMA, and found that 97 per cent of the Australian #southchinasea messages in TrISMA were included in our #southchinasea dataset. This gives us confidence that our #southchinasea dataset captures the overwhelming majority of relevant messages. Restrictions applied by the Twitter REST API are not expected to affect our collection of the China media dataset.

Among the data collected using the above methods, English-language messages were counted and further analysed. While all the tweets collected from the China state media accounts were in English, 34 per cent of replies made to their tweets that contained non-English (ASCII) symbols (including 6 per cent of English-language tweets containing the truncation symbol “…”) were discarded. Ten per cent of collected messages in the #southchinasea dataset containing non-English symbols were discarded.

To counteract Western domination of global communication, China has adopted a proactive strategy in its external communication as it grows in economic strength, and now aspires to set its own frame of global discourse. The activities of China’s state media on Twitter constitute a step towards this aspiration.

Our analysis of big data collected from the Twitter Open API found that the selected public accounts run by Xinhua News, People’s Daily, and CCTV News/CGTN have established a significant presence in the Twittersphere in the six-and-a-half years or so since they started their accounts. Each of them has several million, some more than 10 million following accounts, the overwhelming majority of whose owners must reside outside China given the blocking of Twitter access in China. The substantial percentage of non-English replies collected in the state media dataset suggests that China’s state media reach an international audience in the true sense of the term, not restricted to English-language users, while some of the following accounts might be within China as the collected non-English replies contain tweets written in Chinese characters. The state media accounts tweet actively about China and to a lesser extent, the rest of the world. Some of their tweets are highly successful in attracting Likes and retweets, and on average receive a handful of replies.

Just over 60 per cent of tweets published by China’s state media focus on China, and their Twitter news agenda resembles those they publish on other platforms. It still smacks of propaganda. The Chinese president – particularly when he makes official visits – is the most prominent theme in their tweets. The Chinese premier comes second on the news agenda, while metropolises such as Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong are the sources of frequent stories. Achievements and developments of China are also high on their news agenda. These serious items generally do not appeal to their followers as much as soft items, which may be less prominent in the news agenda but whose popularity makes them more prominent to Twitter users. The sentiment of replies to the panda theme is more positive than to the Belt and Road Initiative or President Xi Jinping’s visits. This supports the view that China’s soft power varies across different spheres (Sparks, 2016), and suggests that a more nuanced analysis of China’s strategy of external communication would be fruitful.

China’s state media make a concerted effort to compete as global news services by devoting just under 40 per cent of their tweets to news not directly related to China. These tweets often focus on breaking news, involving disasters and accidents, or presidents of other countries. These themes are similar to those covered by Western media, and suggest that China’s state media follow Western news values in their reporting of non-China-related events.

Irrespective of the interactive capabilities available on Twitter, China’s state media primarily use the platform as a one-way propagation medium, and rarely engage in conversation with those who reply to their tweets. While the same lack of reader engagement is also observed in the accounts of state media on China’s domestic social platform, Weibo, international social media present new challenges that may further deter their use of the interactive features. Unlike on domestic social media, where ‘undesirable’ messages could be censored, China’s state media are not able to delete critical replies or petition tweets on Twitter that are posted as replies to their tweets. Actively responding to replies may encourage petition or promotional uses of the reply feature on Twitter, and threatens to derail the mission of building good images of China as a big nation (Xinhuanet.com 2016).

Their high volume of tweeting about China makes China’s state media important shapers of the news agenda about the country on Twitter. This is clearly seen in the case study of the #southchinasea hashtag, where the three Chinese state media accounts, individually, are among the most active and influential tweeters. They rank among the top fifteen accounts with the highest average Likes and average retweets per tweet, with Xinhua News publishing the most liked and most retweeted tweet of the hashtag in the studied period. Retweets of their original tweets have helped to make the themes related to China in #southchinasea less emotive.

Compared with the two most active tweeters of the hashtag, the tweets of China’s state media received more unique replies. Yet the active response to their tweets cannot be equated to Twitter users’ support for their messages. Sentiment analysis of the replies received by the tweets of China’s state media identifies much negativity, especially in response to tweets not related to China in content (Table 2). It is likely that among the large number of followers of China’s state media accounts are some who follow to monitor their tweets with the purpose of disputing their content.

Sources from the US and China make the majority of the most influential 20 accounts in #southchinasea. While this reflects dominance of US sources on the American platform, the prominence of China’s state media may not be found among issues in which China has lesser interest. Even in #southchinasea, China’s sources are beaten by US sources among the top twenty, both in terms of the number of accounts (four versus seven news-related and official accounts from the US alone) and the total number of tweets published. The US think tank, AsiaMIT, published more unique original tweets on its own than the combined tally of unique original tweets published by China’s four accounts, The other US accounts among the top twenty in #southchinasea tweeted far less frequently using the hashtag than China’s state media, but when they did, they provoked more retweets on average than the latter. This means that China’s state media have yet to upset the dominance of US sources on Twitter, as exemplified in our study of #southchinasea.

Processing the data, it emerges that systematic attempts exist in #southchinasea to skew the news agenda by repeating tweets, an activity often performed by automated bot accounts. While the manufactured tweets are fake in the sense that they do not originate from the claimed account holders, they are real in terms of their existence in the Twittersphere as published content about the South China Sea. While manufactured tweets distort user metrics, their impact on legitimate Twitter users is uncertain. Twitter users tend to get their news through scrolling their timelines or browsing tweets of those they follow more than through searches (Rosenstiel et al., 2015). The repeated 2,400 tweets discussed above, in fact, received no Likes or retweets, meaning that even if the manufactured accounts managed to draw some legitimate followers, their tweets did not engage them. Our reading of these manufactured messages suggests that some force unfriendly to both the US and China may be behind the artificial amplification of a certain agenda in #southchinasea.

The additional file for this article can be found as follows: