Photographs as Instruments of Public Diplomacy: China’s Visual Storytelling during the Covid-19 Pandemic
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Summary
This article explores the effectiveness of photographs as instruments of public diplomacy through an analysis of China’s visual storytelling during the Covid-19 outbreak. Beijing considered the pandemic an existential threat to its image and responded with a communications offensive that was designed to highlight the regime’s success in containing the Coronavirus — both at home and abroad — and to safeguard the wider ‘China story’ of a ‘peace-loving and responsible global leader’. By combining scholarship on public diplomacy and strategic narratives with the ‘visual turn’ literature in international relations, this article focuses on the non-verbal dimension of China’s storytelling and explores the impact of photographs — distributed by the regime’s news agency, Xinhua — on international public opinion. Through a survey experiment among 1,000 US adults, we demonstrate that such photographs had a positive effect on China’s international image, but that this effect was moderated by levels of political knowledge among the target audience.
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| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1626 | 264 | 28 |
| Full Text Views | 205 | 42 | 0 |
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Photographs as Instruments of Public Diplomacy: China’s Visual Storytelling during the Covid-19 Pandemic
In: The Hague Journal of DiplomacySearch for other papers by Olli Hellmann in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Search for other papers by Kai Oppermann in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Summary
This article explores the effectiveness of photographs as instruments of public diplomacy through an analysis of China’s visual storytelling during the Covid-19 outbreak. Beijing considered the pandemic an existential threat to its image and responded with a communications offensive that was designed to highlight the regime’s success in containing the Coronavirus — both at home and abroad — and to safeguard the wider ‘China story’ of a ‘peace-loving and responsible global leader’. By combining scholarship on public diplomacy and strategic narratives with the ‘visual turn’ literature in international relations, this article focuses on the non-verbal dimension of China’s storytelling and explores the impact of photographs — distributed by the regime’s news agency, Xinhua — on international public opinion. Through a survey experiment among 1,000 US adults, we demonstrate that such photographs had a positive effect on China’s international image, but that this effect was moderated by levels of political knowledge among the target audience.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1626 | 264 | 28 |
| Full Text Views | 205 | 42 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 378 | 73 | 1 |