Pride and Prejudice: The Dual Effect of Wolf-Warrior Diplomacy on Domestic and International Audiences
This book project asks: Why do Chinese leaders antagonize foreign audiences publicly when a major goal of diplomacy is to improve foreign relations? I argue that rather than being inadvertent blunders, these diplomatic efforts can be deliberately orchestrated to incite a negative reaction from foreign audiences, thereby rallying domestic support. I develop a psychological theory to explain how international diplomacy shapes Chinese public sentiment towards their government at the domestic level. First, China’s WWD encourages Chinese citizens to appreciate their powerful and prosperous country under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Second, WWD brings latent memories of the “Century of Humiliation” to the forefront and diverts the Chinese public’s attention to poor human rights practices and social instability in Western countries. In doing so, WWD reinforces the Chinese public’s prejudice against foreign states, thereby rallying domestic support. While WWD increases the Chinese public’s support for their government, foreign audiences will respond to WWD with an aggressive foreign policy. As a result, WWD generates dual effects: Increased security for the regime at the domestic level and heightened tensions at the international level. To sum up, WWD functions as a domestic tool for national leaders to garner local support, even if it risks alienating foreign audiences.
To understand the nature of and trends in Chinese diplomatic discourses, I first create an original dataset of speeches from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). The dataset contains over 28,000 Chinese diplomatic speeches over the past two decades. The supervised machine learning models (multiclass lasso models) and text analyses offer two valuable insights. First, Chinese diplomats have increased their use of wolf-warrior rhetoric over the past decade. Second, the choice of diplomatic discourse, wolf-warrior or conciliatory, varies depending upon the target country. When Chinese diplomats engage with friendly countries, such as North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia, they tend to employ conciliatory rhetoric. Conversely, when dealing with rival countries, like the U.S., Chinese diplomats are more inclined to use WWD and highlight human rights violations, racism, and social inequality in the U.S.
Next, I conduct parallel experiments. These involve presenting identical sets of survey vignettes to both Chinese and American citizens to investigate WWD’s domestic and international consequences. Participants from each country read one of three types of wolf-warrior discourses in text form. In the survey conducted in China, I find that these discourses increase the Chinese public’s support for their government. Further, wolf warrior discourses that highlight China’s “Century of Humiliation” increase the Chinese public’s support for more aggressive foreign policies towards the U.S. In the U.S. survey, I find that wolf-warrior discourses antagonize American citizens and increase their support for aggressive foreign policies toward China. Thus, my experimental findings offer compelling evidence of the dual effects of WWD. WWD not only strengthens domestic support for the Chinese government, but also fosters antagonistic sentiments towards China within the U.S. concurrently.
Three implications emerge from this book project. First, international diplomacy operates as a two-level game, wherein national governments attempt to align with both domestic and international audiences’ national interests. However, because of domestic and international audiences’ distinct interests and objectives, identical messages may yield divergent outcomes at home and abroad. In this specific case, increased Chinese domestic security comes at the expense of mounting hostility on the international stage. Second, this is the first experimental research that tests the effects of identical diplomatic rhetoric at home and abroad simultaneously. Previous empirical research on diplomatic rhetoric primarily investigated the effects of such rhetoric in domestic and international contexts independently. By examining the effects of diplomatic rhetoric both domestically and internationally through a parallel survey experimental design, this study provides important insights into the ways that international relations function in the modern world, where access to global media makes it more likely that leaders’ public statements are heard by multiple audiences. Third, this research offers a new perspective on the influence of diplomacy on great power competition. The prevailing tensions between the U.S. and China can be attributed to domestic political factors, rather than solely as a result of shifts in international power.