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Wolf warrior diplomacy has become Beijing’s primary method for defending its core interests during the COVID-19 pandemic. China’s public diplomacy actors have used social media platforms to diffuse rumors and aggressive statements to promote its discursive power and reshape international order during the pandemic. Although existing studies on online wolf warrior diplomacy include China’s intermestic dimension and audiences, scholars have not examined the Chinese diaspora. Thus, we focused on how China used its domestic social media platform WeChat to conduct diaspora diplomacy during France’s first COVID-19 lockdown period to influence French and European Chinese-speaking populations. The aim was to underline how local pro-China media have used WeChat to defend Beijing’s interests and devalue the policies and COVID-19 measures of host countries.
Huang et al. (Sun,) studied this question.