China’s mediated public diplomacy on climate change: Cross-media dynamics between Chinese, US, and UK news outlets

This research investigates China’s mediated public diplomacy on climate change in the context of China’s “Media Going Global” campaign and its pursuit for leadership in global climate governance. Utilizing mixed computational analyses on a 6-year news corpus (2020-2025), this study examines the potential of China’s outward news channels shaping the salience of China-related climate issues in American and British media. It finds that, while China succeeds in ensuring its climate commitments acknowledged in foreign coverage, foreign evaluations of its climate actions remain largely independent of its mediated messaging. This article underscores the significance of considering the nature of issue when examining mediated public diplomacy. Climate change, unlike more contentious political issues, enables some alignments between China and western media through shared acknowledgment of climate crisis and China’s pivotal role, but remains limited to swing China’s climate image.