Weibo Communication Of US Embassy In China From The Perspective Of Disaster Diplomacy

The COVID-19 epidemic that broke out in early 2020 has soon evolved into a global crisis.Due to its ineffective response,the United States becomes the most severely affected country,with both the number of virus infections and the number of deaths exceeding any other countries in the world.Sino-US relation is thus advancing in a complicated and confusing direction influenced by racism and populism.Overall,the convoluted international situation has brought new opportunities and challenges to public diplomacy.In this context,this paper uses the perspective of disaster diplomacy from public diplomacy to interpret the Weibo communication of the US Embassy in China during the pandemic through semantic network analysis,framing analysis and discourse analysis,and explores how the United States frames the issues by strategic thinking,how it narrates the story to impact audiences’ psychological tendency towards related issues by strategic narrative,and ultimately forms what kind of disaster diplomatic response path to achieve the purpose of improving its national image.The study finds out that,in the macro-level issue management.the Weibo account of the US Embassy in China undergoes three stages,including wait-and-see,participation and integration following the development of COVID-19.The content categories and release forms are different at each stage.To be more specific,during the incubation period of the epidemic,the embassy conveys support for China’s fight against COVID-19 as a bystander,and most of the content released belongs to the category of policy statements.Entering the outbreak period,the embassy participates in the battle with epidemic prevention as well as international assistance as the main and secondary clues,and information sharing becomes the majority in the content released.Turning to the duration period.the two clues and the main content type remain unchanged,whereas the content and perspective alter into a deeper and more diverse way.In terms of the micro-level strategic narrative.the US Embassy in China utilizes a series of rhetorical methods to present the United States and tells a positive story of multiagent fighting the COVID-19.It shapes US as the international police at the beginning of the epidemic,to the national guard and problem solver when the disease breaks out,and finally returns to the indispensable global patriarch.In general,under the relatively tense relationship between two countries,the Weibo communication held by the US Embassy creates a discourse system which is close to Chinese audiences,embodying the characteristics of low politicization in content,multimedia in formation,diversification in subjects and personalization in discourse.Glorified by "humanitarianism",behind it lies the disaster diplomatic logic of"promoting common values in informal and multi-ways".Human beings have entered a global risk society where risks are normalized.Every risk will be a test for each country,and the battle in global filed of public opinion will become increasingly intense.As social media becomes a critical domain for national voices in the digital age,countries that can strategically grasp issues,discourses and technologies on these platforms will invisibly nurture opportunities and gain new opportunities,thereby harvesting more advantages.At the theoretical level,this paper enriches and supplements the theory of disaster diplomacy which is not sufficiently studied in China yet.In addition,it is an opportunity to peek into the strategic communication ideas and principles that Western countries adopt when face the rise of emerging Eastern powers in cyberspace during the rebuilding of international information and communication order.In practice,the result of this study may be conducive to China’s effective response to Western ideological input from online media,and it can also provide useful insights and reference for China’s future disaster diplomacy,such as combining macro-strategic communication and micro-strategic narrative to jointly build a framework for issue management,flexibly selecting disaster diplomacy strategies according to the relationship with the target country and nature of the crisis,and digging out its own unique values and taking them as the core to develop disaster diplomacy,etc.,in order to succeeding in the construction of a global cyberspace community with a shared future under the state of crisis.