Audience costs, humiliation, and social creativity strategies: how Beijing boosts citizens’ esteem in international conflicts

Abstract

Can Beijing afford to appear weak, especially after threatening an adversary to escalate in an international crisis? According to audience costs theory, the more high-profile a threat is, the more difficult it would be for a government to back down. Its citizens expect it to stand firm and punish it if it does not. One explanation for the “micro” logic of audience costs is that from a sociopsychological perspective, backing down sullies the national honor. It harms an in-group’s collective self-esteem vis-à-vis the adversarial out-group. The humiliation that citizens endure would compel them to punish their government. In this article, I examine how humiliation can be redressed proactively. I argue that governments—in this case, that of China—may not just brace for a backlash. They resort to a range of what scholars of Social Identity Theory in psychology call “social creativity strategies” in their propaganda to alleviate their citizens’ sense of humiliation. Such strategies arrest—and in some cases, even reverse—damage done to the in-group’s collective self-esteem. I present and elaborate on 10 such strategies. I demonstrate how they work with anecdotes and two case studies on Chinese propaganda in the aftermath of Japan’s “nationalization” of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands (2012) and the country’s standoff with India in Doklam/Donglang (2017).