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Celebrities as Diplomats on Social Media: A Case Study of Hu Xijin’s Twitter

Project Leader: Xiang Tu

This project takes Hu Xijin as a case study and explores the role of celebrities as diplomats on social media in public diplomacy, and intends to answer the following questions: What is the narrative Hu has adopted during international crises on Twitter? To be more specific, what’s his selection of words and tones, his angle of narrating, and the topics he has concentrated on? What do these constructions mean for the public sphere discussion of the issues, and potentially for china’s image? In this case, what is the Chinese image that Hu has constructed with his tweets? And why did his narrative generate negativity from the foreign public? To answer the above research questions, this research selects tweets concerning the pandemic posted by Hu Xijin throughout the year (from March the 11th, 2020, the time when WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic and the pandemic officially became an international issue, to March the 11th, 2021, the time the research is conducted) and analyzes the content of the tweets to discover his ways of narrating, including the words and tones he has applied and the topic distribution of his tweets.