Twitter, Public Diplomacy and Social Power in Soft-balancing China–France Relations

This article is part of the Special Section on China’s Twitter diplomacy. Arguing that the concepts of hard power and soft power may no longer reflect the ever-intricate state of global politics in the twenty-first century, it intersects two distinct concepts in international relations, Peter van Ham’s social power and Robert Pape’s and T.V. Paul’s soft balancing theory, to examine China’s public diplomacy and its outcomes in the COVID-19 era (2019–2023). It is a case study of the communication strategies of the Chinese embassy in Paris, whose ambassador, Lu Shaye, proudly presents himself as a wolf warrior diplomat. To untangle China’s social power and soft-balancing mechanisms in Sino-French relations, this article uses quantitative and qualitative mix-methods, applied to three distinct datasets: N = 9,162 tweets from three Chinese diplomatic accounts in France; interviews and reports in the French broadcast and printed media; and foreign policy documents and statements. It shows that China’s social power consists of mainly place branding, while some of its communication attempts to frame certain issues and set the agenda in China–France relations and global affairs, by undermining, frustrating and delegitimizing, that is soft-balancing, the French and the West at large.