China’s Experiments with Social Media: Singing Along with Xi Jinping About the Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

As the Chinese state ramps up its efforts in international narrative competitions, Chinese media master new genres and test different visual languages on global social media platforms. The diverse content they produce provides a new source of information about China’s self-representations intended for foreigners and thus provides a condensed answer to one of the key questions of China’s foreign policy: Who is China? It also responds to the question that many observers outside of China pose: What does China’s rise mean for the rest of the world? To explain how Chinese state media use new mediums to (re)imagine China and narrate its relations with the world, this study focuses on the entertainment visual content they posted on YouTube between 2013 and 2019 to introduce and endorse Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI). Using a critical discursive methodology, it decodes text-visual frames created by Chinese media to bring to the fore components of BRI’s discursive politics that are imperceptible in formal diplomatic communications.