Photographs as Instruments of Public Diplomacy: China’s Visual Storytelling during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

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.