| National image presentation at global stage is the combination of self-shaping and other-shaping,which is also the resonance in the same frequency of domestic and international public opinion fields.At present,China’s national image built by the western world is still negative,facing great obstacles with the frequent stigmatization events about China.In terms of the self-shaping national image,official discourse is still the main tone while the individual narrative is not in place.Meanwhile,the system layout represented by government organizations,mainstream media and individuals has not yet formed scale effect,resulting in poor communication effect.The birth of overseas social media not only provides a new mode of information production and interpersonal communication,but also offers governments a broader space for political diplomacy,economic exchanges,and transcultural communication with its huge user scale and extensive types of transnational users,weakening the official color and reaching audience more widely and deeply.Twitter,as the main overseas social media,has shown its great political influence from Trump’s "Twitter governance" in the 2016 Presidential election of the U.S.Under this context,China’s foreign ministries and individuals,represented by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and spokesman,have actively registered accounts on Twitter since 2019,opening up a new field for national image presentation.Therefore,the study of China’s national image presentation on overseas social media of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and spokesman is of great significance for China to make clear its position and explore the rules of the international public opinion so as to effectively fight back the stigmatization,and present a true and comprehensive national image in new public diplomacy era.Due to the strategically important geographical location,with several controversial topics,high attention from the international community has been paid to Xinjiang and the regional image has always been an important part of China’s national image.Selecting"Xinjiang Cotton" incident as the research background,based on framework theory and discourse analysis,using Python computer language combined with the artificial categories construction and coding methods,the research specifically analyzes all the relevant tweets of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesmen of China from October 21,2020,the day when BCI issued the "Xinjiang Cotton Ban" statement officially,to June 30,2022.The paper aims to solve the following research questions:firstly,what is the macro thematic framework of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman’s Twitter accounts and what national image do they show?Secondly,what is the micro discourse restructuring strategy of the research objects?Thirdly,how is the communication effect and how to improve it?The study found that at macro level of theme framework,the national image presentation included rich theme dimensions,covering politics,economy,society,culture and geography fields,while the accounts differed from and complemented each other.The official account of the spokesman mainly focused on the themes of politics,economy and geography,while the personal accounts of spokesman Hua Chunying and Zhao Lijian further enriched the sub-themes of the above and supplemented society and culture themes,jointly showing China’s image of politically responsible and reliable,people living and working in stability and gratification,national unity and cultural diversity,economy confidence and openness,and ecological civilization.At micro level of discourse strategy,using Gooseeker and NLTK computer language tools,the study found,on the one hand,the official and personal Spokesman’s Twitter accounts had a high degree of relevance and overlap in discourse system,such as facts-based topic setting,accurate wording,emotion-enhancing rhetori c,internal and external sources quotation from the official and public.On the other hand,the spokesman accounts were distinctive and unique for highly personal and subjective speech,effectively supplementing the official account discourse and also showing great influence in enhancing user stickiness.In terms of interaction and communication effects,using Python to grab thumbs-up,comment and repost data and NLTK tool for text sentiment analysis,the research found that individual accounts of spokesman Hua Chunying and Zhao Lijian received significantly higher social attention than the official one,among which the average thumbs-up,comment and repost data of Zhao Lijian’s was the highest.As for emotional attitude feedback,the official account behaved more negative,while the two personal accounts more positive,among which Zhao Lijian’s showed the most obviously positive emotion tendency.In view of this,the paper put forward the following suggestions:spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China should make full use of the overseas social media platform to set up rich themes in successive way and different forms,emphasize the spokesman’s unique speech style and use different sources to enhance reliability,and further active linkage between accounts to build a scale network,so as to achieve better national image presentation effect overseas. |
PDF Full Text Request