A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Media Diplomacy And Political Rhetoric In The New Media Environment

Since the 21st century,new media social platforms have provided a new and effective channel for countries around the world to achieve "soft power control" through political rhetoric and media diplomacy.In December 2019,China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs opened its first official account on Twitter,one of the major Western new media social platforms.Since then,the spokespersons of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,represented by Hua Chunying and Zhao Lijian,have begun to actively use their personal accounts on the Twitter platform to carry out active new media diplomacy.However,as far as the current situation is concerned,the voice of the Chinese people on Western new media platforms is still weak,leading to its sphere of influence being limited,and its understanding of Western political rhetorical traditions being insufficient.Comprehensively,a double weakness arises in both two fields of international communication and media diplomacy.In this context,the purpose of this study is to collect and encode the tweets of Hua Chunying(@SpokesmanCHN)and Zhao Lijian(@zlj517),who work as the spokesperson of Chinese Foreign Ministry and as the representatives to deliver Chinese diplomacy to the world,as well as the tweets of U.S.State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus and Ned Price respectively during their separate terms of office,from February 14,2020 to January 31,2023.The work will be completed through the rhetorical situation analysis,problem construction analysis and practical argument analysis of the Rhetorical Political Analysis(RPA)method proposed by the British political theorist Alan Finlayson,combining with the specific methods of analyzing identity construction in rhetorical psychology summarized by Susan Coder and the various specific rhetorical devices of traditional rhetoric.The article will not involve the analysis process of specific policy making,but will focus more on establishing a complete rhetorical political analysis process through the analysis of the communication environment and communication text on Twitter,a popular political discourse communication platform,in a special new media environment.At the same time,the research will also examine the discursive effects of different political rhetorical strategies used by Chinese spokespersons in Western political contexts in the new media environment,and compare them with Western spokespersons,which has not been covered in previous studies.In order to achieve the above argument,this paper will first clarify several core concepts involved in the research in the introduction chapter,including the developing concept of public diplomacy and its domestic and international dissemination,the concepts and related research of rhetoric and political rhetoric in the process of mobile development,and the process of conceptual generation,method expansion and status recognition of RPA methods.In the first chapter,this article overlooks and discusses the new political public opinion battlefield of Twitter,the social platforms,as a whole,and distinguishes the difference between Western "propaganda" and "communication" thinking,while also attempts to demonstrate that the current so-called Western new media political communication system is fundamentally similar to the wartime propaganda of the past.The continuation of this wartime propaganda thinking means that the Western"communication/propaganda" system is mutually exclusive with China’s diplomatic concept of "a community with a shared future for mankind" from the basis of the thinking system,which proposes a possible explanation for China’s passive confrontation on the Twitter platform.Subsequently,by analyzing and describing the rhetorical situation of "passive defense vs.active attack" in which China and the United States live,combined with the encoding and interpretation of existing data texts,this paper determines the situational basis for subsequent problem construction and analysis.The subsequent discussion involves four sub-stages:factual conjecture,definition,assessment of the nature of the act or policy,and debate construction,and specifically analyses the differences in the perception of different affairs status of the same matter between China and the United States,the divergence in the repeated definition of events between the two sides that caused this difference,and the differences between the two sides in choosing the focus of topics.The,this paper summarizes the three macro programming points of media diplomacy completed by the United States before starting the debate.The second chapter provides a detailed textual analysis of the text data collected and the coding categories.Through this process of textual analysis,this paper completes the third loop of the RPA method,being the practical argument analysis.The study points out that the rhetorical strategies of Chinese and American spokespersons on the Twitter platform can be mainly divided into two categories:self-presentation and national image construction,and story construction and emotional resonance.In the process of the specific rhetorical strategy taking effect,the three-way strategy of selfpresentation,story construction and emotional resonance work together to determine how the audience understands the political situation shaped by China and the United States on Twitter,and how the audience should regulate their actions later.This paper argues that this is the role of ideology.By revisiting the birth and evolution of the definitions of the ideology,and through the two political rhetorical concepts of"rationalization" theory and "Legitimizing myths ".this paper also interprets the"ideology" and the "amplifier" role of Twitter in separating positive and negative privileged classes in society.The last chapter is the concluding chapter.Through the re-application of Alan Finlayson’s relevant political rhetorical theory,this chapter empathizes with the aforementioned argumentation logic,and puts forward the role of the Twitter platform as an amplifier in the entire rhetorical process.After finally clarifying the central role of Twitter in the practice of media diplomacy between China and the United States in the new media era,this paper puts forward three suggestions for the spokesperson of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to carry out media diplomacy in the new media environment more effectively.